Even people who don’t drink beer know that the hallmark of the modern American city in the 21st century is the local brewery, often with an interesting name and some implied associations with local history. When it started about 30-odd years ago, it struck some people as a hipster fad. But local beer appears to be at home in the 21st century. At this writing, it shows no signs of evaporating.
It probably seemed like a trendy West-Coast impertinence when it arrived in Knoxville around 1994. Before that, if you drank beer in Knoxville, it was beer brewed in another state—Wisconsin, Missouri, Pennsylvania, or, if you were fancy, Colorado or California. If not Europe.
In the early ’90s, no one alive remembered drinking a beer from a Knoxville brewery. (I’m not counting the beerlike fluid canned for the 1982 World’s Fair; it was just for display.) But in fact, Knoxville once had a brewing tradition. It lasted for almost half a century, and died an unnatural death.
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Of course, beer was not unknown in Knoxville’s earliest days, albeit most often experienced indirectly, mentioned humorously in obscure newspaper stories about the quaint ways of the Old World. But there’s some evidence of it being made here, likely in small batches.
Knoxville Gazette, Jan. 6, 1808.
It first peeks at us from the era when Knoxville was capital of a relatively new state. In late 1807, one Jacob Newman put out a want ad for “good clean barly” as well as hops, “at his Brewery on Second creek, adjoining Knoxville, where he has for sale good Malt Beer, by the Barrel or Gallon.” It’s a very rare mention of beer making during the era of James White and John Sevier. Local whiskey was common here, made in multiple small distilleries, but beer was still exotic. Newman’s ad included a polite gesture to offering his beer “at a liberal discount to retailers in adjoining towns.”
It’s not clear that adjoining towns were all that interested in something so odd.
A rare recipe, headlined, “to the Lovers of Good Beer,” appears in an 1827 issue of the Knoxville Enquirer. It involves two quarts of molasses; two ounces each of ginger, allspice, and hops; a half-pint of “Indian meal”; one pint of yeast; and about 12 gallons of water. After boiling most of it, mixing it together and letting it stand for 24 hours, it was “fit to use.”
For what, it does not say.
Later that spring, on May 23, 1827, just as hot weather was arriving, a “Confectionary,” apparently associated with Jackson’s Barber Shop, which was in turn associated with Jackson’s Tavern, advertised itself a manly resort, “where Gentlemen may be refreshed in City Style, with GOOD BEER and EXCELLENT CIGARS.” The proprietor was one Edward Davis, a barber who had previously offered “Eatables” to his customers. Jackson’s Tavern was the hotel later known as the Lamar House. So the modern-day Bistro at the Bijou, which occupies part of that venerable building, may be our most authentic place to drink historic beer.
And that was early—before railroads, and even a few months before the first steamboat made the journey this far up the river. The following year, in the warmer months of 1828, the year Andrew Jackson was first elected president, a Knoxvillian named J. Hair advertised that he “will keep constantly on hand a supply of MALT BEER, a Liquor, acknowledged by all medical men to be better adapted to the promotion of health than any other….”
Whether he made it himself is unclear. It’s one of the first local testaments to the medicinal qualities of beer, a theme that would return repeatedly.
Still, the fact that in 1833, the arrival of six barrels of beer by steamboat was worth announcing in the newspaper—and that by 1837 a store boasted that it had “12 half-barrels of beer” in stock—suggests Knoxville was at least beer-curious, even if those quantities don’t suggest a robust demand. In 1838, McClung, Wallace & Co. were advertising “Pittsburg Beer,” whatever that implied.
Knoxville began changing rapidly in the 1840s and ‘50s. Business and population were increasing, largely in anticipation of the railroad, which seemed finally sure to arrive. Irish immigrants, fleeing the horrific famine at home, found work in East Tennessee helping to build bridges and tunnels, and laying our first railroad tracks. At the same time were arriving immigrant refugees from Central Europe, escaping the post-feudal oppressions of mid-century Germany, especially after the catastrophic Revolutions of 1848. Many fled for their lives, as the princes and potentates of Central Europe held onto power and brutally crushed the revolts. During that dramatic period when more than one million German-speaking people crowded ships to America. A noticeable number of them landed here in Knoxville.
In 1848, confectioner John Gerber, perhaps one of those new arrivals, advertised that he had “fitted up a separate room for the reception of gentlemen who may desire refreshments between regular meals.” Separately, he advertised “Spruce-Beer or Mead.” He’s likely the same fellow as “Dr. J. Gerber,” who advertised himself as an experienced “homeopathist.” In those days, beer was often heralded as an elixir of health, or at least an alternative to more-dangerous beverages like whiskey.
By 1850, a Philadelphia business, the German Medicine Store, was taking out long ads in Knoxville papers, promoting “Dr. Hoofland’s German Bitters,” along with unnamed ales; and in 1853, a Nashville broker was touting “Pittsburgh and Wheeling Pale Ales, Porter, and Brown Stout.” Perhaps their main appeal was to Knoxville bars and restaurants. In any case, the excitement seems to have been in ordering beer from out of state. It went without saying that beer from a few hundred miles north was better than anything around here.
Beer was a relative rarity in the South, where whiskey and brandy, which require no refrigeration, had been the beverages of choice since early pioneer days. Despite stories of beer being made in small batches for specific occasions, records of sustained commercial breweries in the South before the Civil War are elusive. Beer was mainly a Northern thing.
Serving the Tennessee beer market, and perhaps that of much of the South, there appears to have been a Beer Belt of sorts. It formed a band within 100 miles or so of the Mason-Dixon Line, extending from Philadelphia to Pittsburgh to Wheeling to Cincinnati to Louisville to St. Louis. By 1860 much American beer was being produced in New York and in the upper Midwest, but Knoxville’s supply appeared to be based in that middle zone along the Ohio River. That horizontal band hosted thousands of recent German immigrants, who came from a beer tradition and knew how to do it. But it was also likely a matter of climate, and the proximity of ice to keep the ingredients cool in the process of making beer, especially lager. Before ice factories came to the fore in the 1880s, much of America’s ice supply was in the Great Lakes, where ice remained well into the spring and could be broken up and shipped to other parts of the country, where it might last for months in insulated ice houses. Great Lakes ice arrived in Knoxville by train. It was always a dwindling commodity even here, but the Deep South was too warm to have access to surviving winter ice at all, and ice generally didn’t last long there even in insulated containers. The Mid-South, and the southern part of the Midwest, offered some advantage.
In early summer, 1858, a Charles Haag—again, a likely German name—took over the Swiss Chavannes family’s “City Restaurant” on the downtown part of Cumberland Avenue. A place previously known for its oysters and ice cream, it apparently included efficient cooling facilities. Haag announced he’d keep serving ice cream, but he also offered lager beer and “Scotch Ale.” He didn’t say he was making it himself. Like a lot of beer purveyors of his era, he’s an obscure character, who appeared and vanished.
In August, 1859, the abstemious editor of the Knoxville Whig, Parson W.G. Brownlow, was complaining that enslaved Black people, under the pretense of holding a religious camp meeting at a place called Muddy Creek, were selling liquor and beer.
We might not expect that the brutal, terrifying Civil War might turn out to be the occasion to have open discussions of brewing beer in Knoxville.
An apparently relevant but puzzling item comes to us by way of Parson Brownlow’s famously combative Knoxville Whig, the weekly pro-Union paper that had just returned to publication not long after Union occupation of the city. It’s interesting, considering that in the 1850s the publisher was staunchly opposed to alcoholic beverages, that Brownlow brings us most of our known references to beer brewing in the 1860s.
