Photograph by Thomas Easterly, Missouri History Museum
The St. Louis Courthouse, showing the original portion and unfinished new wing, 1851
Adam Lemp was doing well for himself in the first two decades of his time in St. Louis. His brewery and vinegar business were growing, and his real estate holdings in the St. Louis Commons were generating large amounts of capital that could be used to expand his primary investments. Memories of bankruptcy and flight from debt back in Eschwege must have seemed like a distant memory. But court records reveal that some of Lemp’s old habits had followed him from Germany. Despite all his success, he could not prevent himself from getting sued for some of the strangest and most trivial offenses.
The lawsuits, which made their way all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court on appeal, reveal fascinating and important details of his business, including key historical moments in the history of the Western Brewery. But they also reveal a man who found himself in legal trouble over insignificant amounts of money compared to the vast wealth he was accumulating. What is also interesting is how advanced the Missouri legal system had become just two or three decades after statehood, and how at least white men could expect their rights to be enforced in early America.
Despite abandoning his second wife, Justina, the same year as she gave birth to their second son, Jacob, the future William J. Lemp Sr., Adam Lemp clearly had never forgotten about him. So when a fellow Hessian, Charles Streiblein, was going back to Kassel, the capital of one of the two major halves of the German territory of Hesse, to retrieve his own family, Lemp asked him to bring back William. According to a power of attorney the two signed, William was still known as Jacob in 1846. It sounds simple enough, but complications quickly arose when Streiblein reached Kassel. First, the walk to Eschwege, where Justina and William lived with her new husband, was eight hours (10 hours today, according to Google Maps). Despite popular images in American Western movies, most people could not afford horses in the 19th century, and Streiblein was forced to walk to and from the small town in what was a then–poverty-stricken region of Germany.
Even worse, and not factored into the contract and power of attorney Lemp and Streiblein signed back in St. Louis, there was no contingency for what happened next. Justina refused to release Willian into the custody of Streiblein. He tried several more times, even finally traveling by coach on one occasion. Upon Streiblein’s return to St. Louis with his own family, Lemp refused to pay him the $100 that he had promised, arguing that he had been unsuccessful. Streiblein sued, arguing that no one had told him that Lemp’s ex-wife was going to refuse to let William go, and after a jury trial, won $75 in damages.
Lemp would not let the matter go and appealed all the way to the Missouri Supreme Court, basing his appeal on the definition of a German verb in the original power of attorney. Does abzuholen mean to fetch or to obtain, the Anglophone Supreme Court justices mused. This raises an interesting question: Did either Lemp or Streiblein even speak English at the time of the original legal agreement? When did, or did Lemp ever, learn English? Contemporary commentators spoke about how walking down Second Street, where the brewery was located, one only heard German being spoken.
Regardless, Lemp lost on appeal and had to pay Streiblein the $75. It seems only fair, in my opinion. Walking eight hours in one direction to a small town, only to discover that no one bothered to tell Streiblein that Lemp’s ex-wife had not agreed to let William go to America? He also tried repeatedly to convince Justina to change her mind. Lemp was making deals worth thousands of dollars, and his appeal must have cost far more than simply paying what he had agreed to in the first place.
In 1851, a grand jury indicted Lemp for selling a “gill,” which is about a fourth of a pint, of whiskey to Francis Jones (a liquor control agent?) against “the peace and dignity of the State” on July 6, a Sunday. Lemp was bailed out for $100, guaranteed by his friend and former business partner Louis Bach and released. He was also additionally charged with selling liquor without a license—why he had no license while operating a notable brewery in the middle of St. Louis is not known. Lemp was found guilty and immediately appealed the verdict.
Lemp claimed in his appeal that he manufactured only beer and ale, and only sold those beverages. The testimony veers into the bizarre; Jones claims that beer is liquor, and a discussion ensues about the relevance of whether the hops and barley for the brewing of the beer was grown in Missouri or not. Luckily, logic prevailed. The judge intervened and instructed the jury to disregard the beer’s ingredients and to assume the beer was an intoxicating beverage.
He lost on appeal. The Missouri Supreme Court ruled that the jury instructions were correct. We never find out exactly where the hops and barley came from.
In 1852, Ernest Schnur sued Lemp for unpaid wages of $148.62 for work as a brewer over the course of 1850 and 1851. Interestingly, as we saw with the Bavarian Brewery, the going rate seems to have been $500 a year for a brewmaster to work on contract at a St. Louis brewery before the Civil War, and the contract between Lemp and Schnur paid the latter that much for a 12-month tenure. Lemp stated in testimony that he had paid Schnur the $500 up front, but Schnur was suing for wages that he had earned past the expiration of the first 12-month contract. However, Schnur left before the end of his second one-year contract was complete, therefore voiding the contract, in Lemp’s opinion.
