Tumble down times in Cross Plains Wisconsin

- Note: One of my rules of thumb is that you never find just one of these "Tree Shaped Tombstones in a cemetery.  There are always at least a couple.  But on a fall road trip I ran across a bunch of exceptions to this rule.  Here is "One Off Week". -

Cross Plains Wisconsin.  I had taken a bit of a detour to visit hoping to find remnants of a cave in the ruins of a brewery on the edge of town.  No such luck.

But I did run across an interesting cemetery, another in our series of "One Off" tree shaped tombstones.

Valley Home Cemetery surrounds St. Martin's church.  St. Martin's has been decomissioned and now serves as the headquarters for the local historical society.  The place overall is well kept up and there are some nice monuments there.  But something, perhaps the nature of the soil, is causing trouble with some of the older markers.

Temps fugit.....

Anna Schulenberg has a nice tombstone.

The little motto below is rather Germanic and grim.  It translates roughly to "Death pain and Grave rest, with Christ in Heaven".  She probably did not die peacefully in her sleep.

Well lets hope that she is resting more comfortably than her leaning tombstone!  Is it being propped up by that little slab from somebody else's grave or is that just there to make mowing the lawn easier?

Tree Shaped Tombstones - Father and Sister

- Note: One of my rules of thumb is that you never find just one of these "Tree Shaped Tombstones in a cemetery.  There are always at least a couple.  But on a fall road trip I ran across a bunch of exceptions to this rule.  Here is "One Off Week".

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Mineral Point Wisconsin is a great place.  Scenic.  Lots of history.  It was at the center of the early, pre-statehood lead mining rush.  I expected to find tree shaped tombstones a'plenty.  Nope.  The three cemeteries in town have a total of two examples, each - in the theme of the week - standing all alone.  One was pretty standard stuff but the other....

Reverend Francis Weinhart has a rather imposing tombstone.  Nicely done in the "Rugged Cross" format.  Appropriate for a man of the cloth.  Great detail too, look at the nails that hold the cross together.

I had expected that the "book" part of the monument would have a verse from Scripture.  The line up above VIEMENTO is a bit of Latin portmanteau that translates to "remember the life".

Occupational references on tombstones are always nice to find.  They say something about the deceased and also show the degree of creative latitude given to the monument carvers.  Here we have a Communion chalice and wafer.

Francis Xavier Weinhart was of course a Catholic priest.  He came to Mineral Point relatively late, in 1871.  That was when the German speaking members of the Catholic community decided they should have their own parish.  

If Priests were sort of the "rock stars" of the Catholic world, nuns had a different status.  Respected, in the case of school children sometimes even feared.  But they were decidedly less visible.  Here is an understated tombstone I ran across in Portage Wisconsin:

Perhaps the designation SIS could be interpreted variously but the key is in the other part of the inscription.  Fading and partially covered with lichens...In His Holy Name.

Inch Cemetery

- Note: One of my rules of thumb is that you never find just one of these "Tree Shaped Tombstones in a cemetery.  There are always at least a couple.  But on a fall road trip I ran across a bunch of exceptions to this rule.  Here is "One Off Week". -

Yes, there is a place called Inch Cemetery.  So far the story behind it has eluded me.

As the theme of the week is "Lone Trees" there is just one to show you.

As they tend to do, these stones tell a story albeit an incomplete one.  Notice the radical difference between these two markers?  One is old and the other new. The birth dates for Clark and Etta are similar, just one year apart.  But he died in 1901 and she lived to be 94.  I figure them to be husband and wife.  She seems to have been a widow for 60 years.

No other clear details.  Clark would be too young to be a Civil War vet.  

He does appear to have been a member of the Modern Woodmen of America on the basis of the snazzy little logo.  It is a variant I had not seen before.

Tree Shaped Tombstones - Pacific

- Note: One of my rules of thumb is that you never find just one of these "Tree Shaped Tombstones in a cemetery.  There are always at least a couple.  But on a fall road trip I ran across a bunch of exceptions to this rule.  Here is "One Off Week". -

Pacific Cemetery was probably once aptly named.  It is in rural Dane county northwest of Madison.  From the front gate it still looks peaceful.

