The man who really started what’s now Anheuser-Busch: Part IV

The conclusion of a four-week series, deconstructing the origin story

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Last week, we left George Schneider in financial ruin and obscurity. Now we turn to the real man at the center of the saga.

Dr. Adam Hammer is who I believe was the actual founder of the Bavarian Brewery, the precursor of Anheuser-Busch. And even before he set up the business that would grow one day to be a brewing colossus, his life was fascinating.

By no means was every German immigrant to St. Louis a refugee from revolutions in Germany, but for Adam Hammer, flight from prosecution and imprisonment really was the major impetus for his voyage to the United States. And while many of St. Louis’ early brewers showed little interest in politics, Hammer’s story is intrinsically linked to both European and American progressive movements in the 1840s and 1850s. In addition to his political contributions, he helped to revolutionize and professionalize the field of medicine in St. Louis and America, making important discoveries in heart disease when he returned to the German Empire. On top of all these achievements, each of which would warrant fame, his business interests lay the foundations for what is now the largest multinational brewing corporation in the world.

Hammer was born in 1818—only a few years after the defeat of Napoleon—in the town of Mingelsheim. It was part of the Grand Duchy of Baden, which was one of the last German states to hold on to independence, only joining the Prussia-dominated empire in 1871. A graduate of the famous University of Heidelberg, the young Hammer studied literature as well as natural science and mathematics. He graduated from the university’s medical school and began his career in nearby Mannheim, but revolution called, and in 1847, the Sonderbund War in Switzerland drew Dr. Hammer into politics. Alas, his first foray fighting for greater representative democracy was a disaster; with his friend Friedrich Hecker, he fled to St. Louis, rightfully fearing the wrath of the Prussian King Frederick William IV, who had helped suppress their uprising in Mannheim.

Democracy in Germany would have to wait.

By 1850, Hammer had settled into private practice in St. Louis. The federal census that year provides a wealth of information about the doctor and his brothers, who also settled in St. Louis. Hammer was listed as 32 years old, working as a physician; his brother Charles was 25, working as a “soda manufacturer,” and his brother Philip, 20, was listed without occupation. A 20-year-old woman, Elizabeth Kritz, was also listed as living in the household; perhaps she was a servant. Adam’s wife Helena was not listed, but he was certainly married to her by 1851, because I found a legal contract bearing both their names, selling a Soulard vinegar factory and its whiskey barrels for $550 to John Wm. Kaeckell, an early business partner of Adam Lemp. Land speculation seemed to have been a common means of investing money, as two years later, on December 27, 1853, the couple sold a plot of land for $800 to Eberhard Anheuser—who would, of course, return to play a role in Hammer’s later life.

In the meantime, Hammer focused on the medical profession in St. Louis, which could be diplomatically described, before the arrival of German physicians, as slightly less than professional. In fact, a day of riots had broken out in 1843 when the public discovered the macabre disposal of cadavers at the city’s two medical colleges. In the words of one encomium concerning German medicine:

“…the American people owe them an enduring debt of gratitude not only for the first pioneers of medicine and surgery in this country, but for subsequent inspiration of true medical learning…”

Hammer’s first foray into establishing formal medical education came in 1855, when he opened the St. Louis College of Natural Sciences and Medicine. Unlike other medical “colleges” of the time, Hammer’s curriculum offered a broad range of courses in different subjects of epidemiology and anatomy, and at a time when even the best medical schools’ training last four months, his proposed course stretched for more than 18. Sadly, the school closed a year later, because his professors from Germany were not able to immigrate to St. Louis. But the idea of a professional medical college would stay in the back of Hammer’s mind.

In the meantime, the doctor had ingratiated himself in the German-American society that clustered along South Second Street, where the smell of hops from Adam Lemp’s and George Schneider’s breweries surely wafted through the air. Highly respected, Hammer was also famous for his mercurial personality, as Ernst Kargau would relate years later in The German Element in St. Louis:

“He was one of the best-known German doctors, and he could have been one of the most popular, if his eccentric, domineering nature and combativeness had not been in his way. He seemed, indeed not to feel comfortable if he did not have a feud with somebody and he did not care if this somebody happened to be a colleague or not. The doctor was a passionate nimrod, a great friend of music, a connoisseur of music, a good cellist, and a still better skat player. But he often could not find anyone to play with, for whoever could not trump his rudeness, and there were only few who could, simply could not play with him. However, incredible as it may sound, he could at times be very affable, if he was at the proper humor, but this did not happen very often. In his profession he did excellent work, particularly in surgery.”

