Minnesota doesn’t typically come to mind when you think about slavery and the Civil War. It’s also not a place that’s figured into the national imagination when it comes to Black activism, either—at least, not until recently. However, as part of the series on “Black Life in Two Pandemics,” this post draws on several events in Minnesota’s history to help us understand the connections between the historic and the current experiences of Black and Native people in the Midwest. And yes, you’d expect a historian to claim that this history matters, but it’s crucial that we understand why it’s important. These encounters matter because they demonstrate the long history of Black and Native people in what’s now the state of Minnesota, and these encounters underscore and explain critical moments in the nation’s history.
There are a number of events I could have included here, such as the establishment of 16 American Indian boarding schools across the state in the late 1800s and early 1900s, or the 1920 lynchings of three Black circus workers in Duluth in the wake of what’s come to be called the “Red Summer.” I could have explained how National Guard troops were deployed in Minneapolis in 1967 when racial tensions in the city led to protests and demonstrations, or how American Indians in Minneapolis formed the American Indian Movement in 1968 to protest police brutality. Instead, I’ve chosen to center this essay around Fort Snelling, particularly in terms of its construction as a military outpost, the experiences of enslaved people at the fort, its role in the wake of the 1862 U.S.-Dakota War, and its use as a headquarters for buffalo soldiers. Fort Snelling stands as a symbol of expansion and exploitation, but it also underscores the intertwined histories of Black and Native people in what’s now Minnesota. The history of the fort is one of white supremacy that shapes both Minnesota and national law and history, and it helps us understand the interconnected histories of racist violence, especially during this dual pandemic of police violence and COVID-19.
The Louisiana Purchase, signed a year after George Bonga’s birth, included Native lands. In 1805 U.S. Army Lieutenant Zebulon Pike set out to find places to build military posts. Pike encouraged Native leaders to sign the Treaty of St. Peters, also known as “Pike’s Purchase.” The treaty allowed the United States to build military posts and promised that the Dakota could use the land as they always had. Pike also promised to pay the Dakota for their land, but he left the amount blank. According to historian Roy Meyers, the Dakota received “$200 worth of presents” on the spot, and the Senate filled it in when they ratified the treaty.
Construction on the fort began in 1820. The U.S. government had several reasons for wanting to build a fort near Bdote. According to historian Peter DeCarlo, the United States wanted to keep the British out, profit off the resources in the region, and stay on top of the fur trade. The government also wanted to try to keep the peace between the Dakota and their Ojibwe neighbors in order to draw more Euro-American settlers to the region. Military officers, government officials, and fur traders were among those who would spend part of their lives at Fort Snelling. However, these men forcibly brought other people to the fort. The experiences of enslaved people at Fort Snelling intersected with both the growing Euro-American population and the Native peoples who found themselves on the edges of their own lands.
While the Civil War wouldn’t start until 1861, several pieces of legislation brought arguments over slavery home to Fort Snelling. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance outlawed slavery in the Northwest Territory, and the Missouri Compromise of 1820 also banned slavery in the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36°30’ parallel. However, officers in the U.S. Army were among those who illegally brought enslaved people to Fort Snelling. Lawrence Taliaferro, who served as the Indian Agent at the fort from 1820 to 1839, was the biggest local slaveholder in the region. He also imported enslaved people from Virginia to hire them out or sell them. According to historian Walt Bachman, the only thing Taliaferro lacked was an auction block. Colonel Josiah Snelling, the fort’s namesake who oversaw its construction, also owned enslaved people.
While the names of many enslaved people who were brought to Fort Snelling were never written down, enslaved people at the fort resisted their condition in numerous ways, including four who sued for their freedom. Elias T. Langham, the subagent at the Indian Agency, bought a woman named Rachel in 1830 for Lieutenant Thomas Stockton. Rachel was enslaved at Fort Snelling and at Fort Crawford in what would become Wisconsin. Rachel sued for her freedom in Missouri, and the state Supreme Court ruled in her favor in 1836. Fur trader Alexis Bailly bought an enslaved woman named Courtney in 1831. Her son, Joseph Godfrey, is the only person who is known to have grown up as an enslaved person in what is now Minnesota. Courtney also sued for her freedom, and she was freed after the decision in Rachel’s case.
