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| Jerry's Bar, 1210 Ceape Ave. |
Hermann Heinze was born in 1835 in Bitterfeld, a small town about 100 miles southwest of Berlin, Germany. He was nineteen when he boarded a steamship and left for America. Heinze landed in Baltimore and later said he came straight to Oshkosh. I’ve yet to find evidence of that. His trail through the 1850s went cold long ago.
In 1861, Heinze was definitely in St. Louis. There, he joined the Union Army. He was not yet a U.S. Citizen. That didn’t spare him from the deadly early days of the Civil War in Missouri. He fought at the Battle of Boonville and at the Battle of Wilson's Creek, where more than 1,300 of his fellow soldiers were casualties.
The first confirmed trace of Hermann Heinze in Oshkosh is from late 1867. He shows up working as a carpenter living in an apartment on Main Street. About a year later, he found his true calling. Hermann Heinze became a saloon keeper.
Over the next decade, Heinze worked his way through a series of Main Street saloons. He also met his wife. He married Anna Marie Schmarje in Oshkosh in 1871. The couple lived on Main Street in apartments above whatever saloon Hermann was tending to at the time. They didn’t find their way to the east end of Ceape until about 1877. They arrived in a neighborhood that was beginning to fill in with German immigrants like themselves.
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| A current view of Heinze’s neighborhood on Ceape. His home was at the corner of Frankfort and Ceape. His saloon was just across the street. |
Heinze on the East End
The neighborhood at the east end of Ceape was a world apart from the polyglot of Main Street. This place was like an echo of Germany. Most of the folks were immigrants who spoke little or no English. A German grocery had recently opened at the corner of Ceape and Rosalia. A German music teacher gave lessons a couple doors away. It was a neighborhood of working-class families adjusting to a new world.
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| An 1878 blurb from the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern lampooning the language skills of the German speaking people living on Ceape. “Notice – Anyone troubles this Wood without Special Order from ___ Will Cause themselves trouble.” |
Hermann and Anna Marie fit right in. They had no children of their own, but were soon adopted by the neighborhood kids. They were called Tante and Onkel, German for Aunt and Uncle. The pet names became so fixed that later, after the trouble started, Hermann was identified in the newspaper simply as Onkel.
His new saloon wasn’t just a drinking place. Heinze opened a summer beer garden behind the barroom that grew into a popular gathering spot for families on Sundays. There was a bowling alley on the east side of the building. Heinze's Saloon became the cornerstone for the close-knit community at the east end of Ceape.
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| A rare advertisement for Heinze’s saloon from early 1879. The addresses reflects the old numbering system in Oshkosh. |
The trouble began in 1881 after Joseph Stringham was narrowly elected mayor. Stringham came to Oshkosh from New York in 1864 and made a fortune in Southside real estate. His wealth was not a balm for his crusty disposition. Stringham seemed incapable of taking pleasure in living. His stiff-necked conservatism was entirely at odds with the culture of pleasure brought to Oshkosh by its German-speaking residents.
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| Joseph Stringham |
Temperance crusaders were waiting for a guy like Stringham to come along. They had voted for him. Now they wanted theirs. At the top of their list was enforcement of Wisconsin’s “Blue Laws.” On Sundays, they wanted no bowling, no dancing, no concerts, no fishing, no sports, and especially no alcohol sales or open saloons. And they wanted their agenda imposed by the police.
Blue laws targeting saloons had been thoroughly ignored in Oshkosh for years. The disregard ended three weeks after Stringham took office. On the Saturday evening of April 23, 1881, Oshkosh police toured the city notifying every saloon keeper and liquor dealer that they'd be arrested if they opened on Sunday.
Oshkosh saloons went dark. The liquor stores on Main Street were closed. There were three breweries within a few blocks of Heinze’s saloon. Each of them hung black crêpe on their door as a symbol of mourning. The city went dry for the first time that Sunday.
Blue Sundays
The sense of betrayal was too great for people like Herman Heinze to tolerate. He’d staked his life on a country that promised freedom. He’d fought in their war. He'd renounced his allegiance to his homeland and became a U.S. citizen. And now he was being tyrannized by a clamoring minority of bigots and zealots.
For the German-speaking people of Heinze’s neighborhood, it wasn’t just Sunday beer that was being denied. What was banned was at the heart of their culture. Sunday was their one day free from work. The one day when they could join together and relax with friends and neighbors at Heinze's tavern in a spirit of gemütlichkeit.
The resentment wasn’t confined to the corner of Ceape and Rosalia. It harboured wherever the working classes resided. The following Sunday, Heinze opened his saloon. So did Frank Kuebler on Merritt. And Mike Laubach at Main and Irving. All three were German immigrants. And all three were arrested.
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| The former site of Mike Laubach’s saloon at 695 N. Main; now Calhoun Beach Club. |
It was happening on the Southside, too. But it was easier to make an example of the Eastsiders. They were closest to the police station. Proximity mattered in a city with just a few cops on duty Sunday to suppress 70 saloons. It was an impossible mission. Chief of Police Alsworth "Alley" Ford admitted as much a day after the first arrests were made. Ford said he would either enforce the law or demonstrate that it could not be enforced at all. He probably already knew how this would turn out.
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| The Oshkosh Police in the 1880s. |
Heinze and the others paid $10 fines, but the fight wasn’t over. They didn’t know it, then, but they were setting an example for the Oshkoshers who would reject National Prohibition some 40 years later. Like those who came after, Heinze and his cohorts never stopped kicking back against the prejudicial law.