But it is no longer in a bucolic countryside.  The road along one side no longer conveys gently clopping horses and wagons but cars and trucks zipping past.  And to make it less tranquil there was a back hoe working nearby.  Also two dogs fenced in an adjacent yard who were quite vocal in their disapproval of my visit.  

Amidst all the racket I did find one Tree Shaped Tombstone.

A nicely done specimen.  Note the auto body shop in the background.

I like to highlight some of the nicer efforts of the talented artisans who made these. Note the well executed flower. It has its own little ledge, a chalice like pot, and every flower - or are they leaves? - crisply defined.

The same cannot be said for the "Book of Life" that sits atop the monument.  As we have seen on prior examples the right angle exposure to the elements is not kind to stone or to the works of man.  We are left with a few blurred dates and perhaps the name JONES.  At some point in the future I suspect the road will be quiet again, with gently whirring electric cars.  But by then the inscription will be lost entirely.

Cooking the Turkey. So that was 1000 degrees for 15 minutes, right?

In my post several years ago describing the pyrotechnic demise of Big Tom, the world's largest turkey I neglected to mention that when we visited the scene of the poultry apocalypse I picked up a small charred remnant of the Big Guy.

So for all of you responsible for creating a memorable Thanksgiving feast.  Let's be careful.  Not too memorable!

Forgotten Brewery Caves - Under The Oaks

Sometimes when researching a story you come across what looks like a dead end....but something just does not feel right.  Perhaps when the topic is Forgotten Brewery Caves one should always expect there to be interesting things in hiding.

My first visit to Minnesota City was brief.  I was on my way to Winona but had read that a brewery once existed in this nearby small town (population 204).  I located the site, took a good look at the structure there, and came away puzzled.  The building was in the right place.  It was of a size befitting an early brewery.  But it was under so many layers of renovation that my impression that it was just not old enough was tentative.  I did a bit more research and made a second visit. This unobtrusive marker on a back wall sums things up nicely:

Otto Vill came to Minnesota Territory in 1857 and settled in the frontier community of New Ulm.  Vill served in the militia that helped defend the town during the Sioux Uprising of 1862. His obituary in 1914 mentions that two of his children died during the conflict, but whether they were casualties or died of natural causes is not specified.

After the war Otto moved to Minnesota City, a small but promising community just north of Winona.  The first thing an aspiring brewer needed to do back then was excavate storage space, which he is reported to have done in the summer of 1868.  Actual brewing probably started the next year.

The Vill brewery enjoyed a fair bit of success despite vigorous local competition.  On the death of its founder, his son Oswald took over.

With the arrival of Prohibition a different business model was needed.  The brewery was converted into a hotel and "soft drink parlor".  Given the surprisingly active resistance to Prohibition in the Winona area the quotation marks are probably justified.  It was also rumored to be a stopping off place for mobsters who were commuting between those two great centers of flexible law enforcement; Chicago and St. Paul. 

The Oaks Nite Club opened in 1930.  Upstairs: dining and dancing.  Downstairs: slot machines and a roulette wheel.  A prominent chef from Minneapolis was hired, and the business was a great success for a time.  As the sign says above, it suffered through two serious fires and was rebuilt.  Probably only the foundations survive from its brewery days.

The chef, a certain Walt Kelly, eventually bought the establishment and after its 1948 rebuild it had a dining room that could seat 600, an 84 foot long bar, and a stage big enough for a 16 piece orchestra.  Notables of the time including Lawrence Welk, Sammy Kaye and the Three Stooges appeared there.

But of course times change.  Kelly died in 1957.  By then its popularity was slipping.  Perhaps it was television, or maybe the rise of suburbia made this supper club in the middle of nowhere just seem like an illogical destination.

There were attempts to keep it going, new ownership, new strategies.  It was a dinner theater for a while.  Then a church.  More recently it has been a machine shop.  

Ah, but the topic of this post is supposed to be the caves.

A news article at the time of the 1946 fire mentions that the stock of "rare old wines and liquors" were stored in the old brewery caves and so survived the blaze.

