Very Cheap, Second Hand Beer Bottles

Here’s something that will make collectors of Oshkosh memorabilia wince. It’s a classified ad from the Oshkosh Daily Northwestern of September 9, 1893.

Frank Kitz had just closed up his beer bottling plant when he placed that ad. His bottle house was at the northwest corner of what is now Parkway and Monroe.

Here’s the thing: those “Very cheap, second hand beer bottles” Kitz was selling are now extremely rare. And highly sought after. Only a handful of Kitz bottles are known to have survived. Today, they're worth about $500 a piece.

There’s more on Oshkosh’s beer bottlers, here and here. And I recently wrote a long piece about Frank Kitz and his son Theodore. You can find that here.

The Life and Times of Silvo Fenn

In 1882 Silvo Fenn traveled 4,000 miles to make a new life for himself in Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

A young Christian Frederick Silvo Fenn.

He was born on June 7, 1864, in Saalfeld; a mining town at the edge of the Thuringian Slate Mountains in central Germany.

The Saalfeld of Silvo Fenn’s youth.

The details of Fenn's life in Germany have been lost. What is known is that while in his teens he was trained as a brewer. He appears to have been eager to abandon whatever else his early life entailed. Fenn left Germany when he turned 18. He traveled north to Bremen, boarded the S.S Oder, and was gone. They had a phrase for what he was doing. Fenn was passing into eternity.

The S.S. Oder.

Fenn was two weeks at sea. He wasn’t alone. Ernst Lang, an 18-year-old brewer from Saxony, became his traveling companion. They deboarded together when the Oder reached New York City on October 13, 1882.

Fenn and Lang headed west. They stopped when they reached Oshkosh. On the south side they met August Horn, who had come to America from Bavaria 30 years earlier. Horn hired both of them to work at his brewery.

August Horn.

Horn & Schwalm’s Brooklyn Brewery was launched in 1865 by German-born brewer Leonhardt Schwalm. A year later Schwalm brought in his brother-in-law August Horn. Then, in 1873, Schwalm died unexpectedly. The entire brewery burned to the ground six years later.

The original Horn & Schwalm Brooklyn Brewery in the 1600 block of Doty.

August Horn had a new, much larger brewery built. Leonhard Schwalm's son Theodore stepped in to take over his dead father's role in the brewhouse. But Theodore's all-consuming alcoholism soon rendered him incapable of much of anything. That’s when Fenn and Lang arrived.

Silvo Fenn went to work in the brewhouse. He also bunked there for his first year or so in Oshkosh. Ernst Lang moved into the house next door to the brewery. Lang’s job was to coax Oshkosh saloon owners into buying the Brooklyn Brewery’s beer. Horn’s brewery began hitting its stride. By 1889 the Brooklyn Brewery was selling more beer than any other brewery in Winnebago County.

The new Brooklyn Brewery, built after the 1879 fire.

Time spent hawking beer in Oshkosh saloons made an impression on Ernst Lang. He quit the brewery and in 1889 opened a saloon at the northeast corner of 6th and Oregon. Lang took Leonhard Schwalm's daughter Hannah with him. The couple moved into the apartment above their saloon. They were in the heart of the Morgan Company complex. Thirsty workers were drawn to their bar night and day. Lang’s place was an immediate success.

Ernst Lang's saloon (on the right) at the northeast corner of Oregon and sixth.

Fenn, meanwhile, settled into the life of an Oshkosh brewer. In the spring of 1886, he married Anna Ritschke, who with her family had come to Oshkosh from Germany in 1871. Silvo and Anna had their first child a year after their wedding. Anna had another child, two years after that. And just about every year or so thereafter there was another. They would have seven kids in all.

In 1889, the Fenns bought an empty lot on Doty Street and built a home. The property was sold to them by Frederick Voelkel. He lived next door at the corner of Doty and 17th where he had run a saloon and white-beer brewery. Fenn’s neighbor to the north was a beer salesman for the Brooklyn Brewery. Across the street was the brewery where they worked and the mansion of their boss, August Horn. Fenn was fully immersed in the south side brewing scene.

 The Fenn family home at what is now 1663 Doty Street. The house still stands.

The August Horn home built in 1879 at 1662 Doty Street.

There was no rest in Fenn. He also worked as a finisher at Buckstaff, in addition to his job at the brewery. In 1892, Fenn took on another project. He began bottling beer.

