Forgotten Brewery Caves - Thiensville Wisconsin

Eastern Wisconsin had so many 19th century breweries that they don't always get much mention in local histories.  On the outskirts of a little community called Thiensville there is a picturesque brewery ruin.  It has been "enhanced" a bit by the owners...note the faux battlements on the upper right corner.  There is also a creative re-working of old foundations and new elements into a water feature down below.  I rather like the effect.

Sharp eyed Brewery Cave fans of course will have spotted the entrance in the picture above.  It is one of those that is actually built right underneath the brewery instead of the more typical location along one side.

The owner was OK with us taking a look but asked that we not go inside.  She's right, this is another of those caves that is starting to lose structural integrity.

Collapse along the left wall, a sealed off former doorway into something on the far end.  There also seemed to be a well right in the middle of things.

This is the ruin of the J. Harz Brewery, said to be in business between 1870 and 1880. The remaining structure has been altered a lot so I'm just guessing here, but I suspect the bricked off doorway visible here went to a second chamber of the cave and/or into the cellar of the brewery.  The structure above the cave proper may well have been an ice house.

Private property site.  Quite visible from the road. Let that suffice.

Time Capsule - Black Bag

I'm retired now but I suppose I can still say I am a second generation physician.  My dad practiced for 40 some years.  I did likewise for about 35.  

I remember that my father had an old black medical bag.  Probably it is still around somewhere.  It was an obsolete thing even then, mostly useful for house calls which have become a dimly remembered tradition.  The bag was full of odds and ends, it seemed to be a place where out dated pharmaceuticals and bandages just endured.

Here's today's "Time Capsule".

This was my "black doctor's bag".  I remember getting it early in med school and that it was a gift from a pharmaceutical company back when such gestures were more about appreciation than about trying to bribe you into prescribing their stuff.

It served a function.  When on clinical rounds you needed a place to stow things. We were expected to do painstaking physical exams that included checking all sensory functions.  I remember that this bag once held both a tuning fork and a tiny vial of a strong peppermint stuff, the latter for testing sense of smell.  The bag smelled like peppermint for years afterwards.

Perhaps the secondary function of the bag was to make young, inexperienced students look just a bit more official.

My research into this artifact started with a look at the underside.

The bag was a gift from the Upjohn Pharmaceutical company, and was actually a bit of homage to one of their long standing traditions.  Full details HERE  but in short, Upjohn sales reps carried alligator skin bags as their trademark beginning in the 1880s.  A similar bag, now made of cowhide, was given free to medical students.  What I have read suggests it was at graduation, but I am quite sure I had this during my second year clinical rotations.  

That would have been circa 1983, so I think I just caught the end of the free bag tradition.  Upjohn disappeared in 1995 by way of a merger. Probably the give aways stopped before that date, the practice of drug company freebies was already starting to be questioned when I was still in training.

And of course, even a newer doctor's bag can act as a magnet for old stuff.  Rummaging around in the pockets I came across this:

26 year old tablets of Cipro.  Now entirely inert and useless, they went into the trash.

The Groundhog Winter

In the classic movie Groundhog Day Bill Murray wakes up again and again to the same day, one which features a blizzard that makes escape impossible.

We've been feeling a bit like that lately, with February recently having been declared the snowiest month "ever".  

Another day - or is it the same day? - waking up to more snow.

The arbor vitae tree in the front yard has finally given up hope and has just laid down to die.

By the way, the blue flag seen in the distance is a golf flag.  Our neighbor keeps a little putting green there.  Now it seems like a cruel taunt.

Will spring ever come?  Will we soon enjoy side yard cocktail hour on the picnic table?

The picnic table today.

Forgotten Brewery Caves - The Addison House

Most of the information on this site comes from an odd source....a geocaching page! The individual who posted it had the advantage of chatting with the property owner. When I stopped by they were not at home.

I think the information is a bit of a jumble so I won't comment at length.  But the property now known as The Addison House clearly was an early tavern/inn with its own brewery.  The cave looks consistent with others in the area that date from the mid 1850's to circa 1880.  The mention of three linked chambers was quite intriguing, enough so that I chanced a stroll up to the entrance and a peek inside...

This is the first chamber and sadly you can see that the ones that lay beyond have caved in.  Or have they been filled in?

It is axiomatic that you never find artifacts in brewery caves.  They were for clean storage, not for trash.  But the fill cascading down from this doorway contained a fair number of circa 1920 bottles.  I figure the back two rooms caved in - you'll note how close to the surface this cave is - and made a sink hole.  This was then filled in with material from somewhere that had a moderate amount of trash mixed in.

It is always sad when you find a cave that is in the process of vanishing. And the caves for small breweries in areas that did not have good rock structure to excavate just were not built to last forever.

Here's a picture of the Addison House up above the cave site.

It appears to still be in service as a Bed and Breakfast.

Here's a 19th century map showing the Brewery and Saloon.  Notice that this was once a crossroads and a place of at least local consequence.  Now it is just a bend in the road with the intersection of Highways 175 and 33 eliminating the Western and Southern legs of the crossroads.

Bag and Tag 2019 - The Final Deadline

For the four years our FIRST Robotics team has been around there has always been a challenging deadline to Build Season.  Six weeks and two days from Kickoff comes "Bag and Tag", the moment at which your competition robot has to be sealed up and on a no touch it status until competition.