Two others would become famous for their resistance to enslavement. While it is not clear if Lawrence Taliaferro bought or inherited an enslaved woman named Harriet Robinson, he brought her to Fort Snelling around 1835. Dr. John Emerson, a U.S. Army surgeon, came to Fort Snelling the following year and brought with him an enslaved man named Dred Scott. Scott and Robinson were married in either 1836 or 1837, and Taliaferro either gave or sold Robinson to Emerson. Emerson took the Scotts to St. Louis in the early 1840s, and they sued for their freedom in Missouri in 1846 and 1847. Their case eventually made it to the Supreme Court. In the 1857 decision in Scott v. Sandford, Chief Justice Roger B. Taney argued that enslaved people were not included—and were not intended to be included—under the word “citizens” in the Constitution. Instead, he wrote, they were “considered as a subordinate and inferior class of beings…[who] had no rights or privileges but such as those who held the power and the government might choose to grant them.” Taney also compared enslaved people to American Indians, arguing that the situation of enslaved people was “altogether unlike that of the Indian race.” Even though Native nations “were uncivilized, they were yet a free and independent people…governed by their own laws.” Taney’s decision would have a lasting effect on American history—and particularly on Black and Native history.
Fort Snelling was temporarily decommissioned in 1858, the same year Minnesota became a state. The Civil War started in 1861, four years after the Dred Scott decision, and the government brought Fort Snelling back into service that same year to train newly recruited soldiers for the Union. In 1862 war broke out in Minnesota. Known as the U.S.-Dakota War, the four-month conflict was, in short, the result of treaty violations by the federal government and the negligence of Indian agents. We tend to think of the Indian Wars as something confined to the American West, but the U.S.-Dakota War highlights the mid-1800s contestations over lands and resources. The Dakota, like other Native nations across the country, had been interacting with Europeans and Euro-Americans for centuries. They had tried different strategies of cooperation, negotiation, and outright resistance to government interference, military operations, religious imposition, and growing settlement. When that didn’t work, some argued that they should go to war.
It’s important to recognize that what happened in Minnesota did not just occur spontaneously. Decades of ever-increasing settlement by Europeans and Euro-Americans led to continued conflicts with Native people in the state. The Ojibwe and the Dakota were forced to sign treaties (most notably in 1837 and 1851) that ceded hundreds of thousands of acres of their lands. Missionaries and the federal government also worked to assimilate American Indians. They wanted Native nations to give up their languages, their cultures, their religions, their political systems, and their ways of life in order to become what non-Natives considered “civilized.” The push for assimilation also divided Native communities: some believed that assimilation was the best thing to do, others wanted to continue living their traditional ways, and still more Dakota tried to incorporate some new practices into their traditional systems.
The treaties the federal government signed with Native nations like the Dakota promised payments, goods, and resources (usually called annuities) in exchange for their lands. In the midst of the Civil War, though, keeping their treaty obligations wasn’t high on the government’s list of priorities. Treaties between the federal government and the Dakota had outlined how the government would provide food and goods for the Dakota in order to stop the Dakota from continuing their traditional hunting and gathering practices. When the government stopped providing these resources, it meant that many Dakota were hungry. They couldn’t hunt or harvest like before, and there weren’t enough resources to go around. If they were able to get any provisions, the food was often spoiled or unfit for consumption. By the summer of 1862, with no annuities in sight and traders unwilling to extend credit, the Dakota had nowhere to go and no one to turn to. Trader Andrew Myrick told the Dakota that, if they were hungry, they could “eat grass.” In August 1862, a group of young Dakota men skirmished with some settlers near Acton, killing five of them. The Dakota leader, Taoyateduta (also known as Little Crow), reluctantly agreed with the faction of the Dakota who argued for continuing the attacks in hopes of driving out the settlers. “We have waited a long time,” Taoyateduta told Indian agent Thomas J. Galbraith. “The money is ours, but we cannot get it. We have no food, but here are these stores, filled with food. …When men are hungry they help themselves.”
The fighting raged through southern Minnesota for several months, and there were many divisions among the Dakota as the war continued. When the fighting ended, some Dakota moved north and west to escape the army. Many Dakota who had not taken part in the fighting met General Sibley at a place that came to be known as Camp Release, and Sibley took all the Dakota into military custody. A military commission sentenced more than 300 Dakota men to death, and the remaining Dakota were forced to march to Fort Snelling. More than 1,600 Dakota reached Fort Snelling in November 1862, and they were imprisoned there for the rest of the winter. On the day after Christmas, 38 of the Dakota men who had been sentenced by the military commission were simultaneously hanged in Mankato. It was the largest mass execution in the history of the United States, and President Abraham Lincoln signed off on the executions a few weeks before he issued the Emancipation Proclamation.