Beer bottling in the 1890s was a messy affair. The Brooklyn Brewery, like many other American breweries, wanted nothing to do with it. The process was slow, laborious, and involved a senseless taxation protocol. It just wasn't worth the bother. But some people were willing to pay a premium for bottled beer. So a host of independents stepped in to fill the void.

An ad from the Oshkosh Labor Advocate of November 3, 1893.
Silvo Fenn listed among the bottlers of the Brooklyn Brewery’s beer.

Fenn wasn’t the first independent beer bottler in Oshkosh, but his operation would grow to be the most successful and enduring. Early on, he worked from his home. He'd buy kegs of beer from the Brooklyn Brewery, haul them across the street, and drain their contents into bottles by hand.

Then he had to peddle that beer. Sunday was the best day for it. Fenn would load a wagon full of beer bottles and go trolling through town. The sound of those bottles on a beer wagon was unmistakable. When the wagon came clattering the chime of the jingling glass was as distinctive as the music of an ice-cream truck. It brought people running.

The Brooklyn Brewery was growing prodigiously. Fenn was one of three bottlers for the brewery’s beer. His domain was the south side. Working at the brewery gave him a leg up on the others. August Horn was among the first business owners in Oshkosh to have a phone installed. If a call came in for bottled beer, Fenn was there to take it.

In 1894, Horn combined the Brooklyn Brewery with two other Oshkosh breweries to form the Oshkosh Brewing Company (OBC). The merger created one of the largest breweries in Northeast Wisconsin. Fenn became OBC's primary independent bottler.

An early ad for the Oshkosh Brewing Company that appeared in the Wisconsin Telegraph,
a German-language newspaper published in Oshkosh. Fenn is listed on the right
under “Aus Flaschen gefüllt von” identifying the beer bottlers for the new brewery.

Fenn’s bottling operation had completely outgrown its makeshift beginnings. He borrowed money – and probably advice – from Christian Elser who, before his retirement, had been the bottler for Glatz's Union Brewery. The bottling plant Fenn built behind the family home was the largest of its type in Oshkosh.

Detail from a 1903 Sanborn Map of Oshkosh. Fenn’s Bottling plant is at
287 Nebraska (now 1664 Nebraska). His home is shown at 52 Doty (now 1663 Doty).

The separation between his work and family life was non-existent. For example: in 1896 Fenn’s three-year-old son Sizzo spotted him behind the house sorting beer kegs. The toddler waddled over and...

The father hurled a heavy oaken keg to one side and the child received the full effect of the blow. He was crushed to the ground and picked up by the parent for dead. Medical assistance was summoned and it was found that the infant was suffering a long, deep scalp wound, a fractured skull, and a right leg broken in two places between the knee and the instep. His chances for recovery are considered doubtful.
     – Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, August 6, 1896

Sizzo survived. It wasn’t his last brush with an early death. He took a stray bullet to the neck while out hunting in 1933. That didn't stop him, either. Sizzo lived to be 98.

Sizzo Fenn on the left in 1929. At the time, Sizzo was the secretary for
the Oshkosh Pure Ice Company where this picture was taken.

Silvo Fenn finally quit his job at the brewery and went full-time into bottling beer. It still wasn't enough. He began getting help from Robert Nachtrab who had recently moved from a farm in the Town of Nekimi and into the house next door. By 1898, Fenn and Nachtrab had formed a partnership. Nachtrab focused on beer sales. Fenn focused on getting all that beer into those bottles.

The early Fenn and Nachtrab bottles were manufactured in Illinois, Indiana, and Milwaukee. They were pint-sized with the surnames of the bottlers embossed on the face. The blobbed top was sealed by a porcelain stopper held in place by a wire hinge and cuffed with a rubber gasket. A box of 12 pints went for about 50 cents (approximately $16 today).

The bottling houses in Oshkosh operated like ad hoc saloons with beer flowing freely from bottles and kegs. It annoyed the saloon keepers to no end. Unlike the bottlers, the saloon men paid a hefty licensing fee for the privilege of slinging their suds.

In November 1908, Fenn was ratted out and arrested. He was charged with selling liquor without a license at his bottling house. Fenn pleaded guilty and paid a $50 fine (about $1,450 today). After that, he ponied up the $200 licensing fee and continued pouring beer for his guests.

