Oshkosh Beer: Agnes in Flight

Agnes was 40 when she quit the straight world and dove into the underworld. Her scandalous turn brought her to Oshkosh. The Jazz Age was underway and the old norms were breaking down. Agnes took a radical path to liberation.

"The Flapper" cover of Life Magazine, February 2, 1922.

She was born Agnes Flynn in 1879 on a farm in the Town of Chilton. Her parents were Irish immigrants fleeing the Great Famine. In America, they asserted their fertility. A new baby almost every other year. The arrival of Agnes made it an even dozen.

Agnes was two when the Flynn’s moved to Kaukauna. And there she stayed for the next 38 years. She was always a child of her time. At 13 she quit school and at 17 got married. She became Agnes DeBrue.

Joseph DeBrue was the son of Belgian immigrants and five years older than his teen-age bride. Their first baby came a year after the wedding. Agnes gave birth six times in seven years. She was on pace to outbreed her mother. As devout Roman Catholics, their birth control options amounted to abstinence, rhythm and chance. Agnes beat the odds. At 27, she had her last baby.

Summer in Kaukauna, 1905.

The DeBrues were working-class on the verge of middle-class. Joseph was a foreman at the Kaukauna Machine Works. They had a comfortable home in a pleasant town. Their future prosperity was practically assured. Agnes didn’t want it.

In 1919, she filed for divorce from her husband of 22 years. Joseph counter-sued. The judge ruled in his favor and gave Joseph custody of the kids. The youngest was a 13-year-old boy. The middle-aged mother left town.

Cut Loose
First, she went to Fond du Lac. There were friends and family there. Then she hooked up with Herman Wichman. He was 18 years younger than Agnes, about the same age as her oldest child. Herman was married and had two young kids. He worked on a farm west of Fond du Lac, near Brandon.

Herman F. Wichman.

Herman’s wife died of blood poisoning in 1922. Seven weeks later, Agnes and Herman went to Menominee, Michigan for a quickie wedding. Both fudged their age on the marriage certificate. Herman made himself two years older. Agnes shaved off four years. At 43, she was a newlywed again.

Marrying Herman was like slamming a door on her past. It was an explosively complex relationship. Herman was thickheaded, “powerfully built,” and violent. Agnes was fearless and could not seem to resist him. He frequently beat her. Yet her young husband was surely her subordinate. Agnes brought him along when she moved to Oshkosh. In the summer of 1923, she opened a speakeasy called the Pastime Inn at what is now 24 East Gruenwald Avenue.

The Jockey Club at 24 East Gruenwald Avenue, former home of the Pastime Inn.

The ex-saloon had been vacant since the start of Prohibition in 1920. The place was just north of the Oshkosh city limits, in the Town of Oshkosh. The neighborhood was called Nordheim. It had a reputation for being rough and unruly.

But Nordheim’s lawlessness did not extend to the sale of illegal liquor. The town board had been dominated by Prohibitionists for a decade. They badgered the County Sheriff into raiding the speakeasies that kept popping up near the township’s southern border. The Pastime soon had deputies at the door.

The first raid came in the fall of 1923. Agnes was ready for it. The Sheriff's office complained that during the initial visits, she was too quick for them and had "destroyed the only evidence available.” The evasion triggered a more vigorous investigation.

Winnebago County Sheriff Peter Carlson, who investigated Agnes and the Pastime Inn.

On the Saturday evening of October 27, Sheriff Carlson and his deputies were back. They didn’t bother with trying to catch her in the act. They had learned that Agnes was storing liquor in a shack behind the barroom. They found six pints of moonshine under the floorboards.

They discovered something else inside the bar. There were women hanging out at the Pastime Inn who weren’t there for the moonshine. Carlson handed Agnes a ticket for running an unlicensed dance hall. It was a tactic used against suspected brothel keepers when obvious evidence of a carnal crime was lacking. And it was the first indication that Agnes was offering something more than bootleg liquor.

Agnes was 44 and locked up for the first time. The following morning she pleaded not guilty and got a Fond du Lac friend to post an $800 bond for her release (about $15,000 in today’s money). A week later, her trial began. Everyone was there but Agnes.

Over the next month, Agnes did everything she could to avoid standing in front of a judge. She jumped bail and then claimed she didn’t know about the court date. She missed her next hearing, saying she was too sick to leave home. Her condition grew suddenly worse. By January, she was terminally ill and so close to death that the charges against her were dropped. All of this was a fabrication.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, December 24, 1923.