On Jan. 23, 1864, just a few weeks after the Battle of Knoxville, the Civil War had left Knoxville in an uneasy peace, even as it still raged in all directions. You’d think people here would be licking wounds, reloading, and concentrating on survival. But there it is: “Henry Kaldemorgen’s East Tennessee Brewery.” It’s hailed in a conspicuous ad, offering “LAGER BEER, ALE, COMMON BEER.” Despite the name, though, the listed address of Herr Kaldemorgen’s brewery is on Vine Street in Cincinnati.
(His name seems to be obscure in both Knoxville and Cincinnati sources, until 1878: “Henry Kaldemorgen, of this city, has invented a coffin to protect people from the terrible consequences of being buried alive.” As one of Mr. Poe’s stories suggests, it was a significant anxiety in those days.)
How his East Tennessee brewery ever worked is unclear. Were they brewing that East Tennessee beer here, or in Ohio? In any case, it may not have worked for very long. But it became a popular name. Decades later, there were at least two more unrelated East Tennessee Brewing Companies. About 20 years after the Civil War, one Charles Kohlhase ran one. Mr. Kohlhase turned out to be a key character in nurturing Knoxville’s early appreciation of beer. Like several others, almost all of whom had foreign accents, his era in the public eye was in some respects mysterious.
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Not four months later, in May, 1864, still during Union martial law, Parson Brownlow, soon to be Tennessee’s surprising governor, had vaulted into politics as the special agent for the Treasury Department, enforcing federal guidelines that only “native beer and wine” be permitted in East Tennessee towns. Imported beer would be confiscated.
So there was at least a hint that “native beer” existed here before the war ended. Did that include Kaldemorgen’s briefly touted East Tennessee Brewery? And did Union occupation rules offer a modest boost to early home brewing?
By the end of the year, for whatever reason, soldiers were complaining that beer in Knoxville was 25 cents a glass, more than twice what it cost in Chattanooga.
On May 24, 1865, as men from both sides trudged home from the most horrific experiences of their lives, factions in the city of Knoxville seemed to be inviting a small relief from war, the prospect of good beer.
An item in Brownlow’s Whig, penned by Knoxville boosters, extolled some new prospects for the crippled little city still occupied by federal troops: “Lots well-suited for manufacturing sites on Second Creek offering desirable situations for Tan Yards, Breweries, Brick Yards.” It’s signed by prominent young capitalists J.D. Cowan and C.M. McGhee. Tan yards and brickyards we’d had since the early days, but not breweries. That seems a real-estate ad with at least a bit of a nudge. One early brewer took the bait.
Knoxville Weekly Whig, October 25, 1865.
Later generations would claim that McGhee himself was an early brewer. Details are scarce. But young city boosters wouldn’t need to express any particular fondness for beer to respect the cachet that a real brewery might bestow on a city’s image. In the 1860s, breweries were, like opera houses and train stations and baseball teams, among the hallmarks of a modern and thriving American city.
By 1865, Knoxville had a conspicuous number of German-speaking citizens, most of them refugees from the political catastrophes of Central Europe. Hundreds landed here in this rapidly growing, suddenly industrial railroad city. They came in big enough numbers to form a German social club, the Turn Verein, which was soon big enough to establish a public hall for dances, lectures in German and English, and classical-music performances. Later they even established a semi-public park just north of downtown.
Postwar Knoxville had a bit of a German accent, and it constituted a big part of what seems in retrospect like a cultural renaissance, involving people of several races and nationalities, including Swiss, Irish, and emancipated African Americans. Germans made themselves at home here, making sausages, and candy and bread, and classical music, and soon beer.
The first to have committed to the beermaking idea was a local fellow, likely of German descent. At war’s end, Paul Sturm opened his Union Brewery, where he promised to “sell a good article of beer,” as phrased in an ad that appeared in several issues of the Whig during the fall 1865. “Those in want of a first-rate drink will do well to call. He will sell a better and cheaper beer than those imported from the North.”
Herr Sturm, often called Captain Sturm, was likely the wounded Union veteran of that name who had led skirmishes with the Confederates as they withdrew from Knoxville. In 1866, he was a signatory to the last of several efforts to split East Tennessee from the rest of the state, due to “irreconcilable differences of opinion and interests.” He later publicly supported the congressional candidacy of Unionist/Republican J.M. Thornburgh. Sturm had at least some association with horseracing, as well as with band music. He also ran a restaurant called the St. Charles, on Gay Street.
But his brewery, sometimes called the North Knoxville Brewery, was along Second Creek, northwest of downtown, almost adjacent to the new National Cemetery, where more than 1,000 Union soldiers were already buried. It’s a rare site that hasn’t changed much since then. Sturm’s brewery was perhaps near the bottom of what’s now Bernard Street. There he kept a team of horses to make his deliveries. Fresh beer can’t wait long.
It’s notable that the site of what may have been Knoxville’s first brewery is hardly more than a stein’s throw from today’s popular German-themed brewpub, Schulzbrau.
In 1867, Sturm made an unusual public plea that farmers grow more barley, of which there was apparently a severe shortage in the region at harvest time. “Without barley there can be no beer,” Sturm noted, a melancholy truth, that November, “and the yield of barley is more, on an average, to the acre than wheat or oats.”
His brewery, then still on what was considered to be the outskirts of town, hosted a “great shutzen-fest,” a rifle-shooting context, in early 1868. It’s not clear whether beer-drinking was involved, but the invitation suggests that the Union Brewery was a recognized landmark.
By then, Sturm had some formidable competition. Lucas (or Lukas, or Lucius, or Lewis, or Louis, or Luke) Graf (or Graeff or Graff; immigrants were obliged to tolerate creative or simplified spellings) opened another brewery. Also on Second Creek, perhaps a quarter mile downstream from Sturm’s, it was often described as being beside the “rolling mill,” which is what they called the foundry of the Knoxville Iron Co., the large plant for making nails and railroad spikes, of which the Foundry at World’s Fair Park is the only remnant. In the ravine beside it you can still see the deep creek that attracted both ironmakers and brewers.
There are very few objective descriptions of Graf’s product, but one comes from John Gleason, who remembered it from his youth. Irish-born Gleason was only a teenager when Graf began brewing beer in Knoxville, but by his memory, shared some 40 years later, the brewery was “not more than 15 feet square. The beer from this place was very dark, and there was little thirst for it.” Either Gleason’s memory is imperfect, or Graf refined his recipe: it appears that he was in business for five or six years, and his product was at least sometimes much appreciated.
The 1869 Knoxville City Directory seems pretty tickled about the fact that old Knoxville had two breweries. In that proud but slim volume, Graf’s and Sturm’s establishments are mentioned in several lists, more than necessary to be merely thorough. In a section titled “Manufactories,” in words that sound more personal, and a little like a municipal boast: “We have two breweries, carried on by Messrs. Louis Graf and Paul Sturm, both doing well.”
Graf got in trouble with “the Internal Revenue Collector of this district,” who seized his brewery, “for not strictly complying with its laws,” but apparently settled the issue and recovered handily. Around that time, Sturm seems to have yielded, concentrating more on his restaurant. By the early 1870s, Graf was Knoxville’s primary brewer.