From the 1908 Oshkosh City Directory.

The business continued to grow. Family help was in constant rotation at the bottling plant. And by 1910, Fenn and Nachtrab had hired two additional full-time employees.

The Fenn and Nachtrab bottling plant, circa 1911, at what is now 1664 Nebraska.
The left (northern) portion of the building behind the beer barrels contained the ice house where
beer was stored both before and after bottling. The opposite wing housed the bottling line.
Fenn’s home can be seen through the opening at the end of the driveway.

From left to right: Hank Ritschke, Silvo Fenn’s brother in law. Laurence Nachtrab, Robert Nachtrab’s son. On the horse is Ernst Fenn, Silvo’s son. Silvo Fenn is in the white shirt with suspenders. Oscar Rand, an employee of the bottling plant, has his arms crossed. An unidentified youth, possibly Sizzo Fenn, wears a hat slanted on his head. Robert Nachtrab is in bib overalls at the extreme right.

They were working on borrowed time. Independent bottlers like Fenn were falling by the wayside. Breweries were warming to the idea of taking their bottling in-house. For the Oshkosh Brewing Company, that time arrived in 1912. When Fenn walked out onto the front steps of his home that spring he saw this looming over him....

Completed in 1912, the new brewery of the Oshkosh Brewing Company.

OBC had been doing at least some of its own bottling since 1894. With the completion of its new brewery in 1912, the company decided it was time to do away with the independent bottlers and take that business for its own. Things had changed. The burdensome tax laws had been streamlined and bottling technology had improved considerably. OBC's new brewery had a pipe running from its tanks to a bottling line in the old Horn and Schwalm brewery. Fenn had known this day was coming.

OBC began terminating its bottling agreements. Fenn and Nachtrab were the only bottlers to survive the culling. The others were given the less lucrative option of becoming distributors for OBC's beer. Fenn's long relationship with the brewery may have been what saved them. But the old ties that had bound the Southsiders were fraying. August Horn, the first president of OBC and Fenn’s early benefactor, had died in 1904. His successor, William Glatz, was not the sentimental type when it came to the beer business.

William Glatz

Fenn didn’t seem especially concerned about remaining in the good graces of Glatz. OBC had been the dominant player in the Oshkosh beer market for close to 20 years. The first formidable challenge to that dominance came in 1913 when Peoples Brewing began making beer just a stone's throw away from the OBC plant. Glatz was furious. He publicly railed against the upstart brewery that had been funded, in part, by Oshkosh saloon keepers. Fenn rubbed salt in the wound. He began distributing the new brewery’s beer.

It could have been a ploy to gain leverage. If it was, it worked. Within a year, Fenn dropped Peoples from his portfolio and was back to dealing and bottling OBC beer exclusively.

By the end of 1915, Fenn and Nachtrab had become the only independent beer bottlers still operating in Oshkosh. That distinction wasn’t theirs for long. In 1916, Fenn's bottling agreement with OBC ended. Like all the others, Fenn and Nachtrab were relegated to distribution. It was time for Fenn to bow out.

He hung around just long enough to enjoy one last beer bash. The old battle over Oshkosh saloons being open on Sundays had reignited. Sunday had always been the big day for beer drinking in Oshkosh. The local dries had been throwing fits about it for decades. In early 1917, the anti-fun crowd momentarily gained the upper hand forcing Oshkosh saloons to close on the Sabbath. Suddenly, the services of people like Fenn were in high demand. The old beer wagons were loaded up for another round.

Oshkosh Daily Northwestern, January 1, 1917.

That was the last hurrah. In July 1917, Fenn dissolved his partnership with Robert Nachtrab and quit the beer business. Nachtrab tried to keep the distribution operation afloat. He partnered with Ernst Berndt, who had been working for them since 1910. But with Prohibition on the horizon, there was little chance of the business surviving. It closed in 1919.

Fenn took a job as a fireman at the Deltox Grass Rug Company. His world had been upended. His entire adult life had revolved around beer. All of that was made illegal when Prohibition arrived in 1920. The bottling plant that he had built in his backyard sat vacant. The big brewery across the street that he had helped to make a success was turning out soda water and a dispirited, non-alcoholic brew named Pep.