Walt Kelly's son in an interview said that the stories of gangsters fleeing the G-men through tunnels leading out to the nearby creek were just that, stories.  But he did confirm that there are, or at least a few years ago, were, narrow passageways underneath from the days when beer was stored there.

One of the later owners of the establishment was the colorfully named Carl Gegenfurtner, who said the following in a 1960 newspaper article.

"I'd like to get down and explore these underground caves, the old brewery caves under The Oaks.  But so far I've been too busy upstairs.  We're all working hard hoping to have our big opening with all the fancy new equipment running full blast around April 15th."

And one final crumb of information on the caves.  With due respect to Kelly Jr., who would be in a position to know things, it appears that the caves actually did extend quite some distance towards the creek.  A short news story in 1956, with a very grainy photo, shows a truck on the shoulder of the existing road, its rear wheel sunk deep into a cave in from the underlying brewery cave!

Yep, right about here.

Very little of the old night club decor survives.  These groovy 1960's era lights are just about all you can see from the outside.

Odd little additions and brick structures.  About what you'd expect in a building that has been so many things over its long life....

Schells brings back Cave Lagering

Last week I mentioned that the Potosi Brewery was putting out a "Cave Ale" as more or less a homage to the old ways of brewing.  Not that the cave was actually involved in the process.

Well, another brewery did it one better.

In 2015 the Schell's Brewery in New Ulm, Minnesota announced that they would be producing a "Cave Lager" actually aged in the 1860's brewery caves under their plant. It is a dark lager, in keeping with the prevalent style of that era.

The August Schell Brewery goes back quite a ways by Midwest standards.  It was founded in 1860, two years after Minnesota became a state.  Schell set up his brewery outside of New Ulm but, supposedly due to his generosity to the Native Americans, it was unscathed when New Ulm was besieged during the Sioux Uprising (alt title, The Dakota War) of 1862.  Remarkably the brewery is still family owned, the second largest of such still remaining in the U.S.

I remember it falling on some difficult times in the 1970's...their signature "Deer Beer" was not highly esteemed.

But in the happier times that are our current Better Beer Renaissance Schells has done well.  It is a respected local business that turns out good product.  And they have been innovative in recent times.

One of their experiments has been ageing beer in the original Civil War era caves.

It was a bit of an experiment and is not currently under production.  So I can't give it my personal taste test but others have pronounced it delicious.

A few pictures of the caves.  

An article that came out around the time of Cave Lager's introduction mentions that these are only remnant caves, two in number, each 8 feet tall and going 20 to 30 feet into the hill.  There were more extensive caves but they were filled in so as to improve the structural stability of the brewery overhead.  

This makes sense and was probably a fairly common practice.  I wonder if that explains the little dead end cave at the Bloomer Brewery?

Tree Shaped Tombstones - Some Fine Details

On a fall road trip I found a number of tree shaped tombstones on a day when the conditions for photos were rather good.  It had been raining, and details always show a bit better when the limestone is damp.  It was still cloudy but the light was decent, so less of the washed out/shadowed effect that comes with bright sunshine.

Here are a couple of tombstones from Portage Wisconsin.

Elegant work here.  The bark looks coarse and rough.  If you ran your fingers over it blindfolded you would believe it to be the real thing.  The linked chain...such delicate work with hammer and chisel.  It would not pass the "touch" test but certainly looks like beaten metal.

Another example, with the "Book of Life" weathered blank as usual.

Look at the detail on the broken limb.  To be able to carve this image of wood under strain you must have understood both the stonemason's trade and that of the carpenter.

Small Broken Robot Parts

Machines Behaving Badly, 2017.

Aftermath of a particularly frisky match.  The big metal bar is actually a scythe blade, one of the drop down hazards that nail robots from above.

One of the matches featured a single three pound robot taking on a multibot, that is to say,  a team that put out two 1.5 pound robots.  I just turned around for a moment to help a kid with a repair question and one of the little robots went into the Chains of Doom. Now, there may be a reason why cardboard has not caught on as a robot building staple.  I had to ask, "Where did the other robot go?"  It was disintegrated.  His team mate fought on gamely, taking his own share of damage but almost pulling off the win.  We awarded them the Monty Python inspired "Black Knight Award"...