An 1857 newspaper advertisement gives just one example of how Hammer’s surgical prowess turned to philanthropy and concern for the less-fortunate residents of St. Louis. On Elm Street between Fourth and Fifth streets, he had opened The St. Louis Eye Infirmary and Surgical Clinic for the Poor, advertising eye surgery and other services, all without charge. Hammer even offered free lessons to other doctors who wished to observe his ophthalmological procedures in person. The doctor may have had a few rough edges, but he was a dedicated philanthropist.

By 1857, though, we see Hammer lured by the prospect of the income of owning a brewery. These were heady times, and even the strangest candidates for brewery ownership took the plunge. (Heinrich Börnstein, a vegetarian, teetotaler, and former revolutionary who corresponded with Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx back in Europe, bought the old Peter Wenger Brewery for the simple reason that there was a tavern available on the first floor that held St. Louis’ German radicals newspaper, the Anzeiger des Westens.)

This is where the story gets murky. Was there some anonymous, rustic brewery that Hammer purchased and upgraded on the land that now holds the famous core of Anheuser-Busch? I found no evidence of one. There is no contract between the previous owners of the land and a brewery, and it might well be possible that Hammer raised the capital to open the Bavarian Brewery himself in 1857. A Sunday Republican article from 1858 includes the listing: “Bavarian Brewery, Dr. Hammer & Co. proprietors, established 1857….1,500 barrels of lager beer.”

There is no contract on record of Dr. Hammer purchasing the brewery from anyone else. And as mentioned in Part II, Hammer hired the brewer to operate the Bavarian Brewery in 1857; logically, if the doctor was setting up a brewing enterprise, he would need someone operate it. With Schneider penniless, it also seems logical that he’d jump at the opportunity to regain his financial footing by using his skills without having to generate capital to open his own brewery—something I suspect would be impossible after his highly publicized failures and frequent courthouse steps auctions. Kargau, who is meticulous about his recollections, makes no mention of Schneider previously owning the brewery when he mentions Hammer’s ownership.

The Daily Missouri Republican published an article on June 21, 1857, about the burgeoning brewing industry in St. Louis, and Dr. Hammer was listed as operating. A doctoral dissertation claims that Hammer advertised the formation of a partnership with Dominique Urban with an advertisement in Börnsteins’s Anzeiger des Westens on December 4, 1858, but I could not locate the advertisement, and I’m skeptical about the dissertation’s citations from German-language newspapers.

What is certain is that by 1859, “Hamer & Urban, ns. Arsenal bet 2nd Carondelet av. and 7th” as well as “Hammer & Urban, (Adam Hamer and ____ Urban) brewers, ns Arsenal, b. 2d Carondelet av. and 7th” appear in city directories, confirming the two men were in partnership brewing beer at the Bavarian Brewery on the future Anheuser-Busch site. There was also a listing for “Hammer, Adam, oculist, 61 Market; (and Hammer & Urban;) r. es Menard, b. Arsenal and Crit[tenden].” Apparently the doctor was keeping his medical career alive while venturing into the brewing business.

What can also be documented with certainty is that on September 14, 1859, Hammer and Urban took out a huge loan with the Bavarian Brewery as collateral. A host of businessmen loaned Hammer and Urban various amounts of cash, ranging from $250 to $4,725, with the expectation that they would be repaid with 10 percent interest. Eberhard Anheuser was in that list, loaning $4,235. And the collateral was the Bavarian Brewery along with its fixtures—not the land beneath it. That land was never owned by Hammer—or by George Schneider, for that matter.

I suspect such deals were made frequently, and often revolved around lunch at a German restaurant owned by Lewis “Hippo” Krug, where “much beer was drunk and much politics was discussed,” according to Kargau. Frequent participants with the German-language newspaper editors were “Papa Anheuser, […] Charles Eggers and others. When things became really animated one could be sure that Ferdinand Fuchs and Doctor Hammer were among the disputants,” Kargau reports. Perhaps it was during one of these beer-fueled discussions that Hammer arranged the loan.