The men whose sentences had been commuted were forcibly removed to Fort McClellan in Davenport, Iowa, far away from their families imprisoned at Fort Snelling. The Department of the Interior and the U.S. Army argued over who was responsible for the Dakota at Fort Snelling. The Dakota didn’t have adequate food, clothing, shelter, or access to medical attention, and several hundred Dakota died during the winter. Those who survived were forced to move to Crow Creek, a barren reservation in South Dakota, the following spring. Throughout 1863 and 1864, as the Civil War continued to rage across the South and the West, the U.S. Army launched punitive expeditions into Dakota Territory. Fort Snelling became the epicenter of these efforts, serving both as a military outpost and as a prison for captured Dakotas. The effects of the government’s subsequent treatment of the Dakota linger more than 150 years later. Dred and Harriet Scott’s enslavement at Fort Snelling, Taney’s ruling, the outbreak of the Civil War, and the U.S.-Dakota War have had lasting consequences in Minnesota and across the country.
Less than 20 years later, the U.S. Army used Fort Snelling as the regimental headquarters for several segregated all-Black units who became known as “buffalo soldiers.” Congress passed the Army Reorganization Act in 1866, and buffalo soldiers were tasked with, among other things, helping control American Indians on the Great Plains and in the American West. No one is quite sure how they got their name, but the buffalo soldiers took part in nearly 200 conflicts, skirmishes, and battles during the era of the Indian Wars. Their legacy is complicated, particularly in terms of reconciling pride in military service with the regiments’ role in the violence against and displacement of Native people.
The site of Fort Snelling had been chosen for its importance as a military outpost, and it now sits in the major metropolitan area known as the Twin Cities. Saint Paul, the state capital, was incorporated in 1854, and the neighboring city of Minneapolis was incorporated in 1867. Fort Snelling was decommissioned in 1946. It was designated as a National Historic Landmark in 1960, and it reopened as Historic Fort Snelling in 1970. Its initial interpretations centered on life at the fort in 1827, so visitors never learned about enslaved people, the U.S.-Dakota War and its aftermath, or buffalo soldiers. However, local Black and Native community members, activists, and organizations have encouraged the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) to offer more inclusive and comprehensive interpretations and programming. In 2019, for instance, MNHS updated some signage to read “Historic Fort Snelling at Bdote.” Continued activism has helped lead to a plan to revitalize the fort and increase the number of stories that will be told, including perspectives from Native nations, soldiers, enslaved and free African Americans, and Japanese Americans during World War II. Despite these changes, the historical presence of enslaved people at Fort Snelling and the military’s decision to imprison Dakota families at the fort after the U.S.-Dakota War—two methods of policing and criminalizing Black and Native people—reverberate into the present, highlighting the prevalence of police brutality against Black and Native bodies in Minnesota and across the country.
]]>“By contributing to, and participating in civic projects, 3M and 3M employees have helped to strengthen the bond of community relationship. The unique characteristic of 3M's contribution to the many communities of which it is a part, is the scope and enthusiasm in which 3Mployes enter into many of these various programs and activities.” — 3M Megaphone, July 1953
3Mers Give Blood The company set up a blood donation program with the Red Cross. A bloodmobile came to the plant regularly.
3M and the Local High Schools 3M worked with local schools such as Johnson and Harding High Schools to recruit employees. Young men and women could work part-time while still in school, then move on to full-time jobs after graduation.
3M and Junior Achievement 3M provided advisors to the Saint Paul Junior Achievement program. The program offered practical business experience to high school students by helping them set up their own businesses.
]]>Bubblicious 2014
Material: steel, aluminum, solar lighting
This sundial-inspired artwork evokes the visual imagery of creatures whose bodies are comprised of 90% or more water - jellies, rays, and mushrooms.
A project of the East Side Arts Council and the Saint Paul Port Authority, with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts Fast Track and the McKnight Foundation.
#BubbliciousAtBeaconBluff
#TheHubAtBeaconBluff
]]>German workers and German bosses had a monopoly on brewing beer in St Paul, as they did almost everywhere in the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries. As historian Gary Brueggeman has explained (“Beer Capital of the State-St Paul’s Historic Family Breweries”) St Paul had several advantages: It had the largest German population in the state, including many skilled “braumeisters” who emigrated here as early as the 1840’s, bringing their tradition of creating, distributing and consuming “lager” beer. Unlike the venerable ale, which is brewed warm, lager beer requires cold temperatures for brewing and must be stored at temperatures in the 40’s for aging. “Lager” in fact is the German word for “storehouse.”