No judge would have fallen for such a transparent scheme without a doctor vouching for her imminent death. Somehow she made that happen. There were several doctors in the area helping folks skirt the dry law. Prescriptions for whiskey were commonplace. Agnes and her doctor appear to have taken it a step further.

The Blazing Stump
While faking her death, she was busy planning her next move. Nordheim had proved too risky. She moved to Appleton and searched for a new place. She found what she wanted near the east edge of Appleton on what was then a lonely road leading to Darboy.

For years, William Hopfensperger had been running a saloon and meat market on what is now County Hwy KK near North Coop Road. It took two years of Prohibition to drive him out of there. Agnes came in and opened another kind of meat market.

The Hopfensperger saloon, circa 1916, about eight years before it became the Blazing Stump.

The place was big with a barroom downstairs, a dancehall upstairs, and private rooms at the rear. A fence stood at the perimeter of the property, adding even more privacy to an already isolated setting. The only thing lacking was a splashy name. She called it the Blazing Stump.

The origin of that name remains in question. But there are a few compelling clues. A member of the Hopfensperger family said there was a natural gas reservoir on the property with a blowoff pipe that they referred to as a blazing pump. That might have been all the inspiration Agnes needed.

Blazing Stump was not original to Agnes. By the 1920s, it had already been applied to a number of bawdy, frontier saloons. The name was popularized by an often-reprinted story that appeared in an 1895 edition of the Overland Monthly magazine. The tale involved an adventurous woman who finds love in a rough, country tavern named the Blazing Stump. The woman in the story was named Agnes.

The Blazing Stump became the best-known brothel in the area. A public secret. The first, and still the best, depiction of the BS didn’t appear until 1966, with the publication of Dirty Helen, the autobiography of Helen Cromwell. Helen was a brothel keeper in Superior and Milwaukee and seemed to know everyone in the Wisconsin underworld. She and two women from her Superior stable spent a night at the Blazing Stump on an unspecified date. Here's Helen’s abridged version of that evening.

We arrived in Appleton late in the afternoon. The big convention parade was just over and the streets were swarming with people. We checked into a local hotel and I made a couple of inquiries. All inquiries pointed in the same direction: about three miles out of town to a place called "Blazing Stump." It was a converted farmhouse in the fork of the road.

We entered the farmhouse and found the place absolutely jammed with men. A pale, limpid, distracted-looking guy was standing behind a beat-up bar, dishing out the rottenest moonshine I had ever tasted. I signalled to the girls and they flew up the stairs. There was a slight squabble among the men about who was going to be first with the girls. I helped settle it, and the remainder of the fans lined up to wait their jolly turns…

As the night wore on I felt like a timekeeper at a track meet. I pretended I was a coach at a ball game, and every time there was an opening available I'd slap a new "player" on the rump and tell him to get in there and fight for the home team. At seven-thirty we pulled up stakes and went back to our hotel room. The girls had made well over five hundred dollars each.

Helen Cromwell, circa 1946.

Despite the hot and heavy traffic, Agnes had little trouble with police or Prohibition agents. Yet she had plenty of other trouble. Most of it came from her husband. Herman Wichman’s venom was made more toxic by his binge drinking. He began carrying a gun and was growing increasingly erratic. His beatings of Agnes were more frequent. In the span of eight months, Herman broke her nose twice. She finally kicked him out and filed for divorce.

Agnes liked to drink, too. In August 1924, she was arrested in Winnebago County for drunk driving. She gave the cop a fake name and a hard time. He tacked a drunk and disorderly onto her résumé. Her soon-to-be ex-husband bailed her out of jail.

Her hearing on the charges was moved to Calumet County, the same jurisdiction that oversaw the Blazing Stump. Not a good move. She told the judge, “I was sleepy and that may have affected my driving to some extent, but I certainly was not drunk.” He laughed at her and fined her $25. And then he gave her an ultimatum: get out of the county in 30 days or go to jail.

That same week, Agnes was in an Oshkosh courtroom getting her divorce from Herman Wichman. They had been married for two years and one day. The judge added a restraining order that excluded Herman from Agnes’ affairs in general and the Blazing Stump in particular. It was an unusual decree considering that the business was illegal. It didn’t matter much. At the end of September, she moved out of the Blazing Stump and Calumet County.

Burning Out
Five years had passed since Agnes had left her first husband and their children in Kaukauna. She now inhabited an alternate universe. She was locally famous. Her name, attached to one outrage or another, appeared regularly in area newspapers. When an older brother died, the obituary listed her as Agnes DeBrue. She hadn’t used that name in years. The name Agnes Wichman, a name everybody recognized, would have attracted the kind of attention her family didn’t want.

