Hudson Road Brewery - The Promised Part Four !

We left the Hudson Road Brewery story a while back*, with me wondering exactly what I'd see walking the site.  With the return of balmy weather and some relaxation of Covid Panic I got the chance.  You'd be amazed how much you can learn by chatting with an 87 year old local farmer.....and from walking the site with the current owner of the brewery land.

Because the maps were rather deceiving I suppose it would be best to start there.  The earliest view is from 1877, but it's blurry and unhelpful.  But an atlas from 1888 shows this alignment.

It looks straightforward.  Main brewery building aligned North-South, road to the North and East of it.  This of course is called  "Brewery Road" on old maps.   But take a look at the Sanborn Fire Insurance map of 1910....

Because this is a bit low res, here's a link where you can zoom in and read the labels on each of the outbuildings and areas of the main brewery.  Pink on these maps indicates brick construction....remember the 300,000 bricks used for that rebuild in 1883?  Of interest is the directional arrow....the brewery is clearly oriented more East-West than North-South, and there is a road that makes a dog leg turn and runs on the South side of the brewery.  Now, correlate this with yet another photo courtesy of the Dunn County Historical society...said to be circa 1902.

This one is helpful because it was taken from a little further back, and it sure does show that road running to the south of the brewery.  Gilbert creek is just off to the left in this picture.  Note that the elevation of land behind the brewery is only 20 feet or so.  Recall that the account of the 1874 fire said that the earlier version of this brewery was at the foot of a bluff.  Creative embellishment?  Or was the 1860s - 1874 version of the Hudson Road Brewery somewhere else?  Now for a bit of fun let's try to overlay what is seen in this image onto the current Google Earth map.  I've put the brewery buildings on in blue and the historic road in red.  The blue star below appears to be the vantage point of the 1902 photo.  The red star, now a horse pasture, is where Old Timers say the picnic grounds was located.  Right next to the brewery, so that makes sense.

The course of Gilbert creek has likely changed a bit over the years.  And there are some newer structures that have been built on or near the site of the main building.  Here's some modern pictures.

The red brick structure seen here is a smokehouse, probably built after the last brewery building was demolished.  A scattering of bricks newer and older.  And there were two water pipes sticking out of the hillside.  This is about where the Wash Room for the brewery was.  Possibly original pipes that nobody ever bothered to remove?

   
Old bricks everywhere.  And yes, I did take one home as a souvenir. 

And finally, the picnic area.  Once filled with rowdy drinkers, now a pasture for some nice horses.  Of the reported dance hall I can see no current trace.

This would seem to wrap up the story of the Hudson Road Brewery.  At least in the sense that I don't think we'll learn much more about it.  But some parting thoughts.

1. This is hardly an ideal site for a brewery.  It's not that far from the creek and must have flooded periodically.  

2. I still suspect that the earlier versions of the brewery might have been elsewhere.  On higher ground for instance.

3. The locals actually had a recollection - passed down now for over a century - regards the question of a storage cave.  Somebody long departed who was related to the Burkhardt/Niedermeyer clan thought that Hudson Road shared cave space with the other brewery about two miles away.  This seems odd but I have seen precedent once before in Hastings Minnesota.  Perhaps the hauling of kegs back and forth was going on anyway as their main customers were in town.

4. The "dog leg" road was still in use in fairly recent times.  You can actually see a line of bricks that marks its course going down the hill.  

5. In the pasture, former picnic grounds, there are a couple of probable building "shadows".  Of course these could be of any era but one is in about the correct place for the curious L-shaped building on the 1910 view.  Here, have a little fun playing with the image zooming in and out.  Look for rectangle shapes in the grass, they pretty much always man made.

https://www.google.com/maps/@44.8878271,-91.9730708,50m/data=!3m1!1e3

Don't be distracted by the circular pen, that's new.  But on the edge of the tree line there are the ruins of what the owner calls a "silo" that is about the correct location for the 1910 water reservoir.  Note the vague circle to the left (west) of the modern horse pen.

Final thought.  Is there a chance that the complex building shadows in the pasture actually are the earlier (1860's to 1874) brewery?  A tempting theory, but there is the pesky matter of the report mentioning the "foot of the bluff".  Newspapers of any era are fallible and as unlikely as it seems for a 19th century journalist to not to know where to get a drink it is possible that this was just an inaccurate report.
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If you are coming in late, the earlier installments of the Hudson Road Brewery story:

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Oh and if you are a real glutton for puzzlement here's something on the enigma of that "other" brewery and its cave in Menomonie.