Next year Bag and Tag has been eliminated, you just keep building up to competition day.

There are points both ways.  This year when we lost most of Week Four due to weather, and then lost half of the team in Week Six due to a Music Department trip, the new rules would have really helped us out.  Oh well.

We had some of our recently returned musical travelers - very tired of course - back on hand but Bag and Tag was a subdued event this year.  We are planning on having an open house and a bit more celebration of the season in the near future.

One quirk of Bag and Tag is that you can keep up to 30 pounds of mechanisms out for improvement and add them back in at competition.  What to keep out is a dangerous decision.  You must get everything back on and working in a few hours to get practice matches the day before real competition begins.  We've been burned in the past by finding this process to be far more difficult than it was expected to be.

I don't know how this all ends up.  Will this ridiculously complicated robot astonish the competitive field in five weeks through its competence or through its Goldbergian excesses?

We won't know for a while but after a few days to catch our breath and let the rest of the team make it back to town we will configure our practice drive base into the full competition version and start driving and coding frantically.

The home stretch as it played out.

T-minus 48 hours:

We are now devoting as much or more attention to the "B-machine".  We have to bag the competition machine but have made a near identical clone with which we can continue software development and programming.  Of course the manipulator arm and control box need to be transplanted, but here we have Beta getting ready for action.

T-minus 24 hours:

Both robots are getting their loose wires swaddled in flexible cable covers to reduce the chances of being jostled and grabbed.

Another late innovation:  We want to be able to pick up balls on the fly.  Our robot has a cut out in the front where our vacuum manipulator rests.  Well, why not put a ball catcher in there?  At slow speeds you can corral the ball and bring the vacuum cup down while still moving!  Both A and B machines now have this on board.  Sometimes the one ounce, simple features do more for you than the complicated, heavy parts.

Zero Hour:  A busy night, lots of fussy little details to attend to.  I only took a few pictures and they were unremarkable.  Everyone was tired.  The robot went into its plastic cocoon to the music of Monty Python's "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" played on somebody's phone.

I understand there is another blizzard coming in the morning.  With the team now taking a few much deserved days off I say, bring it on.  The weather can't do much more to us at this point....

FIRST Robotics 2019 - Down to the Wire in Week Six

So many things to get done, so little time left to do them.  We lost Tuesday practice to yet another blizzard.  Fortunately we got Monday and Thursday in, albeit with a reduced work force.  And a long session Friday to get ready for our weekend practice scrimmage.  A few pictures of the week before we move on to the robot's first real outing.

We seem to be big on making really solid parts.  Laser cut, welded, bolted down.  This is a mount for a delicate range finding device that we have not put on yet.

A couple of ambitious things have been evolving in these late days.  The suction cup for ball retrieval has to date been a simple and entirely functional plastic dog bowl from Wal Mart.  Well, one of the kids just had to precision machine a version out of solid aluminum.  I present, a dog bowl made to 1/1000th of an inch precision.  Why?  I ask the team that all the time..."why....just....why?"

We had a scrimmage on Saturday.  It was as always, very interesting.  Many other teams have struggled as we have with weather.  Judging by the numbers of no - shows as the pits opened, I'd say many have struggled harder than team 5826.

Of the teams that showed up - as opposed to staying home for a day of frantic building - we were among the better prepared.  Mechanically our machine appears rock solid.  We did have some software issues and have more than a few final tweaks still ahead, but the robot performed well.

In fact, there were so many robots unable to answer the bell that we got into the habit of bringing extra batteries along and often did back to back matches.  The guy in charge of the queue line got to know the kids well...they were always rolling the robot up and asking "Can we just jump back in?"

A day of solid pay off for a season of hard work.  More hard work of course still ahead.

Forgotten Brewery Caves - Saxonia House

Today's "Forgotten Brewery Cave" is from Fredonia Wisconsin.  This is in the south east part of the state where small breweries abounded.

It is in a hill side behind the Saxonia House, a surviving 1850's building that was Inn, residence and brewery.  Since this is an area with no natural rock formations it is of the "tunnel and vault" variety.  It takes up a fair part of this low lying hill.

It is a substantial structure.  Here is the ante chamber, two storage rooms lie beyond.

Prior to going in I walked over the top.  There I noticed some interesting vent holes that I'd soon be seeing from the other side.  These vaulted structures were more likely to have small square or rectangle vents along the sides of the vault, although as it happens, Saxonia has the more common round, mid ceiling vents as well.  Interestingly these were made not from metal or pottery as would be usual, but from carefully hollowed out logs!

The cave is fairly standard stuff in most respects.  In the back there is what looks like an archway with this area of cave in/dig out.  There does not appear to be an additional chamber beyond, the soil dug out here - apparently by an animal - is clean sand.  I have run into blank archways a few times before.  Maybe they were for planned additions.  On a few occasions I have seen evidence that the were a niche for machinery.

Here is the Saxonia House in a vintage photo.  The brewery is the extension on the right.  It seems to have collapsed about 25 years ago.

The rest of the structure is hanging in there.  Under the caked on layers of more recent work it is a "Fachwerk" or half timbered structure very typical of buildings in Germany.

The site is being slowly renovated by a local volunteer group.  More information on the history of the Saxonia House, and a contact email can be found HERE.