Fenn decided to get away for a while. He had two sisters still living in Germany. He hadn’t seen them in 40 years. His flight-plan was similar to the one that had taken him to America. He headed north to catch a boat across the Atlantic. Fenn boarded the Empress of Scotland at the Port of Quebec on May 30, 1922. He was going home.

Silvo Fenn’s 1922 U.S. passport photo.

Fenn returned to Oshkosh in the late summer of 1922. He went back to work at Deltox. He quit that a few years later and took a job as a watchman at Gould Manufacturing. He retired in the early 1930s. Prohibition was about to be repealed. Fenn was 69 years old when it finally happened. Beer was legal again, but that world was just a memory for him now.

On December 12, 1944, Silvo Fenn died from a heart attack at his home on Doty Street. He was 77 years old. Fenn was survived by his wife, three sons, and two daughters. Silvo Fenn is buried in Peace Lutheran Cemetery.

Silvo Fenn’s weathered headstone.

End Notes
Oshkosh's independent beer bottlers were a fascinating and group. I've written a two part survey about them that can be found here: Part 1 / Part 2.

About five years ago, Oshkosh bottle collector Steve Schrage mentioned that I ought to write a longer piece about Silvo Fenn. I’ve been intending to do that ever since. The push that got me going came this summer from Tim Fenn, Silvo Fenn’s great grandson. Tim was a great help in making this piece happen. He also supplied several of the pictures in this post.

Thanks also to Bob Bergman, Matt Hostak, and Steve Schrage. Each of them helped me out with this in various ways.

Unearthing Our Buried History

It's probably the last place you would go in search of treasure. After all, the pit of an outhouse is not usually where a thing of value gets deposited. But Bob Bergman and Matt Hostak will tell you otherwise. They’ve recovered scores of valuable and historic items from the sites of old Oshkosh privies. Some of the underground chambers they’ve explored have held their secrets for more than 100 years.

Bob Bergman (in the hole) and Matt Hostak during a recent dig on the east side of Oshkosh.

Before the 1890s, most people in Oshkosh did their "business" in outhouses adjacent to their homes. Those privies were phased out as the Oshkosh sewer system developed in the 1890s.

An 1887 photo showing privies behind homes on Otter Street.
Photo courtesy of Matt Hostak.

By the turn of the century, many of the outhouses had taken on a new role. "Basically, what they had was this continually dropping garbage pit," Hostak says. "Often, they were used that way for 50 years or more. So as you dig down, you see a pretty clear downward aging of artifacts."

A sampling of the Oshkosh beer bottles dug from privies (click image to enlarge).

Bergman and Hostak are members of the Winnebago County Historical and Archaeological Society and they've been doing this kind of exploration in the Oshkosh area for decades. "If you're not interested in history, this is not the kind of thing you would do," Bergman says. "The history that goes along with it is just amazing."

It's their study of Oshkosh history that leads them to the point where they put shovels into the ground. "I've collected a comprehensive archive of Oshkosh maps beginning with pre-Civil War era maps," Hostak says. "We begin by consulting those maps and establishing the historic use of a property, including detailed information about any structures that were on it. Some of these historic maps actually show the location of the outhouse structure."

Detail from 1890 fire-insurance map of Oshkosh showing privy locations.

Often, their research takes them to either the east side of Oshkosh or to the south side of the city along the Fox River. "The closer to the river and the closer to Main Street are usually the best," says Hostak. "Those are the areas where this community grew out from."

Next, they survey the property in question. "The privies were kind of hidden from the view of the street," Bergman says. "Normally they would be behind the residence. A favorite spot was in the corner at the rear of the lot. We'll look for depressions or low spots in the ground. Often you'll see lilac bushes near where the outhouse would have been. That's usually a dead giveaway."

Then comes the ticklish part: explaining to a property owner that an outhouse once stood in their yard and asking for permission to dig it up. "Let's just say it's not something a shy person would be very good at," Bergman says. "You get all kinds of different reactions. Usually, though, after you explain your interest in history and exactly what you're looking to do they get really intrigued and interested in what you're doing."

Part of that explanation includes the assurance that the property won't be damaged. "Nothing is mechanically done, it's all done with hand tools," Bergman says. "And we don't dig randomly. We check for utilities and we use a probe that does no damage to find the exact location of the privy. When we're done, the hole is filled and the turf is put back in place. We like to say that it looks better when we leave than when we arrived."

