A Pottery Beer from Chippewa Falls Wisconsin?

Obviously I'm in Archaeology Withdrawal of late.  I know it's not pretty but I make no apologies.  Two years of non digging, (shudder).  It has at least gotten me back to thinking about and researching local history a bit more.  In an earlier time I'd have been out excavating 19th century sites as soon as the ground thawed.  

I've not done much of that in recent years.  The prime sites have mostly been dug up years ago, and while there are still many interesting things in the ground they are generally only going to turn up with construction.  And between a decline in down town development and a remarkable increase in liability concerns, those opportunities are rare.  But I'm OK with this.  I'm not into acquiring "stuff", and sometimes it's more fun to deal in speculation than in reality.  Which brings me to the question of the day.  Is there a pottery beer from Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin?

Pottery beers are delightful artifacts.  They are usually from the 1860's and 70's.  Breweries were smaller then and almost all their product was sold in kegs.  But there was a niche market for bottled beer.  Maybe for home use, although any proper German household would buy in the form of small kegs.  But perhaps you'd want to go on a picnic or something.  There is also the question of when "beer is beer", but I'll get to that presently.

To get your appetites going, here are some pottery beers from elsewhere in Wisconsin.  Varied in color, shape and size, they reflect an era when local potters turned out by hand these containers that for a while were economically competitive with glass bottles.

I'll preface by admitting that nobody has ever found a pottery beer marked from Chippewa Falls. And while dumps and trash pits of this era have not been excavated often here it has happened.  One point against the existence of a pottery beer is this lack of even a shard.  But this is not about what is known to exist, but what might.

So...there were three breweries in town during the appropriate era.  I think we can discount the short lived Union Brewery, they barely got into operation at all.  That leaves Leinenkugel's and Schmidmeyer.  And we can assume that they both bottled in the appropriate time period.  From the Chippewa Weekly Herald of 29 June, 1877:

I don't take everything I read in the local paper to be Gospel Truth, there was often a bit of civic boosterism that went beyond optimism and out into fantasy.  But this sounds straightforward and I think describes real events.  But was the beer put into pottery containers?

For the Schmidtmeyer brewery I've actually seen a pretty complete inventory from 1876.  It mentions no bottles but does describe everything else in such detail that I think they'd make the list.  So evidently our old pal Francis X. put in a small bottling enterprise later, in fact very close to the end of his venture.   The bottles could have been either glass or pottery.  If the latter they might have been marked so as to differentiate them from his competitor.  I'd speculate an FXS marking.  Of course Schmidtmeyer was not a very good businessman so might have gone with cheap generics that were less likely to be returned.  

The Leinenkugel's brewery was probably not called that in this era.  There were a number of breweries owned by this extended family, so I expect it would be referred to as the Spring Brewery.  Or less conveniently Leinenkugel and Miller's.  By 1881 they were running this ad:

Pottery bottles are fairly heavy.  A box of 36 pint bottles full of beer would be quite unwieldy.  And recall that Leinies is unusually still a going concern.  I would think that a curious pottery bottle would have been rummaged up out of some obscure basement long ago if it actually existed.  No, having put in a dedicated bottling line in 1880 they would have been using generic glass bottles with paper labels.  If pottery vessels were used in the '70's they must be very rare indeed.

The same edition of the paper gives us a third possible candidate for a pottery beer.  As it turns out many pottery beer bottles held not the traditional lager but something a bit tamer.  Lemon beer, birch beer, root beer, etc.  Actually the pottery bottles would not be ideal for lager, which needs to be contained longer and usually has higher pressures than a simple cork system could handle.  So this bit is intriguing...

1881 is getting a bit late for pottery beer bottles, although it is mentioned that he was restarting an earlier business.  It sounds as if it was seasonal.

William Faeh is one of those figures in local history who was well known enough that nobody felt much need to talk about him.  What I've run across is mostly bad luck, and the local paper is quite sympathetic to him.  His wife "an old resident" died in July of 1881 just a few months after the above ad was run.  Unless I'm being fooled by a "Junior" scenario he then married a much younger woman named Bertha who was described as being "of bad character" and an opium user.  They divorced in 1889.  Soon afterwards William Faeh removed to the Old Soldier's Home in Minnesota and vanishes from the scene.

I'd actually put the odds of a marked Lemon Beer from Faeh as being moderate.  Pottery vessels were the traditional type used for this and given the likely low volume of his trade there would not be many out there.

Anybody have pottery beers from this general area marked WF, FXS, L&M?