If you think of the American frontier of the mid 19th century as a hard drinking place awash in whiskey you would not be far off. Barring of course a few places where curious "dry" sentiments held sway among the devout and dry throated.
But the economy of the whiskey seller left few traces. Early saloons were usually cheaply built. Barrels got broken up, and most of the glass bottles were generic. Beer left a few more traces, in the form of solid brick brewery buildings and an array of glass and pottery bottles marked with their origins. But these usually came later.
The first businesses to fairly consistently put their names on beverage bottles tended to be soda pop makers. It was a necessity of course. Unlike brewers whose main product has always been delivered in kegs, soda pop came in individual bottles which were a significant capital expense. They needed them back for re-use.
As I meander here and there through local history sometimes I find incomplete little tales that still lack a final chapter. So today I present the story of the first soda pop manufacturer in Chippewa Falls Wisconsin. Somebody just needs to find a bottle somewhere with their name on it.
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The first clue in this story was a modest newspaper ad from 1868. It pretty much just gave the name: "Schofield, Garon & Hebert soda bottlers Chippewa Falls".
Newspapers from that era grudgingly dole out a few more scraps.
April 18, 1868
"Hebert, Caron and Schofield are making preparations for the manufacture of mineral water on a quite extensive scale. Their works are near Church Street under the bluff."
May 2nd, 1868.
"The machinery for Schofield, Garon & Hebert's Mineral Water works came to hand this week - they will be ready to commence operations about Monday next".
September 26th, 1868
"Hebert and Caron dissolve partnership. Caron will continue at the same location".
Finding out anything more has been tough sledding. The earliest map of town shows no buildings where the bottling plant was supposed to stand. A photo of roughly the same vintage hints at a small frame building.
And as to the three men behind the enterprise...
Schofield may have been an out of town investor. Nobody fitting the description was living in town in the late 1860s although nearby Eau Claire did have a guy by that name.
Garon was a saloon keeper. Variously his first name is given as Michael or Mitchell, with the latter seeming to be correct. His billiard hall and saloon was on Bridge Street, then as now the main avenue of town. He is running newspaper ads in the late 1860s and still appears in the 1875 census. With the first name confusion it is hard to be entirely sure but he was probably born in 1826 and emigrated in 1851.
Hebert is the most interesting of the three. Moses Hebert or "Old Moses" as he appears to have been called, was another saloon owner.
The location of his establishment is a little hard to pin down. I find one reference to it being on Central Street and another, from 1875, that relates that "The Summer Garden building of Mr. M. Hebert in LaRose's addition was destroyed by arson. Building and stock insured for $1,300." Central Street was probably where he rebuilt after the fire. It is mentioned that above the door of this bar was a sign that said:
"Old Mose. Live and Let Live."
There is a subtle difference in contemporary articles, between soda water and mineral water. Although the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, the latter was usually a bottled product. The former seems to have been served from a tap, in the fashion of later drug store soda fountains. I found multiple advertisements from saloons of the late 1860's with phrases like "Ice Cream and Soda Water to be had in their season".
Moses Hebert had a stroke in August of 1875 but survived, only to drown in shallow water when trying to launch a fishing boat in 1878. It is mentioned a short while later that he had to be reburied out of the Catholic Cemetery.
If I had to guess I would discard the theory that Moses indicated a Jewish heritage. Heberts are still fairly common in these parts and most I know are Catholic. More likely somebody checked his paperwork and found out that he had been married too often or too concurrently. Did too many grieving widows show up at the service?
Here's the location of the "Mineral Water works" in the fall of 2017. You can see the church up above, the bluff below. There are no structures left and even the streets that once were down below have been erased.
Standing at the base of the bluff you find a few discarded containers, but much newer and more likely to have contained beans than beverage.
Of course what one should find here would be a field of broken bottles, perhaps stamped with the designation SGH. But there is nothing to be seen.
Probably the enterprise was small scale. 5,000 objects are not likely to be lost to history entirely. 500 might be, especially if a bankrupt firm had them all stacked in boxes and they went to the dump together.
Even generic bottles of the proper age and construction are very rarely encountered in excavations intentional or serendipitous.
Were these bottles in fact embossed with the names of the proprietors? For this to make any sense there would have to be a competing company, somebody to get the stock confused with. And in Eau Claire - about 15 miles away - there was a soda water manufacturer who got started a year or two earlier. Maybe this was too far away to be a concern in 1868. Chippewa Falls and Eau Claire were several hours wagon ride apart then, now they blur together and there is a speedy road that will get you from one to the other in ten minutes.
There is a somewhat later connection between the Eau Claire bottler and the man who started the second(?) and more successful soda bottling plant in Chippewa Falls. It's a good story, one with Indian uprisings real and imagined, but it must wait for another day to be told.