Bergman and Hostak prepping the dig site.

"Most owners are responsive," Hostak says. "What often happens is that once we begin digging on one property, the adjacent property owners very frequently become interested, and then they offer us the opportunity to dig on theirs. It kind of just snowballs in that respect."

Their average excavation is four feet in diameter and approximately five feet deep. Contrary to expectations, there's nothing especially onerous about the process. The biological contents of the pit have long since been broken down and converted to odorless soil. As Hostak says, "There's nothing 'icky' about it."

It's a methodical undertaking. They descend layer by layer, reading the soil as they go and taking care not to damage anything that may be hidden below. "We'll find the most delicate items," Hostak says. "We've found light bulbs from the 1800s that were still intact." During one dig Bergman, who collects antique bottles, uncovered the oldest bottle in his extensive collection – an 1869 bottle from Oshkosh soda water producers Hickey and Holcomb.

Bergman holds his 1869 Hickey and Holcomb bottle.

The most commonly found item, says Bergman, are medicine bottles that held elixirs prepared by local pharmacists. "It was like they were all drug addicts back then," he says. "You find a multitude from every pharmacist that was on Main Street." The mix of items often ranges widely. "Pistols, false teeth, syringes, breast pumps, eyeglasses; you just never know," Bergman says. "I once found a Morgan silver dollar."

Bergman with a host of bottles and flasks recovered during a dig on School Ave.

Their discoveries are a tangible representation of Oshkosh life as it was in an earlier era. "We almost always find things," Hostak says. "The remnants of anything used in a household will come up." Items of particular value are often divided among the diggers and property owners, but much of what they unearth is given away.

"I love finding the old stuff, but I can always find someone for whom it's more important or has more meaning, so it usually goes home with them," Hostak says. "We have donated many items to museums, historical societies, and other interested individuals. It's not at all just about us going home with stuff."

Bergman and Hostak are currently seeking sites for future digs. Interested property owners can contact either Bob Bergman at (920) 235-2871 or Matt Hostak at (920) 252-5844.

A slightly different version of this article appears in today's Oshkosh Herald.

Oshkosh Breweriana Collector Steve Schrage

The Oshkosh Public Library is hosting an exhibit titled Neighbors Past and Present: The Wisconsin German Experience. It illustrates the history of German immigrants who settled in Wisconsin in the 19th century. Part of the exhibit's local flair is a display curated by Steve Schrage. He's a collector of memorabilia related to Oshkosh's early brewing industry, itself an outgrowth of German migration here. The items Schrage contributed to the exhibit are part of a collection he's been building for the past 15 years. It began with a few hundred unwanted beer cans.

Steve Schrage with his son Smith and daughter Kennedy at the Oshkosh Public Library Exhibit.

"My uncle was cleaning out his basement and he had this collection of beer cans he was trying to get rid of, so he gave them to me," Schrage says. "Most of them were in rough shape, but there were a few cans from Oshkosh breweries in there and that caught my interest. I grew up in Oshkosh, but I didn't know much about there being breweries here. So I started doing research, and found out, wow, Oshkosh had several breweries. I thought that was really cool. After that, I began searching for anything related to the old breweries."

He found plenty. Beer trays and beer signs and cans and labels and bottles bearing names like Kuenzl, Glatz, and Rahr – all of them German immigrants who came to Oshkosh and helped to establish the city's early beer culture. But as Schrage's collection grew, he found himself particularly drawn to the most elusive and fragile pieces of breweriana. He began focusing almost entirely on embossed bottles issued by Oshkosh's independent beer bottlers in the late 1800s.

Beginning in the 1870s, a subthread of the brewing industry in Oshkosh developed around the growing popularity of bottled beer. Prior to this, nearly all of the beer served here came out of wooden kegs. But as the production of glass bottles became more common, a handful of saloon keepers and brewery workers noticed an opportunity. They would purchase glass bottles in bulk and fill them with beer made at one of the local breweries. The novelty of bottled beer fetched a handsome price. Soon there were bottling operations in every ward.

At their peak in the late 1880s, there were no fewer than a dozen beer bottling houses operating in Oshkosh. Each of their owners would have his name embossed on his bottles in hopes they would be returned. But often they were simply discarded. What was then viewed as little more than an empty package is now a highly sought after collector's item. Schrage's sees a story in every one of them.

