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| Early 1900s inside the former Witzke’s tavern, which traced its lineage back to 1873. Witzke’s closed in 2019. |
Of the existing taverns, three stand out for their longevity: Acee Deucee, Calhoun Beach Club, and Jerry’s Bar. We’ll start with CBC…
Calhoun Beach Club, 695 N. Main St.
If location is the lone criteria, then Calhoun Beach Club is the oldest tavern in Oshkosh. The first saloon at the southwest corner of Main and Irving was established in 1868. There’s been some form of tavern at this spot ever since. It began with a German immigrant named Michael Laubach.
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| Calhoun Beach Club at the southwest corner of Main and Irving. |
Laubach purchased the property on September 10, 1868. His saloon/grocery appears to have opened there several months before he acquired the real estate. Laubach died in 1892. But the tavern remained in operation and under family ownership until 1905, when it was sold to Clara Hilton. She was the daughter of Charles Rahr Jr. of the Rahr Brewing Company. Rahr Brewing bought the saloon in 1908.
The saloon became a speakeasy at the start of Prohibition and was the site of several raids by federal agents. The speakeasy became a legal tavern again when Prohibition ended. Here is where it gets complicated.
The above photo shows the original building where Michael Laubach ran his saloon. This picture was taken in either late 1938 or early 1939. Rahr Brewing had just been granted a permit to tear the building down and replace it. The building that Calhoun Beach Club now occupies is the building that was constructed in 1939.
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| July 17, 1939. |
Can this qualify as Oshkosh's oldest tavern if the original building has been replaced by one built in 1939? You tell me.
Acee Deucee, 1329 Oregon St.
The situation here is more straightforward. On August 10, 1874, a German immigrant named Anton Koplitz purchased the lot at the northeast corner of 14th and Oregon. In 1876, he began building what is now the home of Acee Deucee. Construction was completed in June 1876. A date stone remains visible at the top of the structure that bears the Koplitz name and the 1876 date.
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| Acee Deucee at 1329 Oregon St. |
Anton Koplitz lived in the Town of Black Wolf, where he tended a farm. His son Edward was a brewer at Horn & Schwalm's Brooklyn Brewery on Doty Street. Ed was said to be the largest man in Oshkosh, weighing about 400 pounds. Which made it tough to work in the cramped quarters of Horn and Schwalm’s rustic brewery.
So, in 1876, Ed Koplitz quit the brewery and applied for a saloon liquor license. He then took out an ad in the Wisconsin Telegraph, a German-language newspaper published in Oshkosh. The ad was an announcement for the grand opening of his new saloon at the corner of 14th and Oregon on July 1, 1876. That means that this bar will mark its 150th year in 2026.
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| Wisconsin Telegraph, June 30, 1876. |
Sadly, Ed Koplitz died young. He was just 45. The saloon was taken over by his brothers Theodore and Frank. The photo below is from the early 1900s when “T & F Koplitz” were there. The Koplitz family remained involved with this bar well into the 1930s.
Jerry's Bar, 1210 Ceape Ave.
Getting to the origin date of Jerry’s Bar took some work. The details will be spelled out below, but I’ll cut to the chase for those who’d rather not suffer through the grind of all that: what is now Jerry’s Bar was launched in 1878 by two German immigrants. Their names were Wilhelm “William” Noe and Hermann “Onkle” Heinze. Onkle Heinze was the more prominent of the two in terms of running the bar.
Before I get into the research that led me to those names and that date, I want to dispel a persistent myth about the age of this bar. Here’s a quote from a book published in 2012 that cuts to the heart of it.
“The building it is estimated has been “standing” since about 1858. The building in its earliest days also housed an Oshkosh saloon.”
– Oshkosh, Preserving the Past; Ron La Point, Dog Ear Publishing, 2012.
Over the past 50 years, the 1850s date has appeared in several stories written about Jerry's. If that date was correct, Jerry’s would easily be the oldest tavern in Oshkosh. There is, however, no evidence to support the 1850s date. There are many sources, though, that contradict it.
For example, none of the Oshkosh City Directories published before 1879 place a saloon of any kind near the east end of Ceape. In fact, the land where Jerry’s Bar stands was vacant during those early years. The drawing below is by Albert Ruger published in 1867. It presents an accurate depiction of the area at that time. The arrow points to where Jerry’s would later be built.
I’m not sure where the 1850s date came from. But I suspect it began with an offhand remark made to a Daily Northwestern reporter more than 60 years ago. Gustave “Jerry” Wesenberg was the proprietor of Jerry’s at that time. In an article published on June 29, 1963, Wesenberg is quoted saying that his bar is “all of 100 years old, it was here when I was going to school.”
Jerry Wesenberg was born on November 2, 1882. And he was absolutely correct that the bar was there when he was a kid. His 1963 quip that it was “all of 100 years old” was probably just his way of saying that the place had a lengthy history that preceded his ownership, which began in 1911.
