Phalen Creek was a spring fed-stream flowing from Lake Phalen through a deep ravine that ancient waters had gouged from the land. It ended up forming a small delta on the Mississippi River floodplain. Surrounded by trees and wetlands, it served as a corridor for songbirds and other wildlife. The local Dakota, who lived nearby, surely fished there and hunted along its banks.
When Father Louis Hennepin, a Franciscan priest and explorer was paddling up the Mississippi in 1680, his group met a Dakota war party who detained him and beached his canoe at the creek’s confluence with the Mississippi River. He is usually considered the first European person to visit Phalen Creek.
Shortly after Minnesota became a territory, Edward Phalen took up a claim on the creek that would later be named for him. In 1844 he sold it to William Dugas, who built Saint Paul's first saw and grist mill there. The meandering waterway would have a long-lasting impact on the East Side neighborhood and its water power led to the economic investment that brought settlers into the area.
The ample water supply and sandstone cliffs in which storage spaces could be dug were attractive and the site once housed at least four different breweries. The most significant of these was the one built at the northeast corner of Greenbrier and Minnehaha. Andrew Keller, a native of Germany, established the Pittsburgh Brewery there in 1860. Five years later he sold his small plant to Theodore Hamm, and he and his family transformed it into one of the largest breweries in the country.
After the Civil War, railroads were built in the area and one of them ran along the route of Phalen Creek and attracted industries that brought people to the East Side. The banks of the creek were also homes of Swede Hollow and Connemara Patch, two immigrant settlements. While these residents got their drinking water from artesian wells, they used creek for washing, watering their small gardens and some residents put their outhouses on stilts across the stream.
There were some dangers. Occasional heavy rains turned the creak into a raging torrent. In the spring of 1897, six year old Margaret Connelly slipped on a rock walkway across the creek near East Fifth Street and was swept into a sewer and drowned. Her parents investigated suing Saint Paul for lack of safety near the sewers, but the courts found that no liability attached to the city.
Over time, the creek was deployed into large storm and creek sewers and by the middle 1930’s all of the waterway was contained in a huge storm water system. While the Swede Hollow and Connemara Patch communities no longer exist, there is still a creek. But you can no longer see it, because it now runs underground from Phalen Lake to the Mississippi River.
]]>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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