"I like to think about the people who drank from those bottles," he says. "How hard they worked and what life for them must have been like. And the people who filled them, one bottle at a time. They didn't have bottling machines, this was all done by hand. Some of them are even hand blown. Some are more than 130 years old. It's just amazing that something so fragile could last that long."

Finding those bottles is like searching for the proverbial needle in a haystack. If only it was hay they were hidden in. A number of Schrage's bottles were excavated from the filled-in reservoirs of former outhouses. "Yep, a lot of them ended up in the privy," Schrage says. He was introduced to bottle digging by fellow Oshkosh collector Bob Bergman, who has built much of his collection by digging and diving for rare bottles.

"The first time I went diving with Bob, I found a Frank Thielen bottle," Schrage says. "That was it, I was hooked." Thielen was an Oshkosh saloon owner who in the 1880s was also bottling beer. His bottles are now considered extremely rare.

"They're gone," Schrage says. "What has survived is already in the collections of other people like me who wouldn't think of giving them up. The only way to get them now is to find the ones that haven't been discovered. That Thielein bottle had probably been underwater for more than 100 years. It's incredible to think of. There are some treasures down in that river."

A generous selection of Schrage's treasures, including some of his rare bottles, will remain on display at the Oshkosh Public Library until February 28th.

This article also appeared in the February 5, 2020 edition of the Oshkosh Herald.

The Resurrection of Otto Villnow

Otto Villnow is dead. And this isn't the first time he's been that way.

Otto Villnow, Oshkosh beer bottler, and his wife Caroline, circa 1888.

Otto Villnow was born in 1849 in the north of Germany. He was 17 when the 1866 cholera pandemic visited his homeland. Villnow fell victim to the dread illness and, shortly after, was pronounced dead. They packed him into a coffin and placed him in a vault.

A day and a half later, an attendant discovered that young Villnow was not altogether deceased. He was taken from his crypt and eventually made a full recovery. A year later, Villnow got the hell out of Germany.

He reached Oshkosh by 1873 and took a job at a sawmill. Later, after he had gotten married, Villnow ran a shoe store from the home he and his wife Caroline purchased at what is now 1417 Oregon Street. But in the early 1880s, Villnow took an interest in beer. In particular, the bottling of beer. He converted his property on Oregon Street into a beer bottling plant.

The site of Villnow's bottling operation, formerly 212 Oregon Street.

Independent beer bottling plants became increasingly common in Oshkosh in the 1880s. Government regulation and the troublesome work of getting beer into bottles encouraged brewers to job out their bottling work to others. In Oshkosh, there were more than 20 independent bottlers like Villnow packaging beer in glass.

When I first wrote about Villnow here, I mentioned that he appeared not to have been affiliated with any particular brewery. But about a month ago, while doing research on an unrelated matter, I found that Villnow had worked at various times with two opposing Oshkosh breweries.

First, there was Lorenz Kuenzl's Gambrinus Brewery on Harney Avenue. Here’s an 1885 advertisement for the Gambrinus Brewery from the Wisconsin Telegraph, a German-language newspaper published in Oshkosh. The highlighted text translates into, "The bottles are filled by Otto Villnow."

Wisconsin Telegraph; August 28, 1885.

The Kuenzl/Villnow alliance appears to have soured not long after that ad appeared. In December 1886 Kuenzl sued Villnow for monies owed to the tune of $269.79 (worth about $7,500 today). Kuenzl won the suit and Villnow was forced to pay up. Whether or not that immediately ended the partnership isn't known, but by the end of the decade, both men had moved on. Kuenzl partnered with his neighbor, Oshkosh bottler John Sitter. Villnow, meanwhile, hooked up with brewer August Horn.

August Horn.

Horn was president of Horn and Schwalm's Brooklyn Brewery on Doty Street. Villnow's connection to Horn and the Brooklyn Brewery is confirmed in a brewery ledger from early 1894. It shows that Horn had supplied Villnow with beer pumps, a back bar and mirror, and chairs and tables.

Unfortunately, that ledger lists no address where Villnow might have put Horn’s fixtures to work. City directories during this period also lack any mention of Villnow running a saloon.  A possible explanation may be that Villnow was operating on behalf of a private club; he was affiliated with at least two of them in the early 1890s. 

