William Leard’s Garden of Evil

Here’s an old part of town with some history that’s gone missing…

The southeast corner of Washington and Rosalia.

That corner is part of the Washington Avenue Historic District, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The neighborhood doesn't exactly scream saloon or beer history. It did have its moment, though. There once was a gaudy, two-acre beer garden at this spot. It was the folly of a guy named Leard.

William Leard was 25 when he came to Oshkosh in 1875 from Oconomowoc. The former farm boy remade himself here. The new William Leard was a haberdasher, dealing in fancy clothes for men. It was a fitting turn. He liked flashy things.

Leard was a hustler with a talent for getting people to loan him money. He started doing business from a small shop on Main Street near the river. In 1879, he upgraded to an elaborate, double-front store up the block. Leard put a steam engine in the basement and a dozen steam-powered sewing machines on the second floor. He had a crew of seamstresses making his own line of clothes. Leard claimed to be the first steam-powered tailor in Wisconsin. He could turn out a custom-made suit in eight hours.

William Leard’s clothing store and factory near the southwest corner of N. Main and High, circa 1887.

Leard was a relentless self-promoter. He would parade around Main Street with a rack of his clothes yelling about his cheap prices. He’d hand out gaudy trinkets to remember him by. He’d have fake bankruptcy sales and run click-bait newspaper ads that grabbed your eyes and then changed the subject.

1881

Leard’s park may have been his first overtly crooked scheme. In the summer of 1883, Leard announced that he had purchased land at the southeast corner of Washington and Rosalia streets. This was his first lie. Leard hadn’t bought anything. The land was owned by a Chicago couple named George and Mary Harmon. It’s unclear if Leard even had a legitimate lease on the property. No matter, he immediately put his own stamp on it.

Leard had a fixation with the lucky horseshoe symbol. It was his trademark and became the park’s motif. A driveway, big enough for buggy rides, looped through the park in the shape of a horseshoe with entrances on Rosalia and Washington. At the corner was a horseshoe gate leading onto a winding walking path that passed by horseshoe-shaped flower beds. A fenced deer park was planned for the back of the property. The grounds were lit by Chinese lanterns bathing the place with an ethereal glow. And in the middle of it all was a bandstand next to some sort of residence. Leard wasn’t saying what the residence was for. He knew better.

A recent aerial view of the land that comprised Leard’s park.

Leard’s park was anything but pastoral. The drive and walking paths were littered with signs advertising his clothing. Admission was free if you didn’t consider the cost of being subjected to all the promotional trash. Leard must have realized that one visit would be enough for most folks. His plan for getting them to come back centered around the peculiar residence at the center of the grounds. It wasn’t a residence. It turned out to be a pavilion surrounded by a beer garden.

The park opened on the evening of August 8, 1883. The Arion Band mounted the stand and began blowing. And then the beer was flowing. This was not what people were expecting. The neighbors lost their shit. Or, as the Daily Northwestern more politely put it, “The neighborhood is much agitated and incensed over the erection of a saloon and garden in that locality.”

Did Leard really think he’d get away with this? With no forewarning, he’d plopped a beer garden into a posh, politically connected neighborhood. He hadn’t even bothered to get a liquor license. His lark was short-lived.

It all came tumbling down a month later when Leard finally applied for a liquor permit. The application was immediately denied by the Common Council. One alderman objected to the rejection, saying that the council never had a problem handing out liquor licenses to dealers in his neighborhood. His name was Larrabee, and he lived on the other side of the river in the blue-collar Fifth Ward. His objections were ignored. Leard’s Beer Garden was kaput.

His problems were only beginning. Leard had been living large, and largely on credit. The bills were coming due. All of a sudden, his old friends were suing him. In early 1886, Leard’s assets were seized and sold off to pay his debts. He then suckered one of his creditors into giving him another shot. Leard was back in business by the end of 1886. But his shop failed again a few months later.

Leard had a side grift keeping him afloat while his other bridges burned. He was in cahoots with a wandering Norwegian cigar maker called Dr. F.B. Hyland. The Doctor was no doctor. Hyland was a charismatic quack claiming to be a human battery who could heal people by rubbing them with his “magnetized” hands. The ruse was even weirder than it sounds. In addition to the groping, Hyland used his dynamic hands to magnetize sheets of newspaper. He instructed his patients to wear the magic newspaper over their affliction. And they did. As if cheating them out of their money wasn’t humiliation enough.

An 1885 ad for F.B. Hyland. The address reflects the old house numbering system in Oshkosh.

