Soda Bottling in Chippewa Falls - Part Three, and Some Mysteries

I actually got started on doing the story of the later Soda bottlers of Chippewa Falls when my brother gave me this:

At first glance its nothing special.  Just a wooden box with the company name painted on.  But taking a closer look we see......

There are some painted over letters.  Hard to bring out in a photo, they can more easily be felt.  I think they were originally branded on with a hot stencil as was the usual practice with wooden beer and soda boxes.  That accounts for the slight depression of the lettering, which reads:

ST. PAUL BOTTLING COMPANY

BEVERAGES

ST. PAUL, MINN.

This one lead me on a bit of a chase.  Before I had fully deciphered it I was wondering if it might have come from THIS company.  The time period would fit.  But on closer reading I figured out that this St. Paul Bottling Company was from St. Paul, Virginia!  Nobody would ship a batch of cheap wooden boxes that far.

There was another St. Paul Bottling Company in the far more plausible St. Paul, Minnesota, but my first source put it in the 1880s.  It was probably the bottling branch of one of the big St. Paul breweries back in the day when the law required a bit of corporate separation.  But that's a bit far back for a soda box that presumably was in use in the 1950's give or take a few years.  So it was time for a bit more digging.  And that lead me to this 1898 bit:

This tells a story.  I tend to think of the beer brewing industry as being a place of massive closures and consolidations.  And it was.  From a peak in the 1870s where every town of any consequence had one or more breweries the industry had whittled down to a few dozen survivors during my thirsty college years.  The soda industry had something similar happening, although the same Prohibition in the 1920's and 30's that wiped out any borderline breweries proved a short term life saver to small bottlers.  But eventually, Coke, Pepsi and a few others just took over the soft drink world.  And still dominate it today if you exclude weird new creations like Energy Drinks.

The new St. Paul Bottling Company was going at least into the mid 1920's, but don't know exactly when they went under.  Wooden cases can and do sit piled up in warehouses for decades, so I assume H & H bought these sometime soon after their founding in 1946.  Unless in fact C.E. Kleis had stockpiled them earlier.

With a story like this there will always be things we can't know.  So I'll conclude with another small mystery. 

I'm still wondering why C.E. Kleis would have moved all the way to Chippewa Falls to engage in the soda business.  His dad had been running a very successful one right in Dubuque since the early 1860's.   

Was there some connection between Dubuque Iowa and Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin?

Sometimes you find unlikely clues.

Back in the 1980's I was new to town.  There was a development project going on along the river front.  This was one of the earliest parts of Chippewa Falls, and I was pleased to get permission to do a bit of salvage archaeology on the site before the bulldozers made a hash of it.

One of the many early artifacts we came up with was an 1850's bottle from Dubuque Iowa.  It was from Belcher & Company, one of the earliest soda bottlers in the state of Iowa.  

It seems such an odd coincidence, although coincidence is of course quite likely.  But you don't suppose that maybe, a young C.E. Kleis the senior was working for Belcher in the years before starting his own company?  And maybe came up river to the wilderness of Chippewa Falls circa 1860?  (For reasons even my imagination can't conjure up!).  Chippewa Falls is a pretty town now and was likely even nicer back then.  Nice enough for for Kleis the Elder to recommend that his son C.E. Junior pursue an opportunity to buy out Albert Nunke some forty years later?

(Incidentally, the bottle shown here is quite likely the very example my brother and I dug up.  They are super rare, and we made sure it ended up in the collection of one of our Iowa friends).