St Paul conveniently afforded ready-made facilities for cold storage: sandstone caves which maintained constant temperatures year round. Additional storage could be readily excavated out of the soft stone composing the bluffs along the river. Brewing began here as early as 1848 with the establishment of Anthony Yoerg’s brewery in the Seven Corners vicinity.
Breweries on the West End included the North Mississippi Brewery, owned by the Banholzer family, whose Teutonic mansion at 689 Stewart Ave still stands, although the brewery was closed in 1904. “Banholzer Park,” located nearby, included a beer garden (of course) and other amenities, and was the site, on several occasions, of the official Labor Day celebration hosted by the St Paul Trades and Labor Assembly. Of course the buildings composing the mighty Schmidt Brewery, which lasted into the present era, are still there on West Seventh Street, as is the “Marie Schmidt Bremer House” at 855 W 7th St, originally built by brewer Christopher Stahlmann.
The Brewery Workers Union conducted its local affairs entirely in German—tough luck for the handful of brewery workers who spoke languages other than German. The national organization in particular reflected the influence and inspiration of the Marxist German Social Democratic Party, inscribing at the top of its letterhead, “Workers of the World Unite!” The minutes of Local 97 denominate their members as “genosssen,” the same term used for membership in the German socialist party, the equivalent of “comrade” in English. And, perhaps more significantly, the Brewery Workers, joined by the United Mine Workers of America, were the only unions in the craft union-based American Federation of Labor that organized on an industrial basis, taking in every worker in the industry, whether a braumeister, a maltster, an stationary engineer, a teamster, a laborer, or, apparently, a saloon owner, although the national union constitutionally barred the latter from membership. The records of Local 97 show Hubert Theissen, who owned a saloon at 497 Wabasha, and Paul Grimm, a saloon operator at 700 Reaney, as members in good standing. Of course, these men may have also been employed at one or another of the numerous breweries in the city, and merely run their saloon out of a room in their homes.
In 1908 the "schatzmeister,” or treasurer (literally “treasure master”) of Local 97 was George Tschida Jr. of the well known and extended St Paul family. He was employed by the Hamm’s brewery. The Tschidas were part of a German speaking minority in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that emigrated, or re-emigrated to the United States in the late 19th century.
Workers at West End breweries, selected more or less at random from scattered records, include local union secretary Peter Lipp, employed by the Melchior Funk Brewery, which once stood at the corner of what is now Colburne and Palace. Genosse Lipp boarded at 787 W 7th St. Michael Kellner, a laborer at the Stahlmann brewery, had his residence at 327 Colburne. Of course, there were innumerable workers employed at the giant Schmidt brewing complex over several generations.
]]>Rapinwax Paper operated in Frogtown for many years at 293 Como Av. The company made wax paper for food handling and food preservation. In the days before plastic wrap and resealable plastic food bags, wax paper was a staple in every kitchen and neighborhood grocery store.
Dozens of neighborhood residents worked there in hot conditions. The paraffin wax had to be melted before it went into the paper sheets.
At 12:15 p.m. on June 15, 1936, during an intense summer heat wave, the St. Paul Fire Department responded to a call to Rapinwax. Flames broke out in the company’s 75 by 280-foot factory, where vats held two tons of wax. The factory, which was up to three stories tall in places, was engulfed in flames.
Black smoke hung over the Frogtown neighborhood. It took an hour for crews to contain the blaze.
But what many people would always remember was the flood of melted wax that flowed over sidewalks and grassy boulevards, down Como Avenue and onto a few adjacent streets. Wax coated every surface. The fire loss was more than $109,000. Firefighters and company officials had a very long and messy cleanup.
Rapinwax is long gone but its main brick building at 293 Como Av. remains.
]]>- The dispute between Charles Comiskey and orgainzed labor over the opening of Lexington Park -
On April 30, 1897, St. Paul's legendary Lexington Baseball Park opened to the public for the first time, the start of nearly 60 years as the site of professional baseball. One hundred years ago professional baseball was the sporting entertainment for the urban masses, many of whom were deeply affected by the resurgent labor movement of the last two decades of the 19th century. Those who put their wares before the city working classes strove not to offend the new unions and their enthusiastic adherents. Boycotts and protests against non-union enterprises by labor-oriented consumers were vigorous and frequent.