In any case, Villnow's ties to the Brooklyn Brewery disintegrated when the brewery merged with the Glatz and Kuenzl breweries in 1894 to form the Oshkosh Brewing Company. After that, Villnow was done with beer. He worked as a laborer and janitor in the years that followed until his retirement in 1910.

Otto Villnow was 64 when he died in his sleep at his home on the morning of November 5, 1913. This time it was for keeps.

Villnow's Grave in Riverside Cemetery.

Villnow's obituary mentions nothing of his days as an Oshkosh beer bottler or his narrow escape from death in 1866. It says he was a shoemaker by trade. If not for his years in beer, that would probably have been his altogether forgettable epitaph.

But a funny thing happened on Villnow's way to obscurity. The bottles he used in the late 1800s became highly sought after collector's items. Only a few of them have survived. His name is embossed on the faces of those bottles. The legacy of Otto Villnow lives on, captured in glass.

Thanks to Alan Lareau and Bob Bergman for help with German words and old, beer bottles...

Big Bottles of Wartime Beer

America entered World War II in 1941. With that came rationing. Restrictions were placed on everything from rubber to butter. Tin was in short supply. For brewers, capping all those beer bottles suddenly became a problem. Their solution: bigger bottles.

1942

Big bottles of beer were nothing new in Oshkosh. Quart-sized bottles were used by some bottlers here from the late 1870s into the early 1900s.

For example, here's a quart bottle from the 1880s. It's from Frank Lutz, an independent beer bottler. His bottling plant was on Oregon St. just across from St. Vincent Church.

With the turn of the century came mechanized bottling and metal crown caps. Bottling beer became faster and easier. Especially when using smaller bottles. By 1910, brewers in Oshkosh had all but abandoned the quart bottle.

In 1938, the Oshkosh Brewing Company brought the bigger bottles back. Here's the label seen on OBC's quart bottles.

At first, the quart bottles were a novelty. They became a necessity when wartime rationing arrived in 1942. Bottle caps grew scarce. Quart bottles grew prevalent. Here’s one from Oshkosh’s Rahr Brewing Company.

The ultimate in big beers was the picnic bottle. At more than a foot tall, the picnic bottle held a half gallon of beer. Better yet, it was unpasteurized draft beer. At OBC, they went full-on retro. The brewery capped its picnic bottles with the old Lightning Style Stoppers first seen in the 1870s.

Here's a better look at that label.

Metal rationing ended in 1946. OBC ditched its picnic bottles. The half-gallon growler is our modern equivalent. Like the old picnics, they're filled with unpasteurized, draft beer. More importantly, we again have local breweries to fill them.

The Beer Merchant of Oshkosh

Frank X. Thielen. Something profane would likely have accompanied that name were it uttered by an Oshkosh brewer in 1891. Thielen was their nemesis. He worked as an agent for “foreign” breweries. That is, he imported beer from large, American breweries intent on muscling their way into places served by smaller, regional breweries like those here. Thielen was the beer merchant of Oshkosh. Here’s a look at his work.

Frank X. Thielen was born in the Rhine Province of Western Germany in 1840. In 1858, he arrived in Oshkosh and found work as a railroad brakeman. But by the early 1870s he had gone off the rails in favor of selling groceries and liquor from his father’s store on Main Street. By 1884, Frank X. was running the place.

He planted a saloon at the back of the grocery. Liquids gradually crowded out the solids. Thielen's stand transformed into both a tavern and wholesale liquor distributorship. He took to calling it the California Wine House. Designed by William Waters in a style described as “commercial Gothic,” Thielen’s home base still stands at what is now 420 N. Main Street. Thielen's place is under the red arrow.

Calling it a wine house may have lent an upscale sheen, but beer was Thielen’s meat. He’d been bringing in beer from Milwaukee since the late 1870s. He began with Milwaukee’s Cream City Brewing Company, importing and bottling its Export Beer. Here’s a damaged and very rare Thielen beer bottle.

At the close of the 1880s, Oshkosh’s breweries were losing their grip on the local beer trade. The four breweries were engaged in a price war that made them vulnerable to outside competition. Thielen saw opportunity there.