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| Jerry Wesenberg in front of his bar in the early 1960s. |
Here begins the grind. For the sake of clarity, I’m going to refer to this tavern simply as Jerry’s from this point forward. I’m hoping that will be less intrusive than continually repeating “the tavern that is now Jerry’s.” So I’m going to call it Jerry’s even though that name came to it years after the period we’re about to dive deep into.
To get to the genesis of Jerry’s you have to begin with Hermann Heinze. I wrote about his background in a post I published in October. But all we need to know for now is that Heinze had been working as saloon keeper on Main Street for about 10 years before he launched Jerry’s Bar.
The 1876 City Directory is the last that shows Heinze living and working on Main Street. The next city directory was not compiled until the spring of 1879. It was issued in July of 1879. This one shows Heinze on Ceape Avenue as the proprietor of Jerry’s Bar. That narrows the origin date of Jerry’s to a three-year time frame.
There are two main sources that make closing the gap possible. Most important are the real estate records held at the Winnebago County Register of Deeds office. Next are the historical tax and property assessment ledgers preserved by the Area Research Center at UWO’s Polk Library.
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| 2025 City of Oshkosh Assessors Map for the lot where Jerry’s Bar resides. |
Jerry’s Bar is located on a part of Lot 100 in the Replat of Block 29. That land was purchased by Ludwig “Louis” Genter in 1871. Genter was a carpenter living on Washington Avenue and owned several other empty lots near Jerry’s. He began developing those parcels in the mid-1870s.
On February 5, 1877, Genter took out a mortgage on the Jerry’s lot. He may have done this to finance construction on the property. Something was clearly in the works. On November 20, 1877, Genter signed a lease agreement with William Noe, who was working with Hermann Heinze.
All signs point to Noe and Heinze having a financial relationship, but not a typical business partnership. Newspaper stories about this saloon always identify Heinze as the sole proprietor, while Noe’s name is never mentioned. The alliance with Noe may have been necessary for Heinze due to his abysmal credit rating. Heinze was given the lowest possible credit score in an 1878 edition of the Commercial Agency Register, published by McKillop & Sprague.
In any case, the signed lease went into effect on July 1, 1878, and lasted five years. William Noe didn’t last that long. On January 12, 1880, he assigned the lease to Hermann Heinze. There is absolutely no doubt that this lease was for the Jerry’s Bar property. Both the original lease and the lease assignment reference the legal description for the property. It identifies exactly the same property where Jerry’s stands today.
The fact that the lease began nine months after it was signed suggests that the tavern had not yet been built. The 1877 assessment of the property also points to this. The assessed value of the property did not increase that year.
That changed in 1878 when the assessed value of the Jerry’s property jumped 67 percent. The increase was consistent with reassessments after new constructions on nearby lots, which ranged from 50 to 75 percent. The assessed value of the Jerry’s property rose by another 25 percent in 1879. This could have been caused by the addition of the bowling alley that was once attached to the east side of Jerry’s.
All of this indicates that Jerry’s was up and running by July 1, 1878. It may, however, have opened a little earlier. On April 25, 1878, Heinze took out a new saloon license. If he had been waiting for July 1 to open the saloon, he probably would have delayed paying for that license until he needed it.
When the new city directory was released in July of 1879, Heinze was already there on Ceape settled into his saloon, with a beer garden and bowling alley to boot.
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| 1879 Oshkosh City Directory, page 170. |
Don’t be confused by the 147 Ceape address. This belongs to the old numbering system used in Oshkosh. It was such a failure that the city council ordered the renumbering of the entire city. That project began in October 1882.
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| November 13, 1882; Oshkosh Daily Northwestern. |
The address for Jerry’s changed from 147 to 385. The new number was in line with the other address changes in that neighborhood. There are countless examples of this, here is one: Ferdinand Bunke, whose home was across the street from Jerry’s, saw his house number change from 150 to 390.
The 1882 Wisconsin State Gazetteer and Business Directory also places Heinze at Jerry’s Bar. That directory spells out his location as being on the north side of Ceape east of Frankfort. But Heinze was gone by the time that book came out. He died on December 25, 1881.
Heinze’s lease on the bar did not contain a clause terminating the contract upon his death. His wife, Anna Marie, had to fulfill the terms of the lease until the end of June 1882. Her neighbor, a painter named Jacob Wenzel, stepped in to help. Wenzel took over the saloon in 1882 and then purchased the property from Louis Genter on December 17, 1883.
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| Jacob Wenzel’s Saloon and Bowling Alley. |
In 1881, Heinze had organized a semi-private club that met at Jerry’s called the Lake Shore Casino Club. Wenzel and company kept the Casino Club moniker alive into the next century. The bowling team sponsored by Wenzel was still being called the Casino Club team as late as 1901.
The address for Jerry’s changed again after another city-wide renumbering in 1957. Jerry’s Bar became 1210 Ceape Avenue, just as it is today.
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| Jerry's Bar, 1210 Ceape Ave. |
There’s so much more waiting to be told about all three of these places. Each has a history worthy of a book. This is just a start.