But she wasn’t turning back. Neither was Herman Wichmann. He ignored the restraining order and was twice arrested for beating Agnes after their divorce. The first attack got him a five-dollar fine (about $100 in today’s money). The second cost him nothing. The charge was dropped after Agnes went back to him.

Two months after their divorce, and 10 days after her latest beating from him, Agnes and Herman were back in Menominee, Michigan. Another quickie wedding. Another chance to lie about their ages. After all that had transpired, it was both awful and touching that they would even bother.

The newlyweds returned to Appleton and a home just west of Richmond Street on what is now Wisconsin Avenue. They installed a barroom and got back to work. The moonshine was flowing, the ladies were laying, and the neighbors were complaining.

Around midnight on a Sunday in early December, Appleton police raided the home. Agnes, Herman, and a sex worker named Jennie Miller were arrested. A guy named George Doine was hauled in, too. He got off easy. Doine claimed innocence, saying he had noticed a chimney fire and went inside to put it out. The judge was so tickled by the lovely metaphor that he allowed Doine to go free. The punishment was saved for Agnes and Herman.

Appleton Post-Crescent, December 30, 1924.

Agnes had been ordered out of a county for the second time in four months. And four months later, Herman Wichman made matters worse. He was arrested in Waupun for getting drunk and beating up his brother. While he was being held in the Fond du Lac jail, Herman babbled about Agnes. He claimed she was working with Prohibition agents gathering evidence against bootleggers. His loose talk got picked up by a reporter. The story appeared in newspapers across central Wisconsin. He might as well have put a target on her back.

She couldn’t take it anymore. Agnes dropped Herman and dropped out of sight. She disappeared for a year.

Out of the Shadows
Agnes was calling herself Helen Leiberg when she resurfaced in the spring of 1926 in Aurora, Illinois.

McCoy’s 1926 Aurora City Directory.

She had probably known Chester Leiberg since the early 1920s. He was dividing his time then between Oshkosh, where he worked as a bricklayer, and Florence County where he did seasonal work in a lumber camp.

Agnes was living with Leiberg in Aurora by early 1926. They were married later that fall. She wrote on the marriage license that she was 42 and that her last name was Flynn. She was actually 47. Chester Leiberg was 36.

By 1929 she was calling herself Agnes again. She and Chester remained in Aurora until Prohibition ended. Her notorious past was receding. They moved back to Wisconsin.

Herman Wichman was gone by then. He ended up in Detroit and got married again. And again. And again. His life after Agnes was only slightly less repugnant. He died in Detroit in 1959.

The Blazing Stump was renamed the Clover Inn after Agnes left. The new proprietor, Louis Soffa, tried turning it into a respectable country tavern. It was a flop.

Appleton Post-Crescent, December 30, 1924.

About five years later, the Clover Inn backslid. A longtime flesh-trader named Ella Gouley relocated there after being driven out of her Menasha brothel. “Dirty” Helen Cromwell knew her as “Old Ma Gooley” and wrote that “She was grotesque… the ugliest apparition of a woman I had ever seen – clumps of fat all squashed together like mounds of modeling clay.”

Agnes and Chester Leiberg were living near Tipler in Florence County when the Blazing Stump turned into a hot topic again. A 1939 raid uncovered ties to the Milwaukee mafia. The story was shared by newspapers across the state. Agnes must have heard about it. Most of those stories contained a reference to the old days of the Blazing Stump.

The Clover Inn name never did catch on with folks living in the area. The Appleton Post-Crescent was still calling it the Blazing Stump when the tavern was destroyed by fire in 1945.

Clippings from August 1945, and the burning of the Blazing Stump.

Agnes had left that scene 20 years ago. She had since reconnected with her children. How much of her story did they ever know?

In 1950, Agnes and Chester celebrated Christmas and the New Year in Kaukauna with her three daughters and youngest son. Their father, Agnes’s first husband, had died in 1945. She and Chester were heading back to Tipler when their car collided with a truck carrying 12 tons of pulpwood. Chester was driving and wasn’t hurt. Agnes took the full force of the collision. They used wrecking bars to get her out of the car. She was taken to the hospital in Oconto Falls and died 15 minutes after her arrival.

The obituary of Agnes Leiberg was a study in omission. Not a whisper of her wild years. She was buried in St. Mary's Catholic Cemetery in Kaukauna. The dating on her gravestone shaved a year off her age. Agnes would have liked that.