Dauntless and proud of his product, in 1871, Graf published a whole series of ads and testimonials, mostly in the Daily Press & Herald. One column signed “Gambrinus”—a Germanic folk hero, sometimes called the King of Beer–is breathless in its praise: “I desire to say one word to those who like a mug of beer, fresh and sparkling. During the past three years, Knoxville has been overrun with drummers [salesmen] for the brewers of the Northern and Western states, selling beer and ale far inferior to that made here in Knoxville by Lucius Graff …. Graff’s beer is made of pure and better materials than is usual at other breweries.”
There follows a line that’s a bit surprising, maybe suggesting that customers did not need to show an ID. “For the benefit, more especially, of the women and children, I desire to commend Graff’s beer as far preferable to this foreign and impure beer.” Perhaps Tennesseans wouldn’t give their kids hard liquor, but didn’t mind them sharing a little bit of beer to quiet them down.
One article connects Graf’s beer to a historic event, the first annual Industrial Exposition of late May, 1871. A three-day event that drew 3,000 and featured an apparently awkward speech by former President Andrew Johnson, it was probably the biggest fair since a few similar ones before the Civil War. Likely held in a clearing on the east side of town, it was accessed by “omnibuses,” horse-drawn wagons. It heralded Knoxville’s economic and cultural return after a tragic and often horrifying decade, with a flourish of local invention and art, including paintings of Flavius Fisher, photography, and marble carving. One fair vendor boasted of “50 kegs of Cincinnati beer.”
But Graf had a presence there, too, and it caught the attention of the newspaper. The article in the Press & Herald declared itself with a bold headline that some might guess was paid for: “Tremendous Rush on Graf’s Brewery.” Then a statement: “All living outside of Knoxville prefer Graf’s beer to any beer made. This manifestation of the Fair on yesterday was too strong to admit of a doubt. Hence the big rush made upon him by the hitherto importers of Foreign beer. His laconic and pithy reply–‘my regular customers must be attended to’–sent them off crestfallen. You like to trade with Mr. Graf, he is such a genial soul, and his beer is like himself, clear, sparkling, cheering.”
That article closed with a motto: “Patronize home manufacture.” More than likely, there were advertising dollars behind that rave, but it became a credo in Knoxville. By the 1870s, the city was manufacturing nearly everything of daily use, but Knoxville was still struggling to gain a foothold in the national consciousness, and ambitious to take its place among America’s great cities.
Graf’s competition appears to be the “Foreign” brewers, and he seems rankled that several downtown saloons, like Eifler’s Exchange Restaurant and Sherf’s Lamar House Saloon, that advertised and carried Cincinnati beers.
Sturm is not mentioned as a Graf rival, suggesting that the pioneer brewer had left the business, perhaps concentrating on his restaurant-grocery downtown. There are hints that he turned his pioneering brewery on the north side over to a grocer with a plausibly German name Charles Burger. A couple of years later, Burger sued Sturm, apparently after the latter had left town.
Both Graf and Sturm are absent from Knoxville city lists by the mid-1870s. It’s not yet clear what became of Sturm, who seemed to vanish altogether.
Graf was eventually involved with saloonkeeper Nic Eifler. His saloon, called the Exchange, was notable for its biergarten, or beer garden, a Bavarian custom just catching on in America. Eifler’s was an outdoor space in the rear of his saloon. But Graf and Eifler seemed to have a contentious relationship, as Graf split away and ran his own business called the First and Last Chance. Graf remained in the beer trade in Knoxville until at least 1874, when he ran a provocative item that implied he’d had some trouble with rivals. “Take fair warning, that I being regularly licensed to sell Lager Beer by the keg, will not suffer infringement hereafter.”
He married a woman named Catherine and kept a low profile until his death, at the age of 54; he was buried at Old Gray, with a more significant obelisk than most of his neighbors. Although the city was growing rapidly, the Knoxville City Directory of 1877 lists no breweries at all, though the city’s saloons that advertised beer continued to multiply. Saloonkeepers apparently contented themselves with the stuff imported from Cincinnati or St. Louis.
That directory apparently went to press before learning of a significant effort on the part of a well-known Irishman. Martin Shea had come to America from hist home in County Kerry about the time of the Great Famine. Perhaps the only non-German who aspired to make beer on a large scale during that era, Shea established a brewery on Hardee Street—later known as East Jackson–at Lanier Street, about two blocks east of Crozier, or what’s now Central. It was in the rapidly growing railroad district, near First Creek just east of the modern Old City—around the northwestern fringe of what’s now the construction site of the new Smokies Stadium.
Many Irish came to East Tennessee to work on the railroad, and a few, like Shea, excelled at what they did. Shea was such a successful railroad contractor that he sometimes took on projects in Central America. The Irish brought necessary wits and brawn for growing industries, but also a beer culture.
Beer brewing was typically a young man’s game, but Shea, who lived in Mechanicsville, was about 67 when Shea’s Brewery first comes to the fore. To run it, Shea hired an experienced young brewer named Louis Mankel, a German from Hesse-Darmstadt who’d recently been working for breweries in Bowling Green, Ky. “Having secured the services of a competent brewer,” Shea boasted, “I am prepared to furnish Ale in any quantity, either bottled or in casks.” Shea and his family, in partnership with another Irishman named Donahue, ran a “tin store” on Market Square, and took orders for ale there. But the brewing was done down on Hardee Street, which was becoming more and more industrial thanks to its railroad frontage.
Knoxville Daily Tribune, June 7, 1877.
Later, Shea sounds even more confident: Under the headline, “Knoxville Ale,” is a strong testament: “Martin Shea is making Ale equal if not superior to any ever offered in the Southern market. As a stimulant it is recommended by the leading physicians of the city.” That promise appeared more than a dozen times in newspapers in spring of 1878.
At the end of October, Shea’s brewery sounds dynamic. “One of the local businesses now serving the purpose of retaining at home large sums of money which formerly drifted to Cincinnati and elsewhere, is the Knoxville Brewery,” reported the Daily Tribune on Halloween. “The business which was commenced on a limited scale has continued to increase … till additions to the building will soon be rendered necessary…. Few people are aware of the enormous quantities of ale consumed per month, even in our immediate section; but the increase is far from alarming, for it has been demonstrated that the use of ale and beer prevents thousands from indulging in stronger potations, and thereby becoming inebriates. Would the average American guzzler imitate the Teuton [German] more in the matter of refreshments, the vast army of topers would soon become relatively sober men.”
The word “relatively” offers room for interpretation. In a town where the most common beverage was whiskey, alcoholism was a recognized problem. To Shea, local beer was great for Knoxville’s economy, but maybe also for health. The claim often made by brewers of the 19th century, if not often in our times, was that beer was a path to sobriety.
However, in early 1879, star brewer Mankel left town to work as manager for the established Star Brewery in Louisville, which was developing a considerable reputation for beer. Soon after that, Shea’s son, Martin Shea, Jr., died at age 20, “after a brief illness.” After limping along with another brewer, Shea’s brewery was for sale in late 1879. Perhaps it didn’t sell; Shea was still advertising his beer in 1880.
Morristown Gazette, January 7, 1880.
It’s a little puzzling that after Shea’s brewmaster was reportedly leaving Shea’s to take a great job in Louisville, Louis Mankel keeps showing up here, listed in the 1880 Knoxville City Directory as a “brewer,” and in 1882 as a “beer bottler,” with no specific employer. He seems a bit of an outlier in our story. By 1883, he helped found an ice factory here. Mankel would later establish a significant bottling works for soft drinks, cider, vinegar, and at least occasionally, beer.
