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....