My efforts to help The Homesteaders build this summer has taken me through Augusta Wisconsin on a regular basis. It's a pretty old community for a place that was not on early water transportation routes. Among the bits of history that I have rattling around in my head is this: there was an early brewery there. But nobody seems to know much about it. Time for some detective work.
Doug Hoverson's magnum opus "The Drink that Made Wisconsin Famous" gives a few basics.
The brewery was known as Kaspar Neher and Co., and was in business roughly from 1870 - 1878. It first shows up in government records in 1870, when they produced a paltry 100 barrels of beer. They never seem to have topped 180 barrels. So it was a small time operation.
Various other names are associated with the venture. In 1870 Neher and "his neighbor Nicholas Mergener" were listed as the proprietors. Later a Jacob Haskett was involved. I also found one mention of an "R. Wegener" being involved. This is probably the same name as Mergener, but neither has been easy to locate. In any event the brewery fell on hard times and in 1876 was reported as being mortgaged. An article in an Eau Claire paper from 1878 indicates it was by then out of business.
Neher went on to have a stake in the F.X. Schmidmeyer brewery in Chippewa Falls, yet another twist in that very complex ownership story......
Only a few other facts are certain. There is, or was, a Brewery Hill in Augusta. That would seem a near certain location for the enterprise. As to location of this, well, its hard to say. A history of early Augusta mentions that one of the first homes in the community was built by Erastus Bills and his son S.E. Bills, near "..what is now known as Brewery Hill." They would have been there circa 1857, long before the brewery. The article mentioning this was from 1906, so the name Brewery Hill persisted quite a while before being lost.
So where was this mysterious brewery? In general early breweries would be located along a creek or near a nice spring. A hill side is almost a necessity, as a lagering cave would be needed. You also needed road access to bring in grain and to haul out heavy barrels. And if possible, set up shop just outside the city limits so you could sell a little beer outside of city ordinance saloon hours.
We have our work cut out for us on this one. Warning...between assorted German spellings, transcription and OCR glitches, it will be heavy lifting.
There is an 1878 map of Eau Claire County that shows the Augusta area in considerable detail. Starting with the known names I did find a couple of places of interest. Like this one:
Lets call this site one. Just west of town. We have E.S. Bills owning property along a creek. A J.M. Hackett is next door. Not Haskett but close. But there is a problem.....I can't see a hill anywhere near. Sometimes hills do go away when railroads barge through.
Further out east of town a ways there are two more properties owned by various someones named Bills. We have a J. Bills, and an Ira Bills. no doubt relatives. Could one of them be on the "old homestead"? There was after all a 20 year gap in time between the original settlement and this map. And just a bit further down the road there is a gently rising hill and this....
Property owned by someone named Meher. A typo for Neher? Lets call this site two.
Finally, south of town but not on a creek or near any apparent hill, is another lot labeled E.S. Bills. It is an open field now, not much chance of surviving brewery remains anywhere near. I'm going to rule this one out. It just looks like second tier real estate, and as the main significance of the Bills homestead is proximity to a hill it does not look promising.
A bit more digging came up with the following. The Neher involved was actually named Melchior Kasper Neher. He was born in Germany in 1838. His father Johannes, or John, emigrated to Eau Claire in 1862 and ran a distillery starting in 1864. When it burned down Melchior started his new venture, a brewery on the north side. He sold this to a man named Hunner in 1868. I suspect he moved to Augusta about this time.
This should make the second potential site, that with a J. Meher property, the likely location of the Augusta brewery. Johannes Neher Senior was dead by then, but Melchior had brothers named Johannes Jr., Joseph and John! Any would make sense to hold the property title in this fiscally unstable enterprise. And there is something of a hill on the site, but no creek. Here's a look out across the fields towards the Neher/Meher property:
Not much to see. That little tuft of scrubby stuff in the middle probably used to be "something", but more than likely just an old windmill or some such. A bit closer in but still on what I'm starting to think of as Brewery Hill there is this:
Nice, and just the sort of structure you'd expect for an 1870's small brewery, but I'd put this on the "J.F. Hall" property and suspect it means little beyond that there was habitation on the hill, such as it is, at the right time. By the way, Augusta has a large Amish community who still build in old fashioned configurations. I saw several area structures that "look" 1870's but were probably less than 20 years old.
Ah, but regular students of brewery history will ask "where's the cave?". Years ago I read, in a source I can no longer locate, that there was a brick structure along the creek in "downtown" Augusta that had once been used for beer storage. My brief search then was not productive. But going back a second time I had more information to work with. Firstly, that this made sense. You need to store lager for months in a cool, protected space. Ideally a hard rock cave going way back into a hill. No such geology is present within a few miles of Augusta. You could cheat a bit and use ice in a less ideal cave, but getting enough of that would be difficult at any of the three sites I considered for the brewery. On the other hand.....
If you go back to the first map you can see that Bridge Creek was once dammed up, leaving a nice mill pond upstream. The supposed cave site was just downstream from that, where Stone Street crosses the creek. So I went back for another look. There is "something" there.
A roughly arch shaped structure. The front wall looks pretty well made.
Maybe the cave for the elusive Augusta brewery. I'd be a bit happier with the ID if the flat ground behind this structure showed any evidence of vent holes or a cave in. Still, I'd say the odds of this being a very well filled in 1870's brewery cave are better than even.
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Addendum: Melchior Kaspar Neher moved on after his time in Augusta. In 1876 he took over the struggling F.X. Schmidmeyer brewery in Chippewa Falls in partnership with a man named Huber. Although production was increased the venture was not a success and it went under by the end of 1879. He next turns up in Crete Nebraska as a participant and later owner of the Western Brewery in that town. He also ran a billiards hall, a restaurant, and had a sort of picnic and party area out of town called Neher's Grove. From the available records it sounds as if his involvement in Crete began in 1875. How was he involved in three different breweries at the same time? His final venture in Nebraska seems to have done reasonably well. But through the 1880's he was in declining health, eventually moving to Albuquerque New Mexico where one of his sons ran "Neher's Opera House". He died there in August of 1890.
And no, I can't explain the difference between obituary in the newspaper and date marked on the tombstone. The latter would seem more likely to be in error. Melchior was an enigma to the very end.
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