The new and obviously difficult industry attracted interesting and talented people, some of them with tragic fates. Charles Kohlhase was a German immigrant who’d been around since the Sturm-Graf brewing efforts of the postwar period. Arriving in town around 1869, he first enjoyed some success as a saddle manufacturer, when he partnered with another ambitious German named B. Kemper, creating the firm of Kemper & Kohlhase. Their factory at Cumberland and Second Creek employed 27, making almost 100 saddles a day, and shipping them as far away as Galveston.
The dynamic young Kohlhase was so active in Knoxville’s German-speaking community that by the end of 1872, he was president of the Turn Verein, the publicly vigorous ethnic organization. At some point in his early 30s, he got more interested in the growing saloon business, and by the mid-1870s, he was operating a saloon on the busiest part of Gay Street, between Church and Clinch, advertising the best in imported wines, brandies, whiskeys, and cigars. By some accounts, it was the best saloon in town, and Herr Kohlhase himself became a Knoxville personality, a cheerful, personable, well-liked fellow.
Members of the Knoxville German Turn Verein associations featuring Charles Kohlhase, circa 1880. (Knoxville News-Sentinel, March 26, 1933)
In 1876, he heralded a new public amenity, Fairview Garden, said to be at the former residence of German immigrant Louis Gratz. On April 8, 1876, Kohlhase probably made new friends when he hosted a little spring festival in what was then a rural setting, where Kohlhase welcomed the public to a “Beer and Ice Cream Garden.”
Its location was described as located on a hill “north of the Railroad Depot, on the extension of Broad street.” Based on maps of the time, it was perhaps in the vicinity of what we now know as Fourth & Gill. Kohlhase at that time lived farther north, out in the country, the hilltop where WBIR is today. It’s even possible that was it. But it would make sense for it to be the precursor to Turner Park, established a few years later on the hill alongside Cecil Avenue. Omnibuses—horsedrawn carriages big enough to hold several revelers—left from the Lamar House on Gay Street.
Perhaps to allay any concerns about the nature of his downtown saloon business, which was most notable for whiskeys and brandies, and which occasionally witnessed violent altercations, ads for the park assured “No Intoxicating Liquors of any kind will be sold on the premises.”
Where his beer came from is not specified. His wife was in charge of the ice cream.
Open during the warmer seasons, Fairview Garden was the site of an elaborately colorful Maypole dance, which was then considered a German novelty, “in its perplexing mazes and entanglements … almost bewildering to the vision.”
In late May, 1876, this “German Festival” sounds like a bit of paradise. Amid “verdant lawn and beautiful shrubbery … Rustic summer houses have been erected, in which inviting retreats attentive waiters are ready to supply alike the cooling ice cream, sparkling lemonade, or foaming lager.” At 3:00 began the “sporting events”: a greased-pole climb, a sack race, a “Ladies Target Match” with rifles, a blindfolded pot-breaking competition, and dancing.
That summer brought more dancing, and “moonlight picnics.” The following year, as if to prove these Germans were Americans, now, they hosted a Fourth of July Grand Picnic with fireworks. Unfortunately, all the reporters said about the beer at the beer garden was that it was “excellent.”
Like all Edens, Kohlhase’s Fairview Garden didn’t last. By 1883, it was replaced by another German amenity: Turner’s Park, named not for someone named Turner, but for the Turn Verein. Its location, on Broadway along Cecil on the steep hill just across the street from what’s now the Broadway Shopping Center, is better known, but developed residentially in the early 20th century, no known trace remains.
By 1884, Kohlhase was serving as the Knoxville agent for Foss & Schneider, a Cincinnati brewery. Knoxville was growing fast, and its beer-drinking population was growing faster. By one estimate Knoxville’s demand for beer in 1884 was 12 times what it had been in 1874.
Convinced it was time for a successful Knoxville brewery, Kohlhase took over Shea’s old facility on Hardee Street. Until it got up and running, Kohlhase seems not to have advertised it much locally, but an article in Chattanooga’s Daily Times, run by young Adolph Ochs and his Bavarian-immigrant family, recently of Knoxville, offered some praise. “The Knoxville Brewery, is doing well making some of the finest beer to be had,” went the item in the late summer of 1884. “A number of our [Chattanooga] saloons are selling it.”
Later that fall, the Knoxville Daily Chronicle remarked on the fact that Knoxville was spending $60,000 on beer each year, and $50,000 of that was going to Cincinnati. But there was hope. “The Knoxville Brewery, operated by Kohlase and Kiehl in the old Shea Brewery buildings on Hardee Street, is making already a large quantity of the best quality of beer. They hope ultimately to keep a large amount of the enormous sum spent in other cities for beer at home.”
Kiehl, by any other spelling, is surely the “brewer” listed as “R. Kiel” and “Fred K.C. Kiel” in city directories for 1885. He may not have been there long, and is hard to trace today.
The enterprise’s public statements were more assured in 1885, advertising “Pure Export and Lager Beer” in bold letters. It seemed a promising venture, at first. The following March, the Daily Chronicle reported that “The Knoxville Brewery is on a big boom and running to its fullest capacity.”
Whether it was ever known formally as the Knoxville Brewery, Kohlhase eventually named his establishment East Tennessee Brewing Co., whether he was aware or not of Herr Kaldemorgen’s perhaps vaporous institution of the same name 20 years earlier. By referencing the region rather than the city, Kohlhase just wanted to expand the market. “The best water and grain in the world are from East Tennessee,” he stated. “I now offer to the trade East Tennessee Beer, health-giving and life-supporting.” He was willing to take trial orders, “so that those who use it may see the difference between my beer and that usually thrown upon the market.”
A week later, Kohlhase claimed that his brewery “is now in successful operation with a product that defies competition. I propose to sell to dealers and individuals the best beer of the world.”
Kohlhase’s East Tennessee brewery was a sizeable establishment, a two-story building long enough to cover several town lots, all alongside the busy railroad tracks. By May, Kohlhase was proposing an enlargement of the culvert by First Creek, a move apparently relevant to his manufacturing process. Kohlhase seems to have been optimistic about making it work until the summer of 1885 hit hard. Hot weather increases the demand for cold beer, as it makes the process of making it much more difficult. Once again, the Chattanooga Times picked up the story, perhaps with details that Kohlhase might not have volunteered to advertise at home: “The Knoxville Brewery quit brewing Saturday and will not commence again until October.” It quoted Kohlhase: “I found my cellar and vaults would not answer, and the amount of ice necessary to keep beer at the right temperature eat up the entire profits. I have about closed arrangements with one of the largest brewers in Cincinnati, who will put in ample money, and we will build a first-class brewery here, with capacity for supplying a very large trade in the South, and make beer equal to Cincinnati or Milwaukee.”
That seems to be the first suggestion of building a large, modern brewery in Knoxville. It was Kohlhase’s idea, and he seems to have expected to be part of it.
As it happens, it wasn’t a Cincinnati brewer who made it work, but another Ohio River group. In October, 1885, Kohlhase met with E. W. Herman of Louisville, Ky., and his associate, a brewer named Cornelius Eckert. “After pretty thorough investigation of the situation,” reported the Daily Tribune,” they have decided to join Mr. Kohlhase in re-establishing his brewery, and it is to be a first-class establishment.”
Edward W. Herman had been the well-known president of the Kentucky Malt House since 1875, but was interested in Knoxville’s potential. He became the president of a new company called the Knoxville Brewing Association. The following August, 1886, Herman’s KBA purchased a lot on the town side of Mechanicsville.