In 1890, he began importing beer from the Falk, Jung & Borchert Brewing Company of Milwaukee. The Milwaukee brewery was a rapidly growing concern producing more than 175,000 barrels of beer annually. Thielen arranged to have a refrigerated warehouse built for Falk, Jung & Borchert in downtown Oshkosh, just off Pearl Avenue near the Wisconsin Central freight depot. You'd be looking at it if you stood here back then (this is an interactive view, explore it!)….



Thielen was shooting for the higher end of the Oshkosh beer market. His imports found their way into the craft-beer bars of his day – saloons that didn’t rely on mugs of dark beer offered for a nickel a pull as their primary stock in trade. His domain was downtown. Henry Schmidt’s Opera House Sample Room was a favored outlet. Here’s a typical early 1890s newspaper ad for a Thielen import.

Not to go too far astray, but the Opera House Sample Room was located at the corner of High and Market streets. The building that housed it still stands. Here it is...

The Opera House Sample Room, as you might guess, was near the Grand Opera House. Like the Grand, it was also a William Waters design. The two buildings have a shared look. Each is constructed of cream colored brick, with similar accents and cornice work. Here they are face to face with High Avenue between them.

Enough of that, let’s get back to our man Thielen.

His next client was especially well known. In 1891, the Anheuser Busch Brewing Association was the second largest brewery in America, Pabst being the only brewery with greater output. When Thielen began importing AB, the beers of the St. Louis brewery were something of a novelty here. Budweiser had poured in Oshkosh before, but the beer had never been widely embraced by local drinkers. Thielen set out to change that.

Again, Thielen plied downtown saloons offering pricier beer. Here’s an ad that ran in the Oshkosh Northwestern during May of 1891 announcing the latest arrival of Anheuser Busch beer in Oshkosh.

There’s a lot to unpack there. Let’s start with the beer. Budweiser and Pale Lager, forget it, it’s Tony Faust’s I’d go for. Faust was a golden-hued lager, and by most accounts a fairly hoppy one. It was  a premium brew exceedingly popular with the beer geeks of its day. And what sort of places were serving it in Oshkosh? There are a couple mentioned above to take note of.

The King Bros. Bodega was located at the corner of Algoma and Market streets on the plot next to where the sundial now sits in Opera House Square. Fred and Peter King ran a high end joint, “First-class in every particular,” featuring, “Fine wines and liquors, imported and domestic cigars” and “High grades of bottled goods.” John Thielen's sample room was cut from the same cloth.

John was Frank’s younger brother. The saloon he operated during this period was just two doors south of Frank’s place in another Waters’ designed building that’s still intact at 416 N. Main Street. John also worked as a wholesale liquor distributor. He eventually became Oshkosh’s premier maker of distilled spirits, operating the Silver Spring Distillery. His Badger Club Whiskey was especially popular. Get a load of this...

Frank Thielen’s high-end beer strategy worked even better than he probably expected. By 1893 his business was booming. Here’s an homage to the man from the book Pen and Sunlight Sketches of the Principal Cities in Wisconsin, published in 1893.

Any commercial history of Oshkosh would be incomplete without a review of one of the pioneer business houses of the city, now known under the name of Frank Thielen… He employs four clerks, and has two teams for the delivery of orders, and has a very large and rapidly increasing trade.

Unfortunately for Frank X. Thielen, 1893 also marked the peak of his career as a beer merchant. The decline began with the Panic of 1893, which cast a pall over beer sales in Oshkosh. But the greatest impediment to his success was one that he had helped to create.

Struggling with the foreign competitors that Thielen and others had brought to town, the three largest Oshkosh breweries merged in 1894 to form the Oshkosh Brewing Company. By the late 1890s, OBC so dominated the Oshkosh market, that Thielen all but gave up distributing outside beer. He continued to operate his saloon, but his peak years as a beer merchant were over.

Thielen retired from the saloon trade in 1913. He died a year later at his home on Washington and Broad streets in Oshkosh. Frank X. Thielen is buried in Riverside Cemetery.

His saloon lived on. Thielen's sons Frank Jr. and Sam kept the family tavern running until Prohibition closed everything down in 1920.

Here’s a brief coda to the Thielen story I find interesting: after Peoples Brewing Company launched in 1913 in response to the domineering ways of the Oshkosh Brewing Company, the Thielen brother's saloon was among the first on Main Street to put Peoples Beer on tap. You know their father would have liked that.

Thanks to Ron Akin and Steve Schrage for help with this post.