At the Rahr Brewery, Charlie Rahr claimed immunity from the Sunday Law due to his place not being a licensed saloon. He began serving beer on Sundays in an ice barn behind his brewery. Alley Ford was not amused. He had Charlie Rahr arrested and fined him for selling beer on Sunday.
Another mutiny took place on an eighty-foot steamer named the O.B. Reed. The ship would load up with beer on Saturday and then set out for Tustin on Sunday morning with the beer flowing as steady as the river. The Daily Northwestern, which advocated for the crackdown, groused about the “crowd of excursionists on board who spend Sunday indulging in their lager (beer) without the interference of the Sunday enforcement.”
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| A fully loaded excursion steamer similar to the O.B. Reed preparing to leave the Oshkosh dock at what is now Riverside Park near the Main Street Bridge. |
Onkle Heinze took another route. He hit the city where it hurt: in the kitty. He and a Main Street saloon keeper named Charley Bly threatened to incite a saloon keeper's revolt. The annual $75 liquor license fee was coming due in May. If the saloon keepers refused to pay their licensing fees, the city would lose an essential source of revenue.
Heinze and Bly were exploiting a glitch in the law, which read “every person licensed shall keep his saloon closed on the Sabbath day.” No license, no need to close. Of course, they could all be arrested and fined for selling liquor without a license. But the endless prosecution of cases would have overwhelmed the police and courts. And that fine was no greater than the fine for selling beer on a Sunday.
Mayor Stringham was furious. He called an emergency meeting of the City Council to deal with the “rebellion among the saloon keepers.” But more than half the council opposed the Sunday Law and refused to appear. Stringham directed the chief of police to bring them in. Chaos ensued. While the turmoil swirled at city hall, Heinze hatched another plan.
The Lake Shore Casino Club
The Lake Shore Casino Club was born in May 1881, just a couple of weeks after Heinze’s arrest. It was chartered as a private club. In reality, it was open to just about everyone. Meetings took place on Sunday at Heinze’s “closed” saloon. The Daily Northwestern mocked the idea, calling Lake Shore Casino nothing more than a “Beer Club.” It was definitely that.
Heinze didn’t mind the mockery. In fact, it seemed to inspire him. The club not only subverted the restriction of the Sunday Law, it became Heinze’s platform for satirizing the sanctimonious gaggle who had started all the trouble in the first place.
In early June 1881, Heinze hired a lawyer to draw up articles of incorporation for The Lake Shore Casino. The document dripped with high-toned sarcasm. Among the exceptionally relaxed by-laws was a proclamation that the club would be composed of “Citizens of blameless character, for the promotion of social progress and sociable intercourse” and “the improvement, perfection and the embellishment of life.”
Henzie recorded the articles with the Secretary of State. And that brought it to the attention of several Wisconsin newspapers. They weren't in on the joke. Madison’s Wisconsin State Journal described it as an “extraordinary as well as mysterious document.” Back in Oshkosh, Heinze wasn’t at all shy in admitting that “there was no secret about it, that the association was formed to evade the enforcement of the Sunday law.”
It worked. The Lake Shore Casino Club enjoyed its Sunday beer without interference from the police. Others followed Heinze’s lead by forming clubs of their own. As Police Chief Ford had suspected, the Sunday Law was turning out to be practically unenforceable in Oshkosh.
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| Looking east on Merritt. The former saloon known as Kitz Hall is shown on the left. It was among those saloons that created beer clubs in response to the Sunday Law. |
Schadenfreude
There’s a German word, Schadenfreude, that translates to "damage-joy." It refers to taking pleasure in someone else's misfortune. In the Spring of 1882, there was plenty of Schadenfreude to be had in Heinze’s neighborhood. Mayor Joseph Stringham did not win his party’s nomination to run again for mayor. It was evident he stood no chance of winning the coming election. Chief of Police Alley Ford also got the boot.
In April 1882, Oshkosh voters elected George Pratt to be their new mayor. He ran on a platform that promised an end to the enforcement of the Sunday Law. He won with 53% of the vote. In Herman Heinze’s ward, Pratt took 63% of the vote. The Daily Northwestern, unhappy with the result, blamed the saloon keepers for Pratt’s victory.
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| George White Pratt |
Pratt’s name endures in Oshkosh. In 1960, the City Planning Commission named a road in his honor. Pratt Trail winds through Menominee Park along Lake Winnebago. It’s the most scenic roadway in the city. But at the dedication, they somehow forgot to mention why Pratt got elected in the first place.
Joseph Stringham’s name also lingers here, but in a less pleasing way. The city named a sewer after him. The Stringham storm sewer system cuts through the Southside and South Park. It has never lived up to its promise and floods that area on a semi-regular basis.
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| Pratt Trail in Menominee Park. |
Hermann “Onkle” Heinze didn’t get his full share of the Schadenfreude. Heinze contracted typhus in December of 1881 and died on Christmas Day. A Sunday, no less. He was just 46 years old. His large funeral was followed by a lengthy tribute in the Wisconsin Telegraph, a German-language newspaper published in Oshkosh.
But since then, the good Onkle has been almost entirely forgotten. There has been plenty written about Jerry’s Bar over the years. But Heinze, the man who opened that bar, is never mentioned. His marker in Riverside Cemetery has become a symbol of the forgetting. It’s so weather-worn that the inscription is barely legible. The base is sunken and tilting, and the concrete urn that capped his headstone has fallen off.
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| Hermann Heinze, January 7, 1835 – December 25, 1881. |
This piece is being published on a Sunday morning. Jerry’s will open in just a few hours. If you happen to stop there today, have a beer for Onkle Heinze. That might be the tribute he would have appreciated the most.
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| Jerry’s Bar. |
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