The Hudson Road Brewery, Menomonie WI - Part II

The next owner of the Hudson Road Brewery was Gottlieb Burkhardt.  He was part of an extended family that ran a brewery near Wabasha Minnesota from 1865 onward.  They seem like a rough bunch, one of the Burkhardts was caught tossing phosphorus into the vats of a competing brewery...and got a hefty dose of buckshot for his troubles!

Gottlieb may have been one of the milder members of the tribe.  His 1908 obituary speaks well of him and mentions his service in a Minnesota regiment during the Civil War.

Gottlieb Burkhardt acquired the struggling Hudson Road Brewery circa 1887 ( ?, see footnote below) and moved to Menomonie the year after.  Period photos show a substantial enterprise, no doubt reflecting the major rebuild by Wagner after the 1883 fire.

This photo is again courtesy of the Dunn County Historical Society and is felt to be from 1888.  It is always fun to make presumptive identifications in these old photos.  I know that the guy running the beer delivery wagon in 1888 was named Lars Olson. And I rather suspect that the children on the left side were those of Gottlieb Burkhardt. He had four daughters three of whom were Mary, Pauline and Emma.  Also a son, Louis, who I think is the young man in the center of the photo.

With newspaper articles as the major source of detail you always get an incomplete picture of history, but here's a few tidbits of the Burkhardt years.

- They had regular delivery service running beer from the brewery into town.

- They kept the picnic grounds started by Roleff and Wagner open...and it sounds like a rough place.  I find mention in 1890 of a chap named Louis Jesse being involved in a quarrel at the Hudson Road Brewery and having a finger "chewed off by his antagonist"!

- In 1886 - sort of a grey area in terms of ownership* - there was a newspaper report of "A picnic and dance...near the Hudson Road Brewery last Sunday which is said to have been attended by five-hundred people and where the beer flowed like water."  Interestingly both the chewed off finger incident and the fatal jump off the wagon mentioned in my last posting happened at the picnic grounds and on Sundays.  Hmmmm....

I've studied period maps looking for the location of the picnic grounds and dance hall.  This one from the late 1880's does show a structure on Burkhardt owned land south of the brewery proper.  But it is on the other side of Gilbert creek and there is no road shown.  How did the customers and beer get there?   Not without incident one suspects...

For some reason a fair amount of nonsense has made it into print regards the Burkhardt brewery.  They probably did not brew 10,000 barrels a year (one account put it at 5,000) nor did they make beer with a 12-14% alcohol content although they may have continued the tradition of making a strong Bock in the springtime.  Some later articles claim that G. Burkhardt founded the brewery, while one on-line account has a ridiculous typo claiming that he took over the place in 1806!

The extended Burkhardt family was involved in regional brewing for nearly 50 years but eventually they departed the scene locally.  Gottlieb turned the business over to his son Louis in the late 1890's, then died in 1908.  Louis sold the business in 1912 but remained on the land, devoting his time to farming until his own death from "apoplexy" in 1915.

For the Hudson Road Brewery there would be one more owner.  And one more disaster.
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* Very confusingly this report and suggestion that just maybe a few liquor laws were being violated bore the name of H.H.Brown, who one week later denied that he had said this.  In July of 1887 Brown and two partners bought the "other" brewery in Menomonie at a referee sale after its bankruptcy.  Brewery history is complicated.