It was a choice piece of property at the edge of Mechanicsville, at the corner of McGhee and Chamberlain, near Second Creek, and with rail access. Originally it was just 150 feet of frontage on Chamberlain. Later, adding to it, it was 250 feet on Chamberlain by 250 feet on McGhee, 62,500 square feet. An acre and a half of central Knoxville was devoted to brewing beer.
The location of the East Tennessee Brewing Association, 1890 Sanborn Fire Insurance Map. (University of Tennessee Libraries Digital Collection.)
Although the late 1885 reporting implied that Kohlhase would be a partner in the brewery enterprise, it’s not clear to what extent, if any, the innovative Knoxville saloonkeeper remained in the picture. A later report, in May, 1886, states that the Louisville consortium was in town in May, 1886, and simply bought Kohlhase’s old brewery on Hardee Street, and apparently ran it for a while. According to one later memory, Herman associate William Meyer was already running the place on Hardee when “the creek got up and ran into the basement and ruined all the beer they had.”
In middle age, Kohlhase may have perceived that he was out of his depth in the high-volume brewery game. He’d had a tough year. In August, 1885, as some customers were arguing over a card game in his famous Gay Street saloon, one of them, a local attorney, knifed a stonemason to death. Because of the familiar prominence of Kohlhase’s saloon, the details were in the paper much more graphically than most saloon murders. After a mistrial, the case dragged on into 1886. Then Kohlhase’s wife came down with a “long and tedious sickness” that would result in her death.
The old Shea’s Brewery, still referred to by that name into the 1890s, was converted for use by an organization called the Lucien Oil Co., though it’s not clear that was completed. For a while, at least, in the 1890s, Martin Shea’s old beer expert, Louis Mankel, was running his all-purpose bottling factory at Shea’s old brewery.
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Kohlhase had in multiple advertisements extolled the advantages and virtues of Knoxville beer over Cincinnati beer. But during the summer of 1886, as Herman’s Knoxville Brewing Association was formed, the same Kohlhase had begun serving as the Knoxville agent for the Cincinnati beer made by Christian Moerlein, advertising them more emphatically than he had ever advertised his own products. “The best and purest beer made in this country!” his ads declared.
Meanwhile, as Herman led the most vigorous effort to create a Knoxville beer, he maintained his residence in Louisville. His two partners, William Meyer and Anthony Bindewald, both German immigrants, moved to Knoxville to supervise the big job. At first, the two bachelors lived together, in a residence near the brewery.
Originally from the Duchy of Baden, Meyer found his way into local German society, achieving the status of Assistant Dictator, then Dictator, of the Teutonic Lodge. He befriended several Germans, including familiar Market Square butcher Paul Macher, who was known to raffle off Christmas trees created entirely of dozens of links of sausage in multiple varieties.
Knoxville Brewing Company, circa 1890s. (Courtesy of Jack Neely).
The KBA’s four-story brick factory was built to impress, with a shiny corner cupola that appeared to be clad in golden armor, and it got more impressive as the years went by. Some of its walls were two feet thick. They could have withstood an artillery barrage, but their purpose was to keep important processes chilled, even in a Tennessee summer.
Because it was not on a major thoroughfare, many Knoxvillians didn’t notice the new brewery right away, but it was an easy springtime walk from downtown.
“A Journal man happened to be passing by the Knoxville Brewing Association yesterday and dropped in to make a few enquiries,” went the story in the May 21, 1887 issue of Capt. William Rule’s Journal & Tribune. “He was surprised to find such a well-equipped institution. There is probably no brewery in the state better arranged and better supplied with all the modern means of turning out a pure article of beer. They manufacture all their own ice on the premises, having one of the latest improved ammonia machines, and the juicy product of the malt enjoys all the varying temperatures which are so necessary to the brewing of the beers, from the boiling tubs to the ice-coated coolers in the fermenting room. It is gratifying to know, too, that the beer made by this firm is the pure article and that no poisonous drugs or deceiving sweets are admitted into the vats. Those who drink the beer of the Knoxville Brewing Association may rest assured that they have the pure extract of barley and rice malt flavored with the best American and German hops. The capacity of the brewery is 200 barrels every 24 hours, and if they keep on making the simon-pure article they now turn out, the probability is that they will not be able to supply the demand.”
The big factory employed “40 hands” and produced about 25,000 barrels per year for a regional market that crossed boundaries. At one time they claimed customers in six states.
It was soon claimed that the Knoxville Brewing Association facility was “the first union brewery”—presumably meaning it was unionized. During that prolific era for the national labor movement, it was a different meaning from the old Union Brewery of Sturm’s era.
The KBA’s castle and popular product was a local wonder, a pride and joy, for about half a decade.
A couple of years after completing the factory, Herman, the absentee president sold out to his partners, Meyer and Bindewald, and co-founded a brewery in Augusta, Ga. In early 1893, reportedly because of bad collections, and the national financial panic, the Knoxville Brewing Co. went bankrupt. As did several Knoxville businesses that dark year.
After bankruptcy of his Kentucky malt-beverage company, KBA’s first president, E.W. Herman, was in trouble by 1893 for fraud, and spent the next few years in court answering lawsuits from creditors in Louisville.
Anthony Bindewald, president of the Knoxville Brewing Co., was facing creditors here in Knoxville. Although he had previously announced that he expected to stay with the company through its crisis, he left in 1893, and joined Herman’s venture in Augusta. That left William Meyer as the only member of the original trio still committed to making beer in Knoxville.
***
It was a melancholy year for local beer brewers all around. Charles Kohlhase, no longer the charismatic and stylish restaurateur and saloonkeeper, the creator of Fairview Garden and its fondly remembered events, had fallen on hard times, in recent years running a less notable bar on far north central, near the city limit. After his wife’s death in 1889, he suffered an unnamed “protracted illness” that affected his mental state. In May, 1893, Kohlhase was the subject of an “inquisition of lunacy,” in which a Chancery Court jury found him “incapable of attending to business.” Two weeks later, he died, reportedly at the age of 50. Obituaries mentioned his saddle factory and his “whiskey business” on Gay Street, which was “once the most popular resort in town,” without a word about his briefly famous beer garden, or his pioneering brewery. According to his death certificate, Kohlhase died of cirrhosis of the liver.
In journalism of that era, memories are generally very short, but an article about the collapse of the original Knoxville Brewing Co. mentioned its origins in “the old Martin Shea brewery” 15 years earlier. Old Martin Shea himself had died just before Kohlhase, at age 85.
William Meyer, the brewing expert of that original Louisville triumvirate who had arrived in 1886 to build a small beer empire, remained to guide the brewery into whatever came next. He and his wife, Carrie, seemed content to stay, settling in at Richards Street, just around the corner from the glorious brewery. In early 1893, they had a son, and called him Billy.
The elder Meyer experienced some difficult times personally. In 1894, he was called to testify at the 1894 trial of his friend Paul Macher’s widow. She was charged with murdering her husband with rat poison.
Meanwhile, in the wake of the national economic collapse, the brewery was sold at a dramatic auction, bringing out several saloonkeepers and speculators looking for a deal. A fresh keg of Knoxville beer was tapped to lubricate the bidding. Most of the bidders were local, including former mayor S.B. Luttrell, but the winning bid went to a Louisville business run by Frank Senn, described as a “prominent brewery man of Louisville,” who announced their intention to keep brewing beer there, with most of the same personnel.
