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.