Between 1885 and 1889, Dr. Hyland ducked in and out of Oshkosh performing his mysterious rituals. His base of operation was Leard's home on Waugoo Avenue. Eventually, people got wise to the scam. Leard ended up losing the property to foreclosure. You can still see part of that place. The Konrad-Behlman Funeral Home is built around it.

Leard’s former home at 402 Waugoo Avenue.

In 1888, Leard found a new victim: his widowed mother. She had sold off the family farm some years earlier and was apparently sitting on a plump nest egg. She loaned her shady son money to set up a new clothing shop on Washington Avenue just east of Main. His new store was another flop. It closed the following year.

His undoing was now finalized. Leard left town. He went to Superior and opened another shop. His wife didn't go with him. Maggie Leard remained in Oshkosh with their three children. It was a wise decision.

Leard hatched his next financial mess in Superior. He was soon being menaced again by folks he had burned. They were less forgiving up north. At the behest of one of his creditors, Leard was charged with larceny and arrested. He jumped bail and went on the run. They tracked him down in Barnum, Minnesota, about 40 miles away, in late February 1891. Leard was dragged back to Superior and thrown in jail.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, March 3, 1891.

That was the last straw for Maggie Leard. She took the three kids and moved to Milwaukee. She got an apartment on the east side. She told people her husband was dead. Not quite.

After a short stint in the pen, Leard moved to Ironwood, Michigan and found a job in a tailoring shop. That’s where the clock ran out on him. In the summer of 1893, Leard caught typhoid fever and died. He was 43-years old.

Despite the fiasco of his time in Oshkosh, Leard maintained a fondness for the old town where he screwed so many people over. He asked that his remains be brought back to Oshkosh for burial. His final wish might not have been fulfilled. He didn’t have many friends left. I haven’t been able to find his grave nor any mention of his funeral or burial.

A faint memory of him flickered some 40 years later. In 1935, the Winnebago County Archaeological and Historical Society hosted a discussion of “old settlers” to share their memories of bygone Oshkosh. That evening, a Mr. Scott spoke of a “forgotten” park at the corner of Washington and Rosalia. He said it was run by William Leard. Nobody else seemed to remember it. As far as I can tell, that’s the last time Leard's park was mentioned until now.

Today, there are 15 homes on the 2.3-acre plot of land formerly known as Leard’s Beer Garden. How many of his horseshoe trinkets have been dug up in backyard gardens there over the years? I can only imagine them being tossed aside. Another odd knickknack lurking in the dirt.

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Sin City Beer Gardens

The first Brews on the Bay of the 2023 season is tonight in Menominee Park. A beer garden hosted in a city park is hardly unusual these days. But it wasn’t always this way. There was a time when the mere idea of it inspired fits of fear and trembling.

The sale of beer in Oshkosh city parks was illegal from 1889 until 1940. When the law changed, some folks lost their shit. Among them was William Beck, a fun-starved cynic with an overactive imagination. Beck protested long and loud about the Oshkosh parks being “desecrated” with beer. I thought today would be a good time to share a taste of his ranting.

Here are a few passages from a lengthy and delusional letter Beck wrote to the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern in the summer of 1941. You won't see this sort of “fun” at Menominee Park tonight.

OPPOSES BEER IN PARKS
Can the parks commissioners remember back to the days before we had city parks, when Sunday picnics and holiday celebrations were held in private parks and groves and were commercialized from the sale of beer and liquor?

Can they recall the disgusting sights of men and boys staggering about in all stages of intoxication? The frequent drunken brawls? The bloody fights with fists, clubs, and rocks, when knives and guns were drawn and used with serious and sometimes fatal effect? When women and children were terrorized, knocked down, trampled, and stampeded in all directions, and many families who had planned a pleasant outing for the day fled in panic for their homes in fear of being injured by drink-crazed men and rowdies?

It was to prevent such occurrences that the people wanted a city park where no intoxicating beverages would be sold. They demand a stop to such frightful, shocking, and disgraceful conditions for once and for good.
     – William R. Beck, June 21, 1940.

Beck's vision of Oshkosh's private beer gardens is almost entirely divorced from reality. He didn't know a damned thing about them. Beck was born in 1878 and was a lifelong bachelor who spent most of his adult life raising chickens in the Town of Oshkosh. During Beck's time there, the township was under the thumb of anti-alcohol zealots. Beck and his ilk voted the Town of Oshkosh dry in 1911.