Unlike Herman before him, Senn moved to Knoxville in 1895. He became a notable contender in local bowling leagues, but may have become most popular for stories told about a bizarre incident late in his first Knoxville summer. He’d heard of a fabled bullfrog-hunting swamp nine miles west of town at Lones Springs; he and three male friends who shared a fondness for frogs’ legs drove a horse and wagon out there one late-summer night, with a lantern and a good supply of Knoxville beer. To wade in the marsh, they disrobed entirely, wearing only their straw hats, carrying nothing but a lantern and a canvas bags for frogs. When they emerged from the swamp, their horse and wagon, laden with all their beer and clothes, was nowhere to be seen. With no other options, the four naked men walked back to town barefoot, in some haste to arrive before daylight would expose them to the world. The horse and wagon was discovered by the property owner in daylight, safe but mired in swampy mud. The story seems to have delighted the Journal & Tribune editors, who ran it under the headline, “A Tale of the Marshes.”
Senn appears to have retreated back to Louisville at some point a few months after that incident, leaving his son, Matt Senn, in his place as titular president of NKBC.
Reorganized with different recipes and product names, the Knoxville Brewing Co. became the New Knoxville Brewing Co. in 1895. “With William Meyer, the celebrated brewmaster, and polite, genial Andy Rothman in charge of the office,” things were looking up, noted the Knoxville Sentinel in March, 1895. “It’s a good thing. Push it along. Everyone should call for Knoxville beer.”
NKBC was there for Knoxville’s boom years, when the city saw the construction of two grand new train stations, and the amazing new Miller’s Department Store, and the city’s first public general hospital, and the new Market Hall. The catastrophic Gay Street fire of 1897, after which all the ruined buildings were replaced with much bigger buildings. The early days of football. The construction of the Gay Street Bridge. The opening of Standard Knitting Mill. During the era of the New Knoxville Brewing Co., Knoxville expanded its boundaries beyond the downtown area and grew in population by about 50 percent.
Through it all, the big brewery at Chamberlain and McGhee was there, pumping out product, if not quite as much as they had in the late 1880s, likely as the result of the aggressive incursion of national brands like Budweiser, Schlitz, and Pabst, who were distributing and advertising in Knoxville by the 1890s, and hiring some Knoxville saloonkeepers as agents; some of them boasted of blue ribbons at big events like the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893.
And then there was an almost-local rival. Sixty miles due north emerged, suddenly, a new city called Middlesboro, Ky., intended to be an industrial paradise, launched by Scottish-born Knoxville industrialist Alexander Arthur. Among its new industries was the New South Brewery and Ice Co., founded in 1893. New South made much of its Knoxville connections. The brewery’s general manager, A.W. Schwane, kept a home in Knoxville during his first year in charge, and almost immediately New South established a cold-storage distribution center here, at the sharp intersection of Cumberland and Main. New South’s Knoxville agent was a prominent and colorful Irishman, Tipperary-born John Gleason. Former chairman of the Board of Public Works, Gleason had supervised some of the first viaducts built in the city, as well as some early sewage systems. Now in his mid-50s, Gleason remembered, if not always perfectly, Knoxville’s entire history of beermaking. He seemed determined to make New South seem just as local as New Knoxville. Both breweries participated in Gay Street parades with elaborate floats, and with its popular brands Pinnacle and Crystal Pale, New South constituted significant competition to the NKBC. The rivalry was not always a friendly one. NKBC sued New South on more than one occasion for various alleged infractions. New South hailed itself with a creative existential motto: “Time has no terrors for the women and men who drink Pinnacle Malt Extract.”
Around 1900, New South moved their Knoxville storage and distribution facility into a place with a fabled beer history. It was located alongside the site of the old Shea / Kohlhase Brewery, on old Hardee Street, then freshly renamed East Jackson. Using a Cincinnati architect, they built a facility for their purposes, including a stable for the horses needed for deliveries.
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Dan Dewine (1863-1927). (McClung Historical Collection.)
Less a threat, perhaps, but a growing phenomenon worthy of remembering, were Knoxville’s small breweries. The terms “microbrewery” and “brewpub” didn’t exist, ca. 1900, but the establishments themselves did. It’s unclear how many there were, but the best known may have been the Bowery establishment of Dan Dewine, the former cop and son in law of well-known Irish saloonkeeper Patrick Sullivan, who operated a saloon unusual for two features. One was that it was built directly over First Creek, with wood planking across steel beams. The other was that by 1900 or so, Dewine brewed his own beer. He sold beer in his saloon, but also sold growler jugs for home use. A few still exist today, as collector’s items.
Investing much of his saloon and beer earnings in real estate on the north side of town, Dewine would later be instrumental in establishing Knoxville’s first Catholic hospital, named St. Mary’s, in honor of his daughter, a talented singer who died young.
***
To compete with both regional and ever-growing national brands, NKBC kept making improvements, including higher-horsepower steam engines and, most impressively, a 2,100-foot artesian well in 1896 that pumped a reported 360 gallons per minute of cool, clean water into the big factory. The brewery offered two flagship beers, known as XX Pale and Export Lager, and a sales region that included six states.
They were proud of their product. The Knoxville Journal & Tribune hailed it in a headline as “THE BEST BEER ON EARTH!”
In 1899, Meyer’s NKBC introduced a dark Bock Beer that became the latest rage.
By 1901, the brewery was so busy that they couldn’t pump enough water to fill the demand, and tried to bore a second artesian well, but it encountered a shelf of subterranean rock; it’s not clear that it was completed.
Matt Senn, who’d been young president of New Knoxville Brewing in its final years, died—at age 38, not long after he returned to Louisville, reportedly of pneumonia.
After further problems, the company reorganized again in 1902, when three brothers from Pennsylvania’s Mount Pleasant Brewing Co.—Alva C., Emerson B., and John M. Cochran—bought most of the stock. They renamed the company East Tennessee Brewing Co.—the third time that name had emerged in Knoxville—and brought in a younger Prussian-born “master brewer” from Pittsburgh named Jacob Naas—presumably to replace William Meyer, who was then about 50.
Perhaps resenting the demotion, Meyer quit in 1903 to take over the Sheffield Brewing and Ice Co. in Alabama. He apparently thought better of it. After only five months in Alabama, he returned to be sales agent for the East Tennessee Brewing Co., now a soldier in the fort he used to command.
The new 20th-century regime expanded and improved the plant again, adding a boiler house and smokestack, electric lighting, and a new pasteurization system. Their brands then were Shamrock and Palmetto—beers named for plants not indigenous to East Tennessee, but “unexcelled in flavor and nutritious properties … commended by the medical profession.” Memories later claimed that at its height, the East Tennessee Brewing Co. was producing 40,000 barrels a year.
A rendering of the East Tennessee Brewing Company from “City of Knoxville, 1906,” promotional booklet. (McClung Historical Collection.)
Meanwhile, the Prohibition movement, which had been brewing for half a century, came to the fore. The temperance argument was simple: alcoholic beverages were destroying the American family and the male work ethic. It seemed easy to prove, when the city had a high murder rate. Most of the murders people heard about seemed to take place in downtown saloons, and drink played a role in countless stories of fractured families.
