Although often writing under a nom de plume my legal - if perhaps not True - identity is Tim Wolter. I'm retired from medicine and enjoying travel, family and teaching.
In my recent posts on breweries of Yankton D.T. (Dakota Territory for those who are coming in late) I was reminded of the recurring if ill advised efforts to impose a "Dry" status on that frisky section of the Great Frontier. It was somewhat similar to the situation in next door Iowa, and had the same results. Ultimate failure but a short term boon to a few niche industries. Soda bottlers for one. The first soda bottler of Yankton, indeed, in the entire Territory, was a certain F. Schnauber. Fred, or Fritz to his pals, arrived early. His bottling works was begun in 1869, but a year earlier he was running ads for his "Fruit and Candy Store...and First Class Oyster Saloon".
Sometimes being a Pioneer does not make for lasting fame. Despite being a very prominent citizen - and he was the usual trifecta of Judge, Legislator and Grand Master of the local Odd Fellows Lodge - there is not that much accessible info on Fritz. He put up soda water in a variety of bottles including this really nice cobalt blue 1870's specimen. The embossed letters have been highlighted for better visibility. Note that it has the letters D.T. for Dakota Territory, the predecessor to modern day North and South Dakota. This and similar bottles are highly valued by collectors. As a side business, or maybe his main revenue stream, Schnauber also had an ice house. These were very necessary in the days before refrigerators.
Some later examples of Schnauber's bottles list "& Sons", but the business did not go to any of them, but to a fellow named Peter Binder.
Binder came to town in a rather interesting fashion. In 1873 General George Custer and the 7th Cavalry stopped in Yankton on their way west to permanent quarters at Fort Abraham Lincoln. Peter Binder was one of the horse handlers although it may have been in a civilian capacity. As his grand daughter recalls it, Binder got drunk and missed the departure of the 7th to what would ultimately prove to be an ill starred future. History also records a severe blizzard and much illness associated with the April '73 stop over so there could have been other factors involved. In any event Binder stayed and became an employee of Fred Schnauber. In 1903 he bought the business. He and his sons continued in the related ventures of ice, soda pop and ice cream until 1966. Not a bad run for the combined venture. Almost a century. Once many years ago when I visited Yankton I found an F.Schnauber Yankton Dak bottle sticking out of the side of an embankment. I traded it to a very appreciative collector of Territorial items. Another Yankton bottler got started just a bit later and did not stick around for very long. From an 1878 edition of the Yankton Press and Dakotan:
According to an 1881 history that admittedly is a bit loose with dates, William Heselton was born in Skowhegan Maine in 1850. He "went west" in 1876 spending a couple of years in California before coming to Yankton. He seems to have only been there from 1878 to 1880 before moving to Parker D.T. where he ran a saloon. Bottles from his "Yankton Bottling Works" are very rare and the available photos are few and grainy.
Yankton had the advantage of being an early settled city in Dakota Territory and was even the Capitol until the status was "stolen" in 1883. But then it became something of a backwater. Steamboat travel on the Missouri River had been superseded by the arrival of railroads and the many fiscal benefits of being a government center dried up. So there was a search for new ventures among which, in 1890, was America's largest cement factory on the edge of town. This too did not last for all that long, but long enough for the town to acquire a new nick name, one that appeared on the bottles of another company.
The Cement City Bottling Works was started by a man named M.ONeill. It is known to have been in business as early as 1898. By 1903 it was being operated by an A.P. Johnson. I've had a fair mosey about early maps of Yankton and did come across one other "possible" soda bottler. The earliest detailed Sanborn map is from 1886. It shows a structure at the foot of Walnut Street that is titled Adler and Ohlman's Steam Bottling Works. The notation indicates it is "closed during winter months" and does show a large ice house. Adler and Ohlman was an early wholesale liquor dealer in Yankton. "Steam Bottling Works" is an ambiguous term just indicating steam power for the machinery. Schnauber called his establishment - which clearly only bottled pop - something very similar. I suspect Adler and Ohlman were bottling beer. The 1891 map again shows an ice house but the adjacent structure is simply labeled "beer". This location along the levee and railroad tracks was a popular spot for several breweries from elsewhere to have their "agencies", basically refrigerated warehouse space where kegs would be stored and bottled beer put up. In fact ads of about this time period indicate that Adler and Ohlman were agents and bottlers for the Joseph Schlitz brewery of Milwaukee. But given the chronic uncertainty of Prohibition in Dakota, and the less distinct cut off between alcoholic and non alcoholic drinkables, it is somewhat plausible that Adler and Ohlman bottled soda as well. Several of the images shown here came from an on line compilation of soda bottles. Hutchbook is an impressive compendium of soda bottles from the 1880 to 1915 time span and is worth a look to those interested in such things.