In some of the later rounds on the "playback" side of the brackets we tossed four robots in and had the top two finishers move on.  It saves a little time.  The robot with the rapidly whirling weapon got in a few good licks, but this sort of machine usually ends up tearing itself apart from the combination of too much impact and not enough structural integrity.

The little girl here is wearing the official Machines Behaving Badly shirt.  No, she is not actually one of the folks running the event.  She did drive one of the "volunteer bots" we use to fill spots in the brackets.  But she got scared and couldn't finish the match.  So I gave her a shirt.  Soon she was trying her hand at driving the big FIRST robotics machine!

FIRST roboteers for future teams....

And we finish up with a big melee.  As many robots as we can fit in the arena at once just randoming smashing each other up for a few minutes.  Then the event is in the can until next year.

Robots on Veteran's Day

Somehow, implausibly, we pulled it off again.  A full double elimination combat robot event for 20 teams in exactly four hours.  Full report tomorrow.  But a couple of images for a Monday morning.

Singing the National anthem before the event began.  Nobody needed to be told...they stood. The hats came off.  You will note no protests.

And what the heck is this?  Our first ever robot that actually fired projectiles!  Oh, its nothing exotic, it was based on some kind of spring loaded confetti launcher with a geared down motor to turn the firing crank.  Oh, and it was filled not with confetti but with either pennies or nuts and bolts.  Sort of a little robot shotgun.

It even had a laser beam for aim and a little ramp on the front to raise and lower the elevation of the muzzle.  Of course it was very low powered and did not actually do any damage.

But it did win the Best Design award.

Machines Behaving Badly - 2017 Edition

On the eve of the 17th Annual Machines Behaving Badly robot event it seems appropriate to muse on where we've been, are, and are heading.

The popularity of the class remains high.  Kids of this age will probably always be enthused about building small combat robots.  But other things have changed.

The level of familiarity with the most basic tools and the simplest construction methods continues to decline.  It has been a full generation now that I have been doing this class.  Time enough for those magnificent Depression/WWII era multi-talented grandfathers (and some Rosie the Riveter grannies) to pass from the scene. Their tools? Sold off cheaply at garage sales.  Their expertise?  Only fragments were passed down to the Baby Boomers who have now become grandparents. And less still to the new generation of parents.  

Now we have an entire new generation of young people whose contact with the world is literally superficial....the interface being the tips of their fingers on the screens of their phones.  Tech savvy?  In a way.  Mechanically ignorant?  Oh, yes.

It is pointless to opine on whether this is good or bad, it simply is the case.  In a practical sense it has been a significant factor in my reluctance to advance the rather basic technology level in the class.  2017 kids struggle with things that a decade ago were accomplished with ease.

And the kids are different in other ways.  Like everywhere else our community is changing.  More fractured households, more chaos.  And all the little stuff.  Food allergies, medications to be aware of.  It seems to be more complicated being a kid in 2017.

But the work goes on.  If this sort of class is "lighting a candle against the darkness" then the fact that it is getting darker makes it more important.  And all the other stuff?  Blustery winds that make the light flicker but not so far falter.

A few pictures on the eve of the mini robot apocalypse.  Not surprisingly a bit of an off year for both creative and efficient machines.

One of our later build sessions happened to be on Halloween.  Kids of course were in costume.  A storm trooper and his robot.

We may not have the most creative robots this year, but darned if we don't have some really big ones.  Of course several are drifting just a bit above that three pound weight limit.  I have become less strict about it in recent years. When one student had drilled five or six holes in something trying to trim off several ounces I just told him "five down, another couple hundred to go...".

Sometimes an impractical design just lingers on until the last minute, only to be replaced by something simpler.  One student had this elaborate plan to build a four wheel drive, low speed, high torque pushing robot with sloped lexan armor.  Making the lexan pieces fit did not work so he just subbed in a cardboard box swathed in duct tape and with bits of aluminum and lexan randomly slapped on.  It even seems to work pretty well.

I really like the name, Boxer's Rebellion Gone Mad.  Although I have to say neither spelling nor any understanding of what the original Boxer Rebellion was all about appears to be a priority for the kid!