The Prohibitionists, led by the Women’s Christian Temperance Union—at a time when women weren’t even allowed in most saloons—were smart and determined. They could see through longstanding claims about good beer’s healthful reputation, as a cure for alcoholism. It was obvious that men got drunk on beer, too, and sometimes did silly, dangerous, and evil things. The capture of Wild West outlaw Kid Curry after he shot two policemen in a Knoxville saloon in late 1901 might have been the best thing that could have happened to the WCTU’s campaign; they repeatedly used it in their propaganda in years to come. Their aggressive and, considering that none of their members were permitted to vote, astonishingly effective campaign to ban all alcoholic beverages was changing Knoxville’s society and economy, as alcohol bans were catching on nationwide.
Knoxville had 106 saloons in 1907, and it’s safe to assume that most of them carried good local beer. But it was that year that Knoxville voters—all of them men—voted to close all of those saloons. Beginning in 1907, a “four-mile law” effectively banned alcohol sales, including beer, within four miles of the city. It allowed beer production to remain legal, at least for the moment.
Temperance Election, March 11, 1907, photographed by Jim Thompson. (Abby Crawford Milton Collection, McClung Historical Collection.)
The brewery at Chamberlain and McGhee remained in business, brewing beer that couldn’t be publicly served in its host city, for export to the diminishing number of places in the southeast where beer was still legal to be sold.
It was a tense time, and it sounds like there were some layoffs. In June, 1909, a brewery employee named George Welshouse, in the office of the morally embattled brewery, stood before a mirror in his office and shot himself in the head.
Now rivals were facing a common enemy. Sensing the writing on the wall, in late 1909, Middlesboro-based New South Brewery’s leadership made a poignant plea, published in the Knoxville Journal & Tribune: “Our brewery is an ideal one. Everything about it is as clean and neat as a pin. It is conducted entirely by German brewers—people who know every little detail that goes to make good beer. Our beer contains practically no alcohol—not more than 3.5 percent, just enough to aid digestion. The malt and hops act as a tonic. Good beer is the healthiest family beverage the world has ever known.”
Too soon, things tightened further on a statewide level. Commencing in 1910, a statewide ban on manufacture of alcoholic beverages ended the old brewery’s era of making real beer, legally at least. They tried to keep the vats churning with “temperance brews,” including one called Malt-a-Tonic, which was claimed to be medicinal, and a very low alcohol beer called Swanky, and one called Old Pal Cream Brew.
In 1912, state investigators proved the brewery was still making clandestine batches of real beer, and clamped down, further limiting what could be produced there. In 1915, a statewide “bone-dry law” ended the production of anything even resembling beer. Now run under the name Union Beverage Co., the company produced only syrup for a new beverage apparently concocted just to keep the old brewery going: Jitney Cola. Subject of several lawsuits, it lasted only a couple of years, but today Jitney Cola bottles are prized by collectors.
The distinctive building started a new era during World War I, producing something that had once been an essential rarity for beer brewing. It became an ice factory, known as Knoxville Ice and Cold Storage. For a while in the 1920s, its thick walls made it perfect factory for the Racy Ice Cream Co. For a while in the early 1930s, part of it served as a temporary dog pound.
But those who beheld the 1880s castle always called it “the old brewery.”
When master brewer William Meyer died at age 77 in 1930, at his home just around the corner from the old brewery, beer was still illegal in America, both to make and to purchase. He had come here back in 1886 to oversee the completion of Knoxville’s first big brewery, and was Knoxville’s most experienced beer expert. However, his obituary didn’t mention that he’d ever been a brewer—or a German, for that matter. In the short article about his death, Meyer was only a “retired businessman” who was the father of a notable baseball manager.
His son shared his father’s formal name, but he was better known as Billy Meyer. During the heyday of the East Tennessee Brewery, the boy was well known in Knoxville as a youthful baseball champion. While Knoxville beer was suffering its death throes, he was away from home, playing catcher for the Philadelphia Athletics. By the time of his father’s death, he was making a name for himself as a successful minor-league manager known for grooming the future stars of the big leagues.
Later still, he was manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Although the team drifted toward the bottom of the major leagues, Meyer made some key hires, including catcher Joe Garagiola. And he had a bitter argument with another son of a former Knoxville factory boss named Clarence Brown, over how his Pirates were portrayed in a popular movie called Angels in the Outfield. That’s another story.
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Around the corner from the Meyer home, the big relic stood there, as if waiting for a better day.
In February, 1933, when beer was still illegal, News-Sentinel columnist Bert Vincent strolled over to the old brewery and dropped in on “big, broad-shouldered, slow-talking Ernest Burkhardt,” the engineer who was only survivor of the brewery era still working in the old building, now the Knoxville Ice and Cold Storage building. “Every day or so, Burkhardt takes a cloth and goes back past the modern ice making machinery and polishes a wheel or a lever on an old Knoxville brewery engine. Back in the foamy, sudsy days of 25 years ago, wheels of this old engine hummed, and belts popped and slapped each other under Engineer Burkhardt’s watchful eyes, and upstairs big vats of beer foamed and bubbled, and there was a rich odor of hops and malt about the place.”
“Just me and the old engine left,” Burkhardt told Vincent, “and guess neither one of us will ever be the same again.”
In 1933, Prohibition’s repeal legalized beer in most of Tennessee. Although the old factory hadn’t produced beer for over 20 years, and pennants no longer flew atop its Victorian parapets, it was easy to imagine the local brewery would soon be back.
However, the first to try to bring beer back to Knoxville ignored the old brewery. That new group called Cumberland Brewing Corp., announced big plans in November, 1934. It appears to have begun as a national corporation with some St. Louis roots. Principal stockholders, they said, were in St. Louis, New York, and Atlanta, but they wanted the directors and some of the officers to be prominent locals. They chose Knoxville for this major brewery, they said, because the recent arrival of the Tennessee Valley Authority made Knoxville’s industrial future seem stable and bright.
Their aim was to use the recently defunct Littlefield & Steere Candy Factory on Tenth Street at Clinch, which they purchased in 1934, to make it the biggest brewery in the South, promising 100-200,000 barrels per year, several times the capacity of any brewery in Knoxville history. They’d already bought the necessary machinery, they said, and their license to make beer here was approved. Display ads appearing in early 1935 extol Cumberland Beer as if it was already in the stores.
Its local leaders, as announced, were Charles H. Bacon, president, a prominent textile-mill owner of 58 who lived in Loudon. Bacon Mills, in Lenoir City, was said to be the largest hosiery manufacturer in the South. The prospective brewery’s secretary-treasurer was Walter J. Bacon, 56, (no close kin to Charles), who had held the same office for Littlefield & Steere.
The St. Louis newcomers were Ewald Wintermann, 49-year-old vice president and general manager of the Cumberland Brewing Corp. He also had a brewery interest in St. Louis, and did most of the talking.
Also vice president was a St. Louis engineer, a refrigeration expert who had worked for Anheuser-Busch breweries, George E. Wells. He inspected the Candy Factory for its aptitude to house a major brewery, apparently approved it, and made preparations to install the machinery.
Most of those serving as directors were well-known Knoxvillians, including Nathan Kuhlman, son of a German immigrant and maker of candy and ice cream; Ben Winick, a respected attorney and perhaps Knoxville’s most prominent Zionist, already involved in efforts to create a state of Israel; and Gordon Chandler, insurance man and son of a prominent former police chief and politician. Chandler also happened to be the husband of Coca-Cola heiress Eugenia Williams. Their jazz-age marriage seems to have ended decisively soon after the brewery proposal went public.
Everybody was excited about Cumberland through the very end of January, 1935, when the company was advertising in big, bold letters: CUMBERLAND BREWERY – COMING SOON! A QUALITY PRODUCT.” After that, it’s hard to find a single mention of the project.
