“Between Lynch and Dorcas Street lay, on the east side of Carondelet Avenue, a not very high hill, on which the little brewery of George Schneider, who in the early 1850s had run the Washington Brewery on Third and Elm Street, was located.”

~St. Louis in frühere Jahren: Ein Gedenkbuch für das Deutschthum

“About the year 1850 a Mr. Schneider established a brewery on the present site of the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association. It was indeed a very primitive affair – a hole in the ground, supported by neither brick nor stone wall, being the cellar, with a board shanty over it, for the brew house.”

~One Hundred Years of Brewing: A Complete History of the Progress Made in the Arts, Science and Industry of Brewing in the World, Particularly in the Nineteenth Century

The story is recounted in a dozen books and articles, and on countless websites around the world. Back in the early 1850s, they say, a German immigrant named George Schneider founded the Bavarian Brewery on South Broadway. It was a primitive brewery, and he sold it to two men named Urban and Hammer around 1857, who tried to make it work for a couple of years before finally, in 1860, a soap manufacturer named Eberhard Anheuser bought the failing Bavarian Brewery out of bankruptcy, handing it over to his new son-in-law Adolphus Busch to salvage his investment. And the rest, as they say, is history.

It didn’t happen like that at all. At least, George Schneider never owned the Bavarian Brewery, and it wasn’t founded in 1852. The Bavarian Brewery was founded in 1857 by a fascinating German physician named Dr. Adam Hammer, a man who helped revolutionize the field of medicine in America, saving countless lives in his adopted city of St. Louis and on the battlefield during the Civil War. He also contributed critical new discoveries to our understanding of heart disease. The Bavarian Brewery did in fact end up in the hands of creditors in late 1859, and Eberhard Anheuser did emerge as one-third owner in early 1860. Eberhard Anheuser did acquire that part ownership indirectly due to an “unsatisfied loan” he made to Adam Hammer, as an official history of the brewery states in 1953. But by no means was it a bad investment.

As I will show, Eberhard Anheuser was perhaps one of the shrewdest businessmen in St. Louis, and his investment in the Bavarian Brewery was not a bad business decision in need of salvaging. A huge amount of capital was being invested in St. Louis at the time, and young men were becoming astonishingly wealthy; it was almost a 19th-century Silicon Valley. As I will show over the next four weeks, the real story of the founding of Anheuser-Busch is far more interesting than the tale we’ve all heard, and it gives us a much greater appreciation for the achievements of St. Louis’s oldest brewery since 1860.

First, we must deal with George Schneider, and show how it was impossible for him to have been involved in any way with the founding of the Bavarian Brewery. Luckily for my research (but unfortunately for those doing business with him back in the 1850s and 60s), Schneider was frequently in financial and legal trouble, so there are lawsuits and liens aplenty to document where and when he was operating breweries in St. Louis.

Outside court files, however, Schneider didn’t command much attention in the media of his day. Around 1844 he built the Washington Beer Hall and Garden, which included an adjacent brewery, located at the southwest corner of Elm (now Clark) and Third Street in the heart of what was then the bustling central business district. While the huge influx of German immigrants fleeing the failed revolutions of 1848 had not yet changed the city’s landscape, the area around Schneider’s Washington Brewery had already become an outpost of Teutonic culture, business and politics. A directory of St. Louis businesses from 1848 corroborates his presence at the corner, listing him as “Schneider, George, Washington brewery and garden, 54 s Third.”

× 1 of 6 Expand Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum J.C. Wild's hand-colored lithograph of the St. Louis Levee, c. 1840 × 2 of 6 Expand Photo by William Swekosky; courtesy of Missouri History Museum Entrance to George Schneider's Washington Hall × 3 of 6 Expand Photo by William Swekosky; courtesy of the Missouri History Museum George Schneider's Washington Brewery, at the southwest corner of Elm and Third streets × 4 of 6 Expand Photo by William Swekosky; courtesy of the Missouri History Museum Washington Brewery. The building on the left might be the one cited in the mechanic's lien. × 5 of 6 Expand Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum A detail of an 1870 Whipple Fire Insurance map, showing the Washington Brewery and Beer Garden × 6 of 6 Expand Compton and Dry's Pictorial St. Louis, from the Library of Congress Highlighted, the Washington Brewery at Third and Elm Prev Next

Schneider didn’t, perhaps couldn’t, stay focused on one thing at time. Instead, he endangered his financial position by beginning to invest in real estate. The City of St. Louis was divesting itself of the huge swath of land to the south of the city known as the St. Louis Commons, surveyed by Charles DeWard into a checkerboard of numbered blocks that still affect the modern South City street grid. Ezra English and Isaac McHose had already invested in property above their cave a decade before, and Adam Lemp had likewise already purchased a quarter of a block above his own subterranean lagering chamber, so it probably seemed logical for Schneider to follow suit.