Although I have frequent moments of doubt I am pleased with how the team has tackled the challenge of Week One. I also have no idea if what they are working on will be a magnificent success or a spectacular failure. But it's all good. There are reputed to be some teams out there where the adult coaches dictate the design process, and have active hands on in the building phase. With team 5826 on the other hand, I wander from one working group to another, trying to make sure that they are staying on task. And they have come up with some very audacious ideas, the sort of thing that I would actually not advise them to take on with the compressed build season of six weeks. But it is their team, their robot. They are learning, and how/if it works will teach them more. Current thinking is that they will build an entirely new drive train, one that sacrifices pushing power for maneuverability. And we'll focus almost completely on working the higher altitude targets. The mechanism for grabbing the flat discs and the round kickballs will be a great big vacuum cleaner. I'm not sure why they went this route. One of our clever kids brought a shop vac to our first build session. At that point it was going to be either used in the robot, used to clean the shop, or put into our team benefit auction. But once they started playing with it..... Some views of Week One: We are using a new vision tracking system this year. It is creepy in part due to the glowing green "eyes".
Also in the creepy category, here's a video of it following team members around as they go here and there with a reflective target. Notice that the black "Orcabot" fin has been put back on.
Because I took the crew up to Minneapolis for the official Kick Off I missed the early design decisions. The various things we are supposed to pick up can in principle all be handled with vacuum cups, much as industry moves irregularly shaped objects about. Here's the math that purports to show how much pressure will be necessary.
Last year's robot was dubbed "Mr. Clamps". I shudder to imagine the final name of this thing but so long as the fin is on - here joined by the "drift wheels" - it is still Orcabot, or in this instance Orcabot 2.
As of Sunday night the experimental "H-Drive" was still not working well on the carpet we will have to compete on. But on the positive side, our crews have built the tall "Rocket" that we have to put things into, and the tripod that supports our swing mast has been fabricated.
And here is version 2.0 of the vacuum grabber, along with the ball and disc it will have to latch onto.
Sometimes I have enough clues to assemble a brief "Brewery Caves" article from a place too distant for me to do a boots on the ground investigation. In putting this out into the wilds of the Internet I would yet again remind all that trespassing is bad, and taking risks in exploring is very, very bad. That out of the way it would be marvelous if additional information were to appear. First a map. This is again from Yankton, once territorial capital of Dakota, now a sleepy river town on the banks of the Missouri river.
This is an 1883 Sanborn map and atypically it shows the underground storage cellar extending back from the brewery. The location is simply given as 3/4 of a mile NW of Post Office. At this time in history it was just assumed that this would be a sure fire landmark! Note that the dotted lines extending back into a presumed hill are running west. Yankton sits generally on very flat ground. The exceptions are the bluffs due west of town and also this site, which would have to be on the west side of Marne Creek. At the time when John Foerster set up shop it was actually called Rhine Creek. (A bit of unpopularity of Germany in WW I caused the name change!). The dates on this enterprise are a little sketchy. John seems to have run the brewery from circa 1870 to 1882. His wife Eliza became proprietor then as John had died in a "buggy accident". Mrs. Foerster ran it until 1890 at which point it became vacant for a while. The imprudent solons of the new state of South Dakota took it upon themselves to enact Prohibition as one of their first official duties, and both of Yankton's breweries are shown as "closed" on 1891 Sanborn maps. In 1899 the Eureka Brewing Company reoccupied the buildings but only until 1904. The beer cellars seem to have been kept up, and even improved upon per this 1898 image.
Alas, I cannot hold out hope for a discovery of the interesting cellars shown on these maps. The location of the Foerster Brewery is on Locust Street and West 9th Street. It is now the site of Lincoln Elementary School and I'm sure that the nice hillside behind it has been made entirely immune to the exploring efforts of any inquisitive grade schoolers! As a minor footnote I'd point out that the area previously designated as barley storage is labeled on the later map as BEER BOTTLING. Indeed, the Eureka Brewing Company put their wares up in bottles, and embossed ones at that.
