Road Trip Through History: The National Brewery Museum
Some museums are the road trip equivalent of a destination wedding: you plan the trip for the purpose of visiting that museum. Some museums are must-sees. (Though I must admit that we’ve missed a few of those on previous Great River Road adventures because of scheduling difficulties. *Sigh*) And others are a fun stop when they fall in your path. The National Brewery Museum in Potosi, Wisconsin, was in the last category.*
Here were some of my takeaways:
The museum used the history of thePotosi Brewing Company, which originally operated between 1852 and 1972, to tell two related stories: the effect of Prohibition on small breweries and the transformation of the American brewing industry from hundreds of local breweries to big national companies. The Potosi Brewing Company survived Prohibition, and the Great Depression, thanks to some smart choices about how to diversify. They were not so lucky when it came to the move away from local breweries.
Transportation was as much a part of the story as the beer itself, from horse-drawn carts to the interstate (As an aside, the Potosi Brewing Company was the only brewery in the country that owned its own steamboat, which they used to deliver beer to Dubuque. They also had room for 100 passengers and would take people on river outings, presumably with beer.)
An hysterical video about the use of cowboys in beer commercials, including one with John Wayne. As far as I was concerned, it was almost worth the stop all by itself. I watched it twice and was tempted to watch it a third time. (I tried to find an on-line clip to share, with no luck Instead I offer you this one, which is also pretty funny:
(REMINDER: If you’re reading this via email you may have to move to your browser to see the clip.)
Some unexpected history of brewers and WWII:
- Beer can production for public consumption in the United States ceased in 1942, because tin and steel was critical to the war effort. It took a couple of years, but the government finally realized that the ability to get American beer would be a morale booster to the troops. In 1944, the military contracted with 35 major breweries to produce bee in non-reflective olive-drab-colored cans.
- Advocates of prohibition, who obviously did not share the image of beer as a morale booster, saw the war as a second chance. Brewers fought back by printing and distributing informational materials such as civil defense manuals and booklets on how to handle air raids, blackout procedures etc. They also added special neck labels to beer bottles urging their customers to buy war bonds. In the face of such relentless helpfulness, prohibition advocates didn’t stand a chance.
Definitely worth the stop.
* If you’re seriously interested in the ephemera of brewery advertising, you should move the museum higher up on your personal list.
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Travelers’ tip: The National Brewing Museum is sponsored in part by the revived Potosi Brewing Company, which has a brew pup at the museum. Your museum ticket includes a pint of beer. The food is good, the beer is better. And the root beer is amazing.
Has It Really Been Thirty Years? The Fall of the Berlin Wall
Thirty years ago, on November 9, the Berlin Wall fell, or more accurately was torn down.* In memory of that event, I offer a [lightly edited] version of a post I ran in 2016.
By Edward Valachovic, thanks to a Creative Commons license
Last week while we all blew noisemakers and wore party hats to celebrate the the 100th anniversary of America’s National Park Service, we let another anniversary slip by with less fanfare. On August 26, 1961, the Berlin Wall became more than just a barbed wire and cinder block barricade.
If you want a vivid and detailed description of the construction and impact of the wall, I recommend reading Thomas Harding’s The House by the Lake. Here’s the short version:
Construction of the wall began on August 12–a Soviet response to the thousands of East Germans who fled to the western sectors of Berlin. It was now illegal to cross the wall and border guards were instructed to shoot anyone who tried. On August 24, twenty-four-year-old Günter Litfin became the first East German to be shot as he tried to escape to the West. Two days later, West Berliners were forbidden from crossing into the East.
The wall stood as an international symbol of oppression until November, 1989. Many (most?) of us watched with tears of joy when East Berliners destroyed the wall with their own hands.*
The reunification of the two German states into a single Germany is in many ways incomplete. But the destruction of that wall remains a symbol of hope. To quote Robert Frost, “Something there is that doesn’t love a wall.”
*I’ve reached the point where I always question anything historical event that is described as a fall. The term always seems to be shorthand for something more complicated. In this case it erases agency.
**I still tear up just typing these words.
Road Trip Through History: Button, Button, Who’s Got the Button
The nineteenth century button industry based on fresh-water mussels was a recurring theme of our ten days on the Great River Road this year.
In 1891 a German button manufacturer named John Frederick Boepple opened a button factory in Muscatine, Iowa, after a change in tariff laws caused his business in Germany to fail. Shell buttons weren’t new. The Boepple family had made buttons from shells and horn for many years. But the plentiful mussel shells found in the Mississippi River near Muscatine were thick and well suited for cutting into buttons.
At the time that Boepple opened his small factory, the McKinley tariff of 1890 meant that imported shell buttons were expensive. The original foot-operated lathes that Boepple adapted from those used to make buttons from ocean shells were designed to allow skilled craftsmen to create a button from beginning to end, which meant that even without the additional cost of the tariff buttons were not cheap.* With the introduction first of steam-powered lathes and then a revolutionary machine called the Double Automatic that, well, automated the process, attractive mother-of-pearl buttons were affordable to the average household. By the late nineteenth century, buttons made from river mussel shells were so popular that bars in at least one river town accepted mussel shells as payment.
Like other industries along the Great River Road, buttons were a boom and bust business. “Clammers” earned good livings harvesting shells from the river in large quantities. Button factories sprang up in towns up and down the Mississippi, creating hundreds of factory jobs and more opportunities for cottage industries where women and children sewed buttons to cards at home. In the same way that the logging industry overcut the great forests of Minnesota and northern Wisconsin, by the 1920s, the button industry had decimated the Mississippi’s mussel population, and precipitated its own demise.**
* Today we tend to think about buttons as nothing in particular. Or more accurately, unless you knit or sew, you probably don’t think about buttons at all unless you have to sew one back on your jacket. (A skill everyone should learn, in my opinion.) But historically buttons were a luxury item: made by hand and often from expensive materials. It turns out there was a good reason my grandmothers (and probably yours) kept a button jar. (For that matter, I still have one.)
For those of you who’d like to know more, I recommend this article:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/design/2012/06/button_history_a_visual_tour_of_button_design_through_the_ages_.html
** The related story of efforts to restore the river mussel population was also a recurring theme of our trip. At one time there were 51 species of mussels in the upper Mississippi; today theater are 38, eighteen of them endangered.