Oshkosh Saloons of 1902: The Oasis Sample Rooms

The Oasis Sample Rooms, 416 N. Main Street.

Harry Maxwell, Proprietor.

Harry Maxwell was born in New York in 1855 and was five when his family moved to Jefferson, Wisconsin. The Maxwells arrived in Oshkosh in the mid-1870s. Harry worked in his father's painting business until 1892 when he abandoned the brush for the bar. Maxwell's very popular Main Street saloon was allocated two frames in Oshkosh Up to Date. The first shot shows his saloon's foyer where Maxwell sold accessories to the sporting life: liquor, wine, and cigars.

The Oasis Sample Rooms; page 128 Oshkosh Up to Date, 1902.

After passing through Maxwell's pleasure shop, you arrived at the bar where it was always time for a Schlitz.

If you look closely in the back bar mirror you can see reflected a painting inside a draped frame of a nude sprawled across a bed. Class. Maxwell's saloon was known as a sporting house. Photos of boxers hang from the partition at the end of the bar. Here you could place bets and get up-to-the minute results for important boxing matches, horse races, or elections. It didn't matter where the event was taking place. Maxwell had a phone (his number was 351) installed so he could have the action called in. Totally illegal. Totally permitted. Maxwell was so well known as a handicapper that, on the eve of an important boxing match or election, the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern would sometimes print blurbs telling who Maxwell was putting his money on.

As a sideline to his saloon, Maxwell also ran the Maxwell Novelty Co., which made and sold slot machines.  A couple of years before the pictures above were taken, Maxwell caught a man feeding slugs into one of his slots. Maxwell made an example of the man, beating him "into insensibility" in the middle of Main Street. The performance was so brutal and ugly that it was followed by calls to have Maxwell prosecuted. The police shrugged. Chief of Police Weisbrod said it wouldn't be worth the effort without a complaining witness. The beaten man, who wished to remain anonymous, wanted nothing more to do with anything involving Maxwell.

The building that housed Maxwell’s saloon remains at 416 N. Main Street. It was built in 1884 from a plan by famed Oshkosh architect William Waters.

416 N. Main Street.

The Crawl Continues...

Our next stop on the 1902 Oshkosh Saloon Crawl is The Zayat at 224 N. Main.

To return to the start of the crawl, click here.

For links to all of the stops on the crawl that are currently available, click here.

Notes

The story about Maxwell pounding that man on Main Street appears in the August 13, 1900 edition of the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern.

For more on the William Waters designed building that Maxwell occupied, go here and here.