His two largest lenders, Charles Eggers and Eberhard Anheuser, were certainly the right German-American businessmen to importune. When the Bremen-born Charles F. Eggers first appears in St. Louis in the federal census of 1850, he is a 24-year-old druggist, and he already possesses substantial wealth: real estate assets worth $15,400. His business partner, 41-year-old William F. Schuetze, owned real estate worth $18,000. They employed four German immigrants in their drugstore. By the 1860 federal census, Eggers was married with five children, and his fortunes had mushroomed. Now in the drug wholesale business, his real estate was worth $14,000 and his personal estate was worth $35,000. He had at least two employees.

Soap and candlemaker Eberhard Anheuser was much older, more settled into family life; in the 1850 federal census, he was already 44, married with seven children and a servant. While partnered with Lawrason Riggs in 1854, he lived on the west side of Carondelet Avenue (Broadway) between Park and Barry. In a 1859 city directory, his residence was listed as 84 Myrtle Street, in the heart of a prosperous German-American neighborhood. By then, Anheuser had partnered with Nicholas Schaeffer to create a huge soap and candle factory company, Schaeffer, Anheuser & Co, on Locust Street.

Schaeffer, Anheuser & Co. was a gigantic enterprise. The industrial census lay out statistics of what surely was one of the largest companies in St. Louis at the time, dwarfing all the city breweries. Schaeffer, Anheuser & Co. had $240,000 capital invested; around $630,000 worth of raw materials; a 40 horsepower steam engine; 7 hydraulic presses; 100 lard presses; 6 soap kettles; 5 lye kettles; 90 employees, payroll of $2,580 a month; over 4 million pounds of soap produced; and $661,640 worth of products manufactured annually. So Eberhard Anheuser probably didn’t break a sweat when making the loan to the Bavarian Brewery; his factory manufactured products in only two days equal to the amount of money he lent Hammer and Urban.

Likewise, it probably would have taken about an hour for Anheuser to generate the income to repay the mechanic’s lien that Hammer and Urban found themselves served with on October 22, 1859, one month after taking out their loan. The construction firm of Garlicks, Beck and Fisher had not received payment of $74.50 for their work on machinery in a “brick and frame brewery,” described in court filings as the Bavarian Brewery on the Lami Tract, that would become the heart of Anheuser-Busch. (Unfortunately, much of the handwriting in the mechanic’s lien is illegible, but the word “hoist” can be made out, perhaps describing a mechanism for lifting hogsheads of beer out of the cellars.) Already, Hammer and his new business partner Dominique Urban were having trouble operating the brewery as partners.

A notice of default on the September 14, 1859, loan was filed on January 14, 1860, and the document contains a startling revelation: Hammer and Urban had already given up trying to pay back the loan on October 18, 1859, just one month after they signed for it. The auction on the courthouse steps happened 10 days later, on October 28, 1859, and three bidders emerged with the highest bid of $9,077: Eberhard Anheuser; John E. Schuetze and Charles Eggers, acting together as business partners; and Charles Gottschalk. Each of the three parties received one-third of the brewery ownership, including all the buildings, equipment, horses, wagons, and 600 barrels of beer in the cellars. So the business had definitely been brewing—beer as well as trouble.

The whole situation is rather strange, but one thing is certain: The three parties acquired that brewery for a fraction of the cost of setting it up themselves. Eberhard Anheuser made a shrewd business decision that carried only the slightest financial risk to his own fortunes.

Interestingly, just as Anheuser would later do with his son-in-law Adolphus Busch, he allowed his new young partner Charles Gottschalk to take the lead in running the brewery. Indeed, a Daily Missouri Republican article from May 30, 1860, half a year after the takeover from Hammer and Urban, lists the enterprise as “Bavarian Brewery, Arsenal between 7th and 2nd Carondelet” Gottschalk & Co. 2,700 lager, 500 common beer.”