Eureka was and is a very small community about 300 miles north of Yankton. The unusual business arrangement here seems to have been a way that Eureka - a major grain growing community - could market some of their produce directly to the idled brewery which one imagines was purchased or leased very reasonably given the uncertainty of South Dakota Prohibition efforts. Here's Part One of the Yankton Brewery Story
Sometimes I have enough clues to assemble a "Brewery Caves" article from a place too distant for me to do a boots on the ground investigation. In putting this out into the wilds of the Internet I would yet again remind all that trespassing is bad, and taking risks in exploring is very, very bad. That having been said it would be marvelous if additional information on these breweries were to appear. ----------------------------------- I lived in South Dakota for three years. The people there were all very nice, albeit with a bit of an eccentric streak. That certainly would apply to Charles Rossteuscher, the pioneer brewer of what was then the wild and untamed Dakota Territory. My first information on Rossteuscher has him in Manitowoc Wisconsin in the early 1850s. He was in partnership with William Rahr in one of the three breweries existing in that tiny but very thirsty village. Rahr fired him, as their partnership agreement contained a clause saying the agreement was void if either "violated the laws of the land". It seems that Rossteuscher had been involved in a brawl in 1854 that resulted in the death of a certain Jacques Kurzwaelli. The particulars are a bit obscure, but the indictment drawn up against Rossteuscher was written in very florid prose. He was described as: "...not having the fear of God before his eyes, but being moved and seduced by the instigation of the devil..." The report went on at some length about the knife used (value one dollar), the wound inflicted, and the opinion of the grand jury that the actions were carried out "..feloniously, willfully, and of his malice aforethought...". Interestingly the district attorney who drew up the papers also was among those signing for his release on bond, and perhaps it is no surprise that Rossteuscher was promptly acquitted and that the cost of the entire proceedings was $20.79. Rahr fired him anyway. Not long afterwards the Rahr brewery burned to the ground under suspicious circumstances and Rossteuscher left town for good. The Manitowoc newspaper described him thusly: "He was always considered a man of mystery by all who knew him, and his emnity greatly feared. He was a man of good education but inclined to get into all kinds of mischief. During the early days it was the style with the men to wear military or "Spanish" cloaks, as they were called, and his was of a scarlet hue augmenting greatly his mysterious air and bearing." His movements for the latter 1850s are unclear but Charles Rossteuscher ended up in Yankton, the rustic capitol of the new Dakota Territory, circa 1860. He is mentioned as running the first butcher shop in town. He also served as a private in the local Dakota militia that was mustered in during the troubled time of the Dakota Uprising. In 1866 he returned to the brewing business bringing equipment to town by steamboat and setting up shop in a wooden building at 2nd and Walnut.
Given his previous difficulties with the law it is a bit surprising that he also held a variety of civic offices including Justice of the Peace, Judge and Mayor! He also ran the local German language newspaper and on this matter the friendly rival pages of the Daily Press and Dakotian made comment in 1880: "First butcher and brewer, Charles F. Rossteuscher, who has since degenerated into an editor though he still sticks to the brewery to keep up his reputation." The City Brewery had a long successful run despite state wide Prohibition in the 90's and and then getting a two year head start on the National dry spell beginning in 1917. Of course this is supposed to be a "Brewery Caves" post. The above Sanborn map from the early 1880s shows a "Cellar" on the main property. This was constructed in 1876 and was said to have "elaborate beer vaults". This along with plentiful Missouri River ice was probably sufficient. But in the earlier years of the enterprise there may have been cave storage. This 1953 article while primarily about the local Native American citizens does make mention of a cave that was thought to be used by "The City Brewery" in its early years. The clues are inexact and I can find no more recent information, but it is apparently just west of town and in the river bluffs. The road that led to it is now partly gone but likely corresponds to Sister Grove Road. I suspect the cave is at the foot of the bluffs somewhere below the Sacred Heart hospital/monastery complex. Here's Part Two of the Yankton Brewery Story
And so it begins. We had a nice contingent go over to Minneapolis for the Kickoff, an event that is a sort of weird mix of Reveal, Pep Rally and Nerd Fest. You get to know your own team over time but seeing an entire auditorium full of talented kids from all over is always inspiring. Going back to my predictions of Friday, I did not get much right this year. But... At first glance this looks like a game we can play. We've had some success with an elevator system that delivered boxes last year, this would just be other things to deliver. But first looks can deceive. As quite frankly can second and third looks. Our goal is to finalize designs and lay in all necessary parts this week. Until that point there are assorted tasks that can be done independent of final design considerations. Well, this one was frankly kind of weird. We have a set of what are called "Omni Wheels" that can be used to drift drive. There was an unexpected bit of interest in hooking up three of them and making a strange drive base. It drifts...also spins out of control. Hopefully we'll settle on a less glitchy drive option shortly...