President Charles Bacon and his wife were both hospitalized with a serious illness that winter, but recovered. Perhaps the mostly unnamed big-city investors were discouraged by something in the national market and quietly pulled the plug. It was the Depression, after all. Also complicating things was that an old brewery with exactly the same name re-emerged in Maryland at about the same time.
For what it’s worth, Wintermann (1888-1974), a St. Louis businessman specializing in refrigeration, later married the daughter of Adolph Anheuser in 1942—making himself the grandson-in-law of Eberhard Anheuser, the co-founder of Anheuser-Busch. If that’s relevant to his role in stoking the dream of a Knoxville brewery, seven years earlier, it’s hard to say how.
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Once intended to be the biggest brewery in the South, the Candy Factory became an anonymous warehouse until it was reborn, 47 years later, as a central attraction in a world’s fair, and hosted a balcony amenity that served Miller’s Beer.
Meanwhile, not half a mile to the north, the stout old fortress once known as the Knoxville Brewery still weathered the years, housing only its small ice and coal company.
It hadn’t been forgotten. In late 1936, the News-Sentinel reported that “Explorations have shown that the walls and foundations of the old building are in excellent shape and ample for needs of a modern brewery.”
The occasion for that assessment came when a remarkable team of old brewers and their relatives got together and announced they were going to revive the old Knoxville Brewery. Among them were two of the Cochran brothers, A.C. Cochran, then 78, and E.R.; L.C. Sienknecht, a local automobile dealer of German parentage, then in his mid-50s; and Jacob Naas, the Pittsburgh hotshot brewmaster who had replaced William Meyer back in 1902. Now in his early 70s, Naas had been living in Norfolk in recent years, but expressed his willingness to return to Knoxville to do it again. Knoxville beer had died an untimely and unnatural death due to Prohibition, which was over, and there was every reason to believe that it could return, if done right.
It was mostly the cadre of Pennsylvanians who came together to modernize the factory as the East Tennessee Brewing Co. in the very early 20th century. However, in that group of revivalists was another familiar name from an even earlier era. By the 1930s, the name Charles Kohlhase was famous again, this time as the name of a brilliant kicker for the Tennessee Volunteers in the early Neyland days. He was perhaps the Vols’ last master of the drop-kick. He was a grandson of the immigrant brewer, who died before he was born.
However, the football hero’s uncle, Otto, remembered his German father and the heyday of Knoxville brewing. The 61-year-old was son of the first Charles Kohlhase, the visionary who had pictured a large, modern brewery here. Almost old enough to remember his father’s idealistic Fairview Garden, the family beer resort once famous for Maypoles and moonlit picnics, Otto had spent most of his own career in more practical pursuits, in the moving and storage and automobile businesses. But he was obviously interested in reviving his family’s legacy in beer production. Otto Kohlhase joined the Pennsylvania cadre as they inspected the old brewery, recently only the home of Knoxville Ice & Coal Storage.
Everything was looking up. They announced that they might open the old brewery as soon as May, 1937. But something went wrong. Some ante’d up, others didn’t. No machinery was purchased. When the brewery hadn’t opened by the end of 1938, some disappointed investors sued, alleging fraud. Even if no one was convicted of anything criminal, it was the end of that experiment. It was in the courts into the 1940s.
Having resettled back in Norfolk, the main brewing expert, Naas (or Nass) died in 1941, at age 75.
The sturdy old building stood there with only an ice company using part of it. By the early 1950s, it had been damaged by fire. Columnist Bert Vincent observed in 1952 that there was a cottonwood tree growing out of one of its once-stalwart walls. It attracted both vagrants and kids; that year a 9-year-old boy suffered a serious head injury in a fall from it.
A late-summer storm in August of that year blew off part the building’s distinctive Victorian cupola. J.P. Roddy, the rags-to-riches Coca-Cola magnate, announced that he was going to “modernize” the big building into a one-story warehouse.
But it was soon in the way of a highway project. At some point, it got flattened and forgotten. A few years ago, there were still substantial industrial ruins down on that Second Creek bottomland, and a few intrepid artisans who made their studios there. Today, this place near where McGhee Street crosses Second Creek, in another century an urban area dense with both factory yards and houses, is just the vacant and featureless underbelly to our convenient interstate system, beneath a long concrete swoop connecting Henley Street to I-40 East. At those times when no one’s looking, it tends to strike some vagabonds as a great place to camp.
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When it was torn down, though, the Knoxville Brewery may not have been our only brewery ruins. Believe it or not, “the old Shea Brewery,” as it was known when this “old brewery” was built, may still have been standing in some form.
The two-story building on East Jackson had seen lots of weather, over the years, since the spell between 1875 and 1886 that it had actually brewed beer for Shea and later Kohlhase. It was at least briefly Mankel’s versatile bottling plant, then in 1894, the bottling works of A.W. Schwane, who dealt in Schlitz Milwaukee Malt Extract, as well as Gerke Cincinnati Beer.
Another building alongside it served the Middlesborough-based New South Brewery & Ice. Co. until Prohibition. Then, the Purity Bottling Works, also owned by Gleason, made Gleason’s Ginger Ale there, including something called Coca-Ginger, “hot on one side, cold on the other.” After 1922, it was Elmore’s Milk Depot, which went out of business in 1930, after which it became the Nu-Grape Bottling Co., which also sold fresh fruit on the side, after which it housed a hand laundry, and later still, the Cookie Shoppe. It had periods of vacancy combined with periods as a warehouse for various distributors and manufacturers, as it stood alongside what was known to the Black community as The Bottom.
Images of it from the 20th century show its long side along Luttrell Street as opposed to East Jackson, perhaps suggesting that little of Shea’s old building remained.
By 1945, the structure belonged to the R.J. Quigg Chemical Co. , which manufactured chemicals used in the textile industry. It was there until at least 1975, when the third Mr. Quigg died.
By then, there was new interest in restoring old buildings in the Old City. But the excitement was a couple of blocks to the west, where Sullivan’s old saloon was getting sudden attention as a landmark.
The last-known beer-related building was vacant for some years, then disappears about the same time Luttrell Street does. It’s unknown whether some of the bricks and mortar of either East Jackson beer building were still in place when a new era started within shouting distance of the old Shea/Kohlhase brewery site. A couple of blocks to the northeast, local beer returned to Knoxville, after an absence of about 80 years, in the mid-1990s Ed Vendely and Al Krusen, who had a respect for history, commenced the new New Knoxville Brewing Co., in an old building at 708 East Depot. They borrowed some of the old logos, imagery, and brand names from the largest and most famous of Knoxville’s breweries, and began distributing an English ale he called Swanky. It won some awards, but that company, perhaps slightly ahead of its time, found it a challenge to convince Knoxville’s beer-drinking public that something manufactured in their hometown was worth drinking. Knoxville seems proud of itself and its products in the 21st century, but that wasn’t the case in the late 20th. Thousands of locals were happy to tell you they were perfectly content with their Bud Lights. Hence the new New Knoxville Beer didn’t last more than a few years.
In the ’90s, local beer struck some local consumers as a weird fad. Knoxville’s tastes sometimes seemed unyieldingly mainstream and bland. Still, the general idea caught on. In recent years, Knoxville has hosted as many as 20 independent local breweries at the same time, and most seem to produce and sell beverages of a quality those early guys with the mustaches and the foreign accents might be proud of. Maybe their tortured history of success and failure offers our talented hipsters a claim on authenticity.
By Jack Neely