The partnership had begun in time to be recorded in the 1860 industrial census:

“Gottschalk & Co., Beer and Brewery; $8,000 capital and monetary investment; 2,500 bushels of barley, 3,000 bushels of hops, 1,500 bushels of coal, valued at $2,500, $500 and $150 respectively; 40 horsepower steam engine; 4 male employees, payroll of $30 a month; annual production of 600 barrels of ale valued at $4,800, 400 barrels of (lager?) beer valued at $2,400”

The common belief that the Bavarian Brewery had been falling behind its competitors at the time seems to hold true, compared to Adam Lemp’s Western Brewery in the 1860 industrial census:

“Adam Lemp, Brewery; $30,000 capital and monetary investment; 10,000 bushels of barley, 10,000 bushels of hops, 5,000 bushels of b. coal, valued at $7,000, $1,500 and $550 respectively; 9 male employees with a monthly payroll of $270 annual production of 2,000 barrels of beer valued at $12,000 and 3,000 barrels of ale valued at $24,000.”

Charles Gottschalk was a highly respected member of St. Louis society by the time Anheuser went into business with him to take on Lemp and other successful brewers. By the age of 34, Gottschalk had already become the City Registrar, and he held $16,000 in real estate and $5,000 in personal estate. He lived with his 24-year-old second wife, Julie, who, like him, was from Prussia, and they were raising three children, two of them from his first marriage. He was also successful enough to take care of his 65-year-old father, Friedrich Abraham Gottschalk. The first president of the Washington Fire Insurance Company, he was involved in singing societies and made himself available to meet with constituents at Soulard Market. Kargau speaks highly of him:

“One of the best-known Germans of his time was Charles W. Gottschalk. In his younger years he was a watchmaker, and on Carondelet Avenue had a jewelry store between Barry and Marion Streets. In 1859 he was elected city registrar, and then represented the second ward for several years in the city council. He was a stern opponent of all limitations of personal freedom. When he passed away in the later sixties the German element suffered a great loss.”

Life went on for Adam Hammer as well, and while he may have failed at operating a brewery, his career afterward was one of distinction. Anheuser-Busch’s roots in the historic Bavarian Brewery lie not in the myriad failings of George Schneider, but in the story of a freedom fighter, abolitionist, philanthropist and medical pioneer. After settling his affairs with his creditors, Hammer picked up his earlier pursuits. In an 1860 city directory, he was listed as a physician at his newly-founded Humboldt Institute on the east side of Ninth Street between Market and Walnut, and his residence was on the north side of Crittenden near Second Carondelet Avenue—right where documents tell us that his wife sold property to the expanding Anheuser & Co. Brewery.

In the 1860 federal census, Hammer is listed 41 years old, the proprietor of the Humboldt Institute, with personal assets of $250. His wife Helena, 34, like many Germans in St. Louis, was listed as born in Hesse-Darmstadt. The Humboldt Institute held classes in German, illustrating the prominence of Teutonic education and economic power in St. Louis. (The Institute later switched over to English language instruction and continued until 1869.)

The outbreak of the Civil War gave Adam Hammer a powerful new focus—and the Union’s enemies a formidable foe. Since the Humboldt Institute’s students were German, the pugnacious doctor enlisted their help as the fate of St. Louis hung in the balance, with pro-Union and pro-Confederate factions angling for control of the strategically important Federal Arsenal. It sat just downhill from the Bavarian Brewery and the doctor’s house, which he’d turned into a fortified guardhouse overlooking the stockpile of weapons. The details are hazy and perhaps apocryphal, but in The German Element in the United States, Albert Faust claims Dr. Hammer and his students packed some of the Arsenal’s weapons in beer barrels and whisked them to safety. However, Heinrich Börnstein, editor of the Anzeiger des Westens, claims in his autobiography that he saw the weapons loaded en masse onto a steamboat at the docks of the Arsenal. Regardless, Dr. Hammer used his former military experience to help keep the City of St. Louis safely in Union hands in the critical early months of the war.

Hammer also served with distinction as a surgeon, first in the field, rising to the rank of captain, and then at the Marine Hospital, which had been requisitioned by the Union Army. According to Kargau, he was the chief surgeon, and would have been able to commute easily from his house. Like many German Americans, he supported the abolition of slavery, and he and his colleagues were Radical Republicans pushing for emancipation. No doubt the victory of the Union in 1865 served as personal vindication for Hammer, after his earlier defeats fighting for democracy and freedom in Europe.