Baseball entrepreneur Charles Comiskey was the beneficiary of the construction of the new St. Paul ballpark, located at the southwest corner of Lexington and University Avenues, by a Buffalo, N.Y. capitalist named Edward B. Smith, who put $75,000 of his own money into the park, big money in those days. This, of course, was at a time when no one would have dreamed of asking for public money for such a facility.
Manager Comiskey who became the focus of a crescendo of complaints from St. Paul unions. At a meeting of St Paul's Trades and Labor Assembly in early April, a complaint against the manner of constructing the park, initiated by the Carpenters Union, was referred to the Building Trades Council. A particularly sharp grievance emanated from Local 20 of the Theatrical Stage Employees Union, who were engaged in a struggle with the management of the Metropolitan Theater over the employment of union stagehands. As a result of the dispute a boycott had been placed on the theater by organized labor, and the local was incensed when it learned that a sign advertising the Metropolitan was to go up in Lexington Park in time for opening day.
A special committee was appointed to visit Comiskey to raise these and other grievances -- asking additionally that only union label cigars be sold at the park and that only union musicians be employed at the ballpark. However, all did not go smoothly. The band Comiskey employed on opening day had misrepresented itself to him as a union group. Non-union cigars were on sale. The sign was still on the outfield fence. The Metropolitan sign had been placed in the park, Comiskey said, because he had been "hoodwinked" by the theater manager. Comiskey, the committee reported, claimed he had rented the space to a wily entrepreneur who had then sublet it to the Metropolitan over his protests. The Assembly notified Comiskey that if the sign did not come down, a boycott would be instituted.
At the May 14 meeting the baseball committee reported progress "but no assurance of a satisfactory settlement," and the boycott was imposed. Shortly afterward the sign came down. Comiskey wrote to the Assembly stating that "the Met has did just what it agreed to with me in regard to my fences and will put no sign on it." At the May 28 meeting of the Assembly the boycott was officially declared off. And finally, on July 16 James Nelson, Local 20's secretary, reported that as a result of labor's boycott the Metropolitan Opera House had closed for the season.
]]>Saint Paul’s West End is Minnesota’s first urban neighborhood. With West 7th/Fort Road as its spine, it extends from Seven Corners near downtown to the overlook on the east bank of the Mississippi River across from Fort Snelling. This was also the last stretch of the historic fur trade route from Eastern states and Canada.
From the arrival of Zebulon Pike in 1805 to the West End of today, a number of recurring themes shaped this community’s development. Most symbolic of this process is the Mississippi, the Great River, which has been the integral connector for all the encounters we have experienced, understood, forgotten, and recovered.
Fort Snelling, which was constructed 1819 to 1825, at the confluence of the Minnesota and Mississippi Rivers, was built to protect our northern borders from the British and to control development in the territories. It served as the mechanism for successive treaties and distributions of former Dakota lands, which eventually resulted in supplanting the indigenous population and loss of control of their traditional lands.
For a time in the 1820s and ’30s, settlers from a Swiss colony at Fort Garry (Winnipeg), along with a mixed group of Dakota, Métis and French Canadians, were allowed to use lands adjacent to Fort Snelling. When their use of fuel and forage conflicted with the needs of Fort Snelling, they were expelled and first settled at Fountain Cave three miles downriver near what is now Randolph Avenue. A second expulsion pushed the mixed group of settlers, whiskey sellers, and ex-soldiers to begin to build around the area of the Upper Landing three miles further downstream. This settlement became the core of Saint Paul and the West End neighborhood. In the 1840s this group expanded, and with the arrival of a wave of Eastern settlers later in the decade, the growth of Saint Paul began in earnest.
As the heads of river navigation, the Lower and Upper Landings provided a destination not just for goods but also for entrepreneurs and adventurers who were ready for a new territory and the hope of a new start. Early Saint Paul’s population expanded rapidly.
The settlement of Saint Paul was established in 1849, the same year as was the Minnesota Territory. Early settlers John Irvine, whose ferryboat dock was at the Upper Landing, and Henry Rice, a fur trader who quickly made a fortune in real estate, each donated lands for future parks. These donations may have been the first real sign that a community was about to grow here.
Saint Paul became an incorporated city in 1854. Rapid development centered at Seven Corners, the major intersection that included Third Street (the “third up from the river,” now Kellogg Blvd.), Seventh Street and Eagle Street. As the population increased, the direction of development was westward along Fort Road through Uppertown. John Irvine’s land donation became Irvine Park, and many newly rich land developers and businessmen began to build homes and businesses.