According to a ledger kept by the City of St. Louis and a contract between Thomas McLaughlin and Schneider, the German brewer bought the northeast quadrant of Block 53 for $676 on September 17, 1845, using an installment plan with 5% interest per annum over five years. A later addendum states that the contract’s terms were paid in full on September 11, 1847. It was a tidy profit for McLaughlin; he had purchased the same quadrant only a few years earlier, on September 6, 1841, for $494.70, the City having passed Ordinance #766 to authorize the sale. Interestingly, the City’s ledger did not hand over title to Schneider until September 12, 1849.

The rest of the 1840s seems to have gone smoothly for Schneider. He solidified his brewing interests by selling off individual lots of the northeast quadrant of Block 53, now rechristened Schneider’s Cave Addition. (The 1851 Schultse and 1853 Fischer maps show its layout.) The east-west street was named Washington Street, and the north-south street was named Cave Street. A visitor to this quiet corner of Benton Park might notice that the modern-day Withnell and Illinois avenues are strangely narrow for two blocks; this is a relic of Schneider’s platting of his then-rural subdivision. He was making a tidy profit on his investment; on November 21, 1849, he sold Lots No. 22 and 23 in Block #2 for $350 to Emanuel Bender. A little more than a week later, on December 1, 1849, he sold Lots No. 21 and 22 on Block #4 to Carl Brawn for $200. But already Schneider was taking out a loan for $1,200. He finalized the paperwork right before these sales, on September 12, 1849, the money borrowed from a Franklin A. Dick and guaranteed by a Theodore P. Greene. Schneider used his downtown brewery and Block 53 as collateral. He would not pay the loan off until April 12, 1855.

As the new decade began in 1850, the U.S. Census and a now discontinued federal census of industry painted an optimistic picture of George Schneider’s life. The census information corresponds neatly, with the industrial census giving even more data on his operations at Third and Elm. Schneider was a 30-year-old brewer in 1850, and he had ten employees—nine listing their occupation as “brewer” and one as “saddler.” All listed their place of birth as Germany, which was more concept than reality in 1850, with the German Empire not formally being created until 1871. They most likely all lived in the brewery property, as they are all recorded in the same dwelling and household. Incidentally, there’s no evidence that Schneider was from Bavaria and named a brewery accordingly, as some sources have suggested.

The industrial census shows:

“George Schneider, Washington Brewery, $11,000 capital investment; 150 cords of wood, valued at $600; 3,000 bushels of charcoal, valued at $300; 7,000 bushels of hops, valued at $1,750; 10,000 bushels of barley, valued at $10,000; ‘hand powered’[no steam engine], 9 employees with a monthly payroll of $150; output of 3,000 barrels of ale and beer valued at $18,000.”

For comparison with a successful brewer in the same time period, we can look at Adam Lemp’s Western Brewery, a couple of blocks away in the Levee district:

“Adam Lemp, Western Brewery, $40,000 capital investment; 80 cords of wood, valued at $320; 2,000 bushels of coal valued at $200; 6,000 bushels of hops valued at $1,500; 8,000 bushels of barley valued at $8,000; 6 employees with a monthly payroll of $120; 4,000 barrels of beer and ale valued at $24,000.”

Schneider’s Washington Brewery was by no means as fully capitalized as Adam Lemp’s Western Brewery, but it was not an underperformer. Perhaps the only major difference was that Lemp was able to produce more beer with less employees and a smaller payroll. Both Lemp and Schneider operated adjacent beer halls on the premises of their respective breweries, Lemp hosting a raucous Ratskeller in the basement of his house facing Second Street, and Schneider creating the famous Washington Hall and [Beer] Garden, which lived on long after his tenure as owner. Recounted Ernst Kargau, years later:

“Washington Hall and still more, the Washington Garden, passed through their palmy period during these years. Tony Niederwieser, Bernard Laibold, Frank Boehnz, and particularly the combination of Boehm and Felsing made this establishment one of the best amusement places. It has its origin in the Washington Brewery. There had been a demand for a place where dances and other festivals could be given. So the company built Washington Hall.”

The good times crashed to an abrupt end in 1852, the year when many historians claim that Schneider was supposedly founding the Bavarian Brewery. The city directory for that year still listed him at the downtown address under the Washington Brewery name. And a litany of legal filings show that the hapless brewer almost certainly could not have obtained the capital to found another brewery the same year that his Washington Brewery lurched into bankruptcy.

Next week, in Part II: debt and desperation