After the Civil War, Dr. Hammer got back to civilian life. By the 1870s, he’d moved to South Fifth Street near Cerre Street. He’d also resumed his old habit of interpersonal conflict, stirring up dissent in the Liederkranz Society; many the members quit after an effort to expel him failed. Around this time, he was invited to the home of an old investor in his brewing venture. On November 17, 1876, the society pages of the Daily Missouri Republican reported that Dr. Adam Hammer had been invited to, and had attended, the surprise seventieth birthday party of Eberhard Anheuser. If there had been any bad blood, and I suspect there had not, it was certainly gone sixteen years after the doctor had defaulted on his loan.

As well as offering free medical services to poor residents in St. Louis, Hammer also took the opportunity to travel back to the now-unified German Empire in 1876, where he made a critical discovery in our understanding of heart disease, an advance for which he is now largely forgotten. As Dr. Arthur Gale recounts, Hammer performed an autopsy on a recently deceased 34-year-old man and made a startling discovery that confirmed the German physician’s earlier hypothesis. The deceased’s coronary artery had completely clogged, cutting off the flow of blood to the heart and causing the man’s death, in a process called coronary infarction, or as we usually call it today, a heart attack.

Hammer soon found himself back in the German Empire permanently, disillusioned after 27 years in America. The election of 1876 is now largely forgotten, but when Democrat Samuel Tilden won the popular vote but lost the electoral college to Republican Rutherford B. Hayes, it was too much for the aging doctor. He left St. Louis forever on April 20, 1877. After settling in Wiesbaden, he lived only one more year, dying August 4, 1878.

So, this is where we are left. There is no evidence that supports George Schneider founding the Bavarian Brewery in 1852. There is plenty of primary-source documentation that he was instead embroiled in severe financial troubles involving his Washington Brewery, beginning in1852. There is no documentary evidence that anyone owned the Bavarian Brewery before Dr. Adam Hammer, who owned the small enterprise in 1857. There is of course a small chance that it existed before that time, and I welcome anyone to produce the evidence for a previously unknown owner or founder—but the brewery certainly did not date back to 1852. The newspaper article from 1858 saying it was founded the year before is compelling evidence for the 1857 date.

Finally, no self-respecting German brews beer in a shack over a hole in the ground!

In my opinion, Anheuser-Busch can be proud of its true roots in Dr. Adam Hammer and discard the hapless George Schneider from its history. Though possessing an irascible personality, Hammer proved to be a true leader in St. Louis history. He revolutionized medicine in St. Louis. He served the poor and indigent. He made important discoveries about heart disease. He fought tirelessly, alongside his fellow German Americans, to keep Missouri in the Union. He worked diligently for the emancipation of African Americans from slavery.

That’s quite a legacy.

Afterword: A note on title searches for the Anheuser-Busch property

In order to see if the title of the original core piece of property on Pestalozzi Street, where Hammer and Urban’s brewhouse was located, would reveal any pertinent information about the founding of the Bavarian Brewery, I traced the property’s ownership to 1812. The first known owners of the property, part of the Lami Tract, were James and Isabella MacKay, who sold it to John Long for $250 on November 27, 1812, when the land was still part of the Louisiana Territory. The transaction was witnessed by Justice of the Peace Thomas Sappington and recorded by P. LeDuc. The area was so rural at the time that the sale used trees, boulders, and other natural features to define the plat of land.

The property then came under the ownership of L. Hardage Lane, who retained title through the 1850s. Much of what we know about Lane’s ownership comes from his last will and testament, which names the tract as the “Hardage Lane Subdivision of the Lami Tract.” On July 9, 1863, Eberhard Anheuser, William D’Oench, and Adolphus Busch purchased the land from Lane’s estate. On July 15, 1876, Adolphus and Lily Busch transferred their personal ownership to Anheuser-Busch. The land has not left the control of the Anheuser-Busch Brewery since that date.

At no time did George Schneider, or Adam Hammer for that matter, own the property under which the historic core of Anheuser-Busch now stands. This was not uncommon; Adam Lemp did not purchase the property under his Western Brewery until many years after his business was successfully established. Primary sources show Hammer operating a brewery on the site; we have none for Schneider.

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