Beck moved to sin city after he retired from his chicken farm. He planted himself in an apartment on Merritt Avenue, where he had to suffer the spectacle of fun seekers going to and from Menominee Park. Maybe that's what did him in. Beck died two years after penning his beer-garden letter.

Poor William. If you get to the beer garden tonight, raise a glass to our nervous, gloomy friend. Prost!

... such frightful, shocking, and disgraceful conditions.

The Menominee Park Beer Garden

Wednesday night's beer garden in Menominee Park was an overwhelming success. So overwhelming, in fact, that the beer ran out. Within an hour of the start, hundreds of people had poured into the park.

Earlier that morning I was interviewed by WBAY to talk about the history of beer gardens in Oshkosh (you can see that HERE). I tried to get across that an event like this is a natural fit for this city. What happened Wednesday night bears that out. These public beer gardens deserve to become a traditional part of summer in Oshkosh.

The Parks Department, which organizes the beer gardens, has a few things to work out. The main issue was the long lines of people waiting to get a beer.

That shouldn't be too difficult to address. We'll find out in July. The next Menominee Park Beer Garden will begin at 5 p.m. on Wednesday, July 14.

Oshkosh's Summer Beer Gardens

It’s been 150 years since Oshkosh last had a lakeside beer garden. Brews on the Bay is about to end that drought with a series of pop-up beer gardens that will begin on June 9 at the Kiwanis Shelter in Menominee Park. It will be followed by beer gardens in the park on July 14, August 11, and September 8. The monthly beer gardens will run from 5-9 p.m. and are being organized by the Parks Department.

Local beer may be the rally flag for these events, but Jen McCollian of the Parks Department says they're about more than that. "We'll have family yard games, and live music, and we'll definitely have food trucks," McCollian says. "We try to find things to do that are inexpensive to bring people and families to the park so they can get to know what we have to offer. Oftentimes, people aren't aware of the Children's Amusement Center or that we rent kayaks, and canoes, and aqua bikes, and those facilities are going to be open during that time as well."

But it wouldn't be a beer garden without beer. Oshkosh's Bare Bones Brewery, Fifth Ward Brewing, and Fox River Brewing, along with Omega Brewing from Omro will have their beer pouring at all four of the events. "They'll each have a line where they can feature whatever brew they choose," McCollian says. "We'll also have domestic beers, and water, and soda." Members of the Society of Oshkosh Brewers homebrewing club will participate by pouring samples of their homebrewed beers.

McCollian anticipates this year's beer gardens will provide the launch for what will become an annual summer occurrence. "We've been approved to have four through the city council this year," she says, "but we do want to see this grow and possibly even travel into other parks next year. It's definitely something we plan on doing into the future."

Traveling beer gardens have grown in popularity over the past decade. Oshkosh joins other Wisconsin municipalities such as De Pere, Glendale, Milwaukee, and Oak Creek in coordinating these public-park-based events. For Oshkosh, it will be the resumption of a legacy initiated in the 19th century.

Throughout the latter half of the 1800s, summer beer gardens were a staple here. Most wards featured an outdoor "beer resort" of some sort. The most ambitious of them was on the lakeshore just south of Menominee Park.

Oshkosh City Directory, 1869.

In 1869, Oshkosh hotelier Gustavus Bogk established Bogk's Pleasure Garden at what is now the end of Otter Avenue on the shore of Lake Winnebago. Bogk's resort was a sprawling, ten-acre beer garden that featured a bathing house, a dance hall, a restaurant, and a brass band playing every Sunday afternoon. The beer served there appears to have been provided by the three Oshkosh breweries then in operation. But it was a short-lived affair. Bogk, a serial entrepreneur who constantly teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, was forced by his creditors to abandon the property in 1871. It was the last of Oshkosh's lakeside beer gardens.

Brews on the Bay will revive that tradition with more backing than Gustavus Bogk was ever able to muster. "There's no way possible that we'd be able to do this without the help of the Oshkosh community," Jen McCollian says "We have some really great sponsors in addition to the breweries and the local restaurants. It's just something we would not be able to do without the support of the Oshkosh area community."

This post also appears in today's Oshkosh Herald.

Beer Gardens Coming to Menominee Park

This was supposed to happen last summer. But like most events set for the summer of 2020, the Beer Gardens planned for Menominee Park never came to pass. This year those gardens will finally bloom.

The first Brews on the Bay will be Wednesday, June 9, from 5-9pm at the Kiwanis Shelter in Menominee Park. Beer Garden dates have also been scheduled for the second Wednesday of July, August, and September. Save the dates. More to come...