Ah well.  The event should be fun as always.  If the robots are having an off year there is always this:  New T-shirts!

Forgotten Brewery Caves - Potosi Wisconsin

What's not to like here?  The Potosi brewery names an ale after their cave and puts a picture of it on the label!  (Never you mind that ale really does not need a lagering cave and that the cave is not actually used in the process.....from personal research I can say it is a tasty product).

Potosi Wisconsin is another of those lead mining towns that boomed early.  In 1848 when Wisconsin attained statehood, 1500 people lived here.  Now the population is less than half of that.  The Gold Rush of 1849 ended the boom town days.  But it was still a pretty little place with plenty of good farmland near by.  

The brewery in Potosi was started in 1852 by an Englishman named Gabriel Hall.  The site was ideal.  There was a cliff face with a natural cave that could be expanded.  There was a free flowing spring of pure water next to it.  There was plenty of limestone around that could be quarried for building materials.

The later success of the establishment can be credited to a Bavarian immigrant named Adam Schumacher.  He was an employee of the brewery who one day in the early 1880s arrived at work to find his boss Mr. Hall had hung himself.  The brewery closed down after that and Schumacher went to work at the nearby British Hollow brewery.  A few years later he bought the idled Potosi brewery and did well with it.

Schumacher was simply a darned good businessman.  When the ferry across the Mississippi was in danger of closing down due to competition from the railroad he purchased it.  In addition to the appreciation of his local customers he found it a useful way to ferry beer across into Iowa, expanding his market while keeping transportation costs down.  It is reported that the ferry would even take orders from fishing camps along the river, dropping off small kegs and picking up the empties a few days later!

Potosi was an unlikely success story, growing to supply a five state area in the Post Prohibition beer revival.  But in the end competition from the big breweries was too much and the brewery closed in 1972.

In 1997 the deteriorating buildings were bought for back taxes.  The guys who did this did not know quite what they were going to do with them but eventually the complex underwent extensive renovation.  It reopened in 2008.  It now has a brewery, a restaurant, and two very good museums.  A quick video describing the process by which the site was saved is worth your time.....POTOSI.

The site today.

The brewery cave is on the first floor.  This area is free.  The impressive museum of breweriana is on the floor above and can be visited for a modest entrance fee.

The cave is not open for visitors but you are quite welcome to peer through the glass.

The cave shows its origins.  Notice the make up of the walls.  The natural cave has been expanded by excavation, a cement floor has been added and a few areas bricked off.  I suspect there are additional caves not on display.

Potosi is not really on the way to anywhere.  You'd have to make a special effort to visit.  I recommend you do so.  The restaurant was busy and the food smelled great. You can buy a couple of six packs of what we must assume is beer fresh from production.  Oh, and if things above ground interest you the entire area is extremely scenic.

The Trials of Travco

I'm taking a mechanical design class.  This is a hopelessly wide topic and so this is just an introduction.

The most fun part is also the most educational.  We work together in small groups that are in essence little design firms.  I was recently working with three other guys.  One of them being named Travis we dubbed ourselves Travco.

The assignment was to create a wrench that could tighten or loosen various sized bolts inside a tiny cramped space.  

We quickly came up with a variety of designs that we considered too easy.  The final design had 18 parts.  The whole thing was sketched out on paper, then drafted with Solidworks software.  The parts files were sent to a 3D printer.  Here's how things went.....

The wrench worked by having pulleys driven by a belt.  The hex cutouts matched the bolt head sizes.  A hand crank turned it.  There are two different cranks show below..human error, one was made with the wrong dimensions.

Obviously the metal part was not 3D printed.  In an effort to do things "real world" the design had some outsourced bushings made of Oil Lite brass.  It was my job to machine them to the right size.  And a pesky bit of work that was.

Finished product with belt installed.  A keen observer might note that the pulleys have been redone.  No human error this time, 3D printers just have more variation in final dimensions than you might expect.  The pulleys were done a second time with looser tolerances.

Final product in action.  The functional and entirely impractical Travco 
T-rench ready for mass production.  We are patiently waiting by the phone for that venture capitalist to call and offer to buy us out for millions of dollars.