----- FIRST robotics posts will be weekly - probably Robot Mondays - with extras as appropriate. Most likely the unrealistic optimism and pessimism that I roller coaster through during the build and competition seasons will be on full display. With the season less than 48 hours old I've already cycled several times!
Tomorrow the hectic FIRST robotics season begins in earnest. It always starts with a flourish, FIRST keeps the details of each year's "game" top secret until a big reveal video at Kickoff. Various hints of course are given. This year's game is called "Deep Space" and it features Boeing as a big time sponsor. So probably it won't be Rain Forests or Submarines. There is also a "teaser" video. In past years these have contained useful clues along with a lot of static. This year it is so generic that I'm not sure it helps at all. Here's a link to it on YouTube if you are interested:
Hmmm. Not much to go on. We have had a few pre-season meetings and I've tossed out some quick design challenges to the team based on what I figure we might be asked to build. Others have engaged in the more extensive and arcane discussions that FIRST always generates...and always ends up with the never to be realized prediction of a "Water Game" played in some kind of swimming pool. This will happen....never. So, my 2019 predictions. On Monday I'll give my predictions the grades they will have earned. I'll probably be using a red font to do so. 1. I figure we will have to open and close doors. The central theme is a space station. Airlocks are important. And it is a fun concept to work on when dreaming up robot components. Not really. But there are hatch covers to place. Sort of like doors. 2. Many years it is necessary for your robot to pick something up and launch it. I'm not that excited about this one, our sole attempt at a launcher a few years ago was not very impressive. (Although we learned things, which was the point of building it). Again, partial credit. We have to pick up big soft "playground style" balls. But it looks more like placing them than launching. Happy to be wrong on that. 3. Some kind of bumpy terrain. Craters, hills, whatever. Likely not too extreme as it is necessary to keep the game something that rookie teams can play on some level. Of course as rookies we came up with a robust solution for rough terrain. This was an accident as we effectively built a steel tank for the one year in which durability was the absolute key... No, unless you count a sort of Olympics Awards Podium that can be climbed at the end. 4. Dramatic end game. This is a safe bet. The game developers have done a good job in recent years creating a clock ticking, eye catching, sometimes match deciding final element. I'll go out on a limb here and say there will be a suspended object at least 15 feet above the playing field that we have to "reach" in one fashion or another. Nope. Just wrong.
Another year turned over. From my perspective - and really I can't write from any other - it has been a year of apogee. I've accomplished a lot. But sometimes I feel that the energy required to go any higher has become impractical. With age comes Gravitas, that hard to define air of seriousness, of maturity. But with age also comes gravity, the inexorable force that pulls at us all. When you are young it is almost imperceptible. In fact it is a useful thing that helps us tell what is up and what is down. But after age 60 we are never in doubt about that. Down is where we are heading. Maybe soon, probably later. So I've been feeling inclined towards more outrageous adventures, on the theory that if not now, then....when? But then there is that inexorable pull. Stop off in Iceland for a few days? Meh, seems like a lot of work and the flight connections are not ideal. When you start to pass up opportunities on the basis of not wanting to loiter a few hours in airports it is a concerning development. Well if a mundane routine is problematic it at least is conducive to steady writing. Detritus of Empire tipped the scales at 172 posts in 2018. This is down a few from recent times but considering the general demise of old school blogging I consider this decidedly non shoddy. It's coming up soon to 8 years of writing thrice a week. Looking ahead. Back to England for a digging trip to Vindolanda. I think the year off will prove refreshing. Outside chance of another interesting archaeology trip developing but it is too soon to speak of it. More robotics stuff, but reading those posts there is a certain sameness to them so perhaps less of these. I am very stingy with family pictures and stories as these are shared property, not mine alone. But I am now a grandfather for two imps one of them - Lord help us - a girl. My entire Naughty Grandpa shtick so well suited to rascally boys has been rendered obsolete. I fear the worst. Tea parties with stuffed animals.