The plot thickens, however, when Lemp made accusations that his brewer had been brewing inferior-quality beer. While Schnur admitted to brewing 20 barrels of bad beer, he also said that such mistakes were covered in his employment contract and he was not liable for damages. The jury found for Schnur, awarding the lost wages of $148.62.
Lemp appealed, and the testimony reveals some interesting aspects of the workings of the Western Brewery. We learn that his business partner, John William Kaeckell, most likely left the partnership with Lemp around 1850, which is consistent with his legal problems discussed last week. For the sake of the appeal, the date of ending of the partnership is of critical importance, for reasons that are not completely clear. Perhaps Kaeckell (whose last name makes yet another permutation spelled as “Kaegle”) wanted to be immune from liability from having to pay Schnur back pay.
The appeals court granted Lemp a new trial in 1853 due to faulty jury instructions. However, the results were the same: While Schnur had quit his job without cause as brewer at the Western Brewery before his contract was complete, he was still entitled to the wages for the period he had worked before leaving.
Also, in 1853, Lemp was the plaintiff for once, suing a Frederick Pfund for a breach of contract for having not paid him $500. Pfund, however, argued that he had already purchased Lemp and John William Kaeckell’s vinegar factory back in 1851 for $1,000, with the agreement that the latter would stop manufacturing once he gained possession of their business. But before Pfund knew it, Lemp and Kaeckell continued to produce vinegar, in violation of the contract, under the Lemp name, which, in his mind, invalidated the contract he signed with them. This time, Lemp prevailed in court, and it was the defendant Pfund that appealed the verdict of $577.60. The verdict was sustained by the Missouri Supreme Court; their reasons are not clear, as the handwriting of the decision is so atrocious as to be illegible.
Another unforced legal error came when Lemp sought to save a few dollars on salvaging some fence after selling land in the Lemp Cave property in the St. Louis Commons. Lemp had made a savvy business decision in buying the entire southeastern quadrant of Block 52 when the City of St. Louis was divesting itself of the old French colonial common fields and was now making a handsome profit selling off the individual lots at a premium. A series of auctions, preserved in several dozen contracts, show he made thousands of dollars of pure profit in 1855 off a small upfront investment in the 1840s.
The lots that now make up the property known as the Lemp Stables were sold in 1855 to Edward Hasse. We know from old advertisements that Lemp and his business partners had tried to get into the wine business, at one point even trying to hire a vintner in German-language newspapers. While that venture never seemed to take off, the fruit trees and grape vines that Christopher Huth had planted were still growing on the property when it was sold in 1855, though half of the lots were a sinkhole, still visible in Compton and Dry’s 1876 Pictorial St. Louis. For legal and practical reasons, since cattle grazed unfettered in the commons, Lemp had enclosed his property in a fence.
Lemp, obviously not consulting a lawyer first, ordered one of his employees to pull down the fence surrounding the apple orchard and grapevines after he had closed on the deal with Hasse for the property for $2,400. As might be expected, hungry cattle, as well as humans, according to the lawsuit Hasse filed against Lemp, proceeded to wander onto the property, devouring everything in sight, destroying the fruit trees and grapevines, valued at $500.
Lemp argued in court that his sale of the property did not include the fence and that no one should have assumed that the valuable improvements to his property were included in the price. He even tried to play dumb, saying that he had no knowledge of there even being a “sturdy fence” surrounding the property at the time of the sale to Hasse. Lemp lost the argument; the jury found in favor of plaintiff Hasse and ordered Lemp to pay damages of $500 plus court costs for the destroyed apple, pear, and plum trees and missing fence. It didn’t help that Lemp’s employee, Christopher Luhn, who had been instructed by Lemp to tear up the fence, testified under oath that he had done so. So much for the fence not existing.
The value of the lumber in the fence Lemp had ripped out that caused $500 worth of damage to the orchard was placed at $7. He lost on appeal to the Missouri Supreme Court.
It’s worth noting that we have the United States Federal Census from 1850 and 1860 to give us an understanding of Lemp’s financial situation during this decade of legal troubles. In 1850, he was worth at least $40,000, and likewise in 1860, he was worth around the same amount, though his brewery had increased in value. Why was Lemp so unwilling to simply part with less than $100 to avoid conflict, instead choosing to press his luck in civil court, losing almost every time? It was not for want of having friends in the legal profession; the many extant real estate and business contracts show that he had many friends, both English and German American, that could provide advice, and likewise, he was able to hire attorneys for all of his trials and appeals. It seems, for all Lemp’s success in America, there was a complexity to his character that simply drew him to argue over trivial matters.