Today, the West End continues to be a community of caring connections. It maintains a wide diversity of class, culture, wealth, and lifestyle, while common concerns in development, health, and quality of life sustain forward movement and assure continuity for the generations to come.
]]>A thousand years ago the area around the confluence of Trout Brook and Phalen Brook near the Mississippi River was a marshy flood plain. By the early 1900s, the entire delta had been expanded by filling and became an industrial railroad corridor. As rail use decreased in the 1970s, the land was largely abandoned and buildings and tracks were removed.
If you saw it in 1980, it was a barren, fed litter-strewn site that had been the victim of illegal dumping. However, local East Side activists and Lowertown residents saw the site’s potential and in 1997 they began working together as the Lower Phalen Area Project. They joined with the DNR, National Park Service to reclaim a twenty seven acre area to start developing a landmark that combined restoration of the riverfront habitat with public access.
The City purchased the land and restoration work was soon undertaken by volunteers who removed tons of debris that had been dumped over the years. Clean soil was brought in to replace marginal land and invasive buckthorn was uprooted. The goal was to bring back a mix of floodplain forest, prairie and oak savanna tamarack seepage swamps, and four acres of bedrock bluff prairie.
The twenty-seven acre park now contains native plant communities and the wildlife is returning. Two small ponds attract waterfowl and the uplands are home to grassland bird species. Turkey vultures, bald eagles, and red tail hawks are now seen along the sandstone bluffs. Pedestrian paths and bicycle trails have been installed, a series of three wetlands now hold abundant water and a spring-fed stream runs through the property.
On May 21, 2005 the park was opened to the public and was named in honor of Bruce Vento, a native of the East Side, a teacher and a U. S. Congressman who served the area from 1977 until 2000. He was the author of a law that created a Mississippi National River and Recreational Area.
There are a few remnants of the older days, including railroad maintenance pads that echo the importance of trains to the area history and mention the old brewery. The project recreated a number of ecosystems that had existed including oak woodlands, floodplain forests, prairies and oak savannas. Carver’s Cave is protected, but its entrance can be observed.
The Bruce Vento Nature Sanctuary’s walking and biking paths take visitors through a vibrant habitat with colorful signs that explain and interpret various parts of the site. Volunteers have planted nearly 2,000 trees, and the wetlands and prairie sections are now filled with colorful flowers. While trains occasionally rumble by below the bluff, you are more likely now to see eagles, Indigo buntings, northern flickers and red tailed hawks and other wildlife soaring above the park.
]]>When German immigrant and former butcher/saloon owner Theodore Hamm bought a struggling business on Phalen Creek in St. Paul in 1864, would he have thought it would become one of the largest breweries in the country? That first year there were five employees who brewed five hundred barrels of beer.
Hamm’s Brewery was then on the edge of the city and hard to reach in the winter. So the family built a dormitory for single men. His wife Louise cooked their meals and also provided food at noon for the married men. It was, of course, accompanied by beer, which could also be accessed during work hours. Louise also operated the storehouses and did the bookkeeping.
Hamm often invited the farmers who brought their grain to the mill to stay and have a beer. This soon turned into having a meal and Louise, who was deeply involved in company operations, to start a "bier garten." Under her direction, it became a popular destination.
By 1885, Hamm’s Brewery had grown to seventy-five employees who brewed 40,000 barrels and the complex had grown to four acres. Deliveries kept fifteen to twenty wagons busy every day. In 1894, the brewery expanded to include a bottling works and that was followed by artificial refrigeration in1895.
Theodore’s son, William, and grandson, William Jr. inherited the operation in 1903. It continued to prosper until Prohibition hit breweries hard. During that time Hamm’s survived by producing soft drinks, near beer, syrups and other food products.
The repeal of Prohibition in 1933 was celebrated by a huge gathering outside the brewery and when a whistle blasted at 12:01 A. M. on April 7th, the crowd roared and blew car horns. It was estimated that by 6 A.M. that morning, 100,000 cases of beers had been shipped.
Between 1946 and 1954, the site was expanded to twenty acres with 1,300 workers. Hamm’s became one of the country’s top beers advertising that it came “From the Land of Sky Blue Waters.”
The time came when no family members wanted to run things and in 1968 the company was acquired by a series of owners. The last company on the site was Stroh, which operated the brewery until 1997. You can see most of the buildings, in various states of re-use, spanning Minnehaha between Payne Avenue and Arcade Street.
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