So What Was the First Brewery in Chippewa Falls???

I gave a talk recently on the breweries of 19th century Chippewa Falls.  Most people around here know Leinenkugels.  A fair number knew there was another early brewery run by a scoundrel named F.X. Schmidmeyer.  But while doing research for the program I was able to finally piece together some pesky bits of information and nail down a date for another early brewery.  Was it the first one?  Hard to say, as the Schmidmeyer brewery has sketchy documentation.  But if you define the question as "what is the first brewery for which there is a solid date?" Well, that date is 1858.

An "old settler" named Thomas McBean had a series of stories of the early days that he published in the local paper around the turn of the century.  In two of them he mentions a brewery built in 1858 by a man variously named Hubert or Herbert Massen or Mannsen.  

Initially constructed as a brewery it was later to become a hotel, The Wisconsin House.  It seems probable that the brewing continued, think of it as an early brew pub for the patrons.  Here's the Wisconsin house as it existed in 1874.  It is marked 18 on this map.

There is a nice convenient hillside where a small beer cave could have been excavated.  Perhaps behind the little building across the street?  Sadly the landscape has been completely altered.

Massen shows up in the 1860 census of Chippewa Falls, being listed as a "Brewer".  He is in fact the only person so listed, so it is likely that the 200 barrels of beer on which tax was paid for that year came from this establishment.  

Hubert died in 1866, his wife also dying soon after.  His 14 year old son August seems to have inherited a stake in the hotel, as the next year this ad was running.  Note that the name Massen has now been anglicized to Mason.

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 August Mason seems to have been a bright lad.  Spending his formative years seeing lumber jacks roll into town to blow their paychecks persuaded him that going off to the cold, lonely woods to make a living was a bad option.  Why not just sell things to the lumber jacks?  He started a company that made work boots.  And Mason Shoe is not only going strong to this very day, it is still doing business along Duncan creek, just a couple hundred yards away!

Here's the site of the Mason brewery in 2024.  The decommissioned Lutheran church occupies essentially the same foot print.  There's probably some really interesting stuff in that back yard!

Although the Mason brewery is the first one I can nail a date to it is probable that the Schmidmeyer brewery did get going on a small scale just a bit earlier.  But records from this era are hard to come by and so I can only surmise.

Walk like an Egyptian....

I'm not a very "musical" person.  My assorted relatives a couple generations down were amazed that I don't own ear buds, don't have a music streaming service...heck, I don't even listen to music when I'm driving.  Meh.

But every now and then a song, or in this case a music video, captures a moment in time and I take a liking to it.  For instance....The Bangles, and Walk like an Egyptian.....

Here's the full video.....it brings back the 80's every time....

1986.  Women mostly had hair like that.  It was a silly era.  So what was the actual story behind this nonsense?

I assumed it was a call back to the famous Steve Martin appearance on Saturday Night Live in 1978.  And I bet there is some indirect influence.  He was very much, and very over the top, dancing like an Egyptian.

But the actual story is odd.  Apparently the song writer, a certain Liam Sterberg, was crossing the English Channel in a ferry during rough seas.  As the boat swayed side to side the passengers had to do a sort of "Egyptian" dance move to stay steady.  I've crossed the Channel back in the days before the hover ferry and the Chunnel.  I can relate.  The first few lines of the song seem to reflect this story when they mention "..if you move too quick...you're falling down like a domino.."

I was new in medical practice and a first time father when Walk Like an Egyptian came out in 1986.  So I probably did not notice it at the time or even know who The Bangles were.  But as they are my age contemporaries its nice to find on a bit of searching that they are all alive and seem to have had mostly successful lives.  

Not all the people appearing in the video did.  Princess Diana would die in a traffic accident 11 years later.  Muammar Quadaffi had a few brushes with mortality before meeting an unfortunate but not undeserved end in 2011.  And the fire fighters of Ladder Company 100, well, some of them would have a date with destiny on September 11th, 2001.  Which makes this image from the end of the video especially poignant.  The Lady who is doing various Egyptian moves has her torch directly above the Twin Towers.