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Photography by Jason Gray
The back of the new stock house
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Photography by Jason Gray
A detail shot of the new stock house
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On Sunday morning, July 29, 1906, the Lemp Brewery placed a want ad in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch for 50 wreckers to report Monday morning at the malthouse. Dating back to the early 1870s, it was the oldest building on the brewery grounds, and now was the time for it to make way for progress. With the newly upgraded capacity of the state-of-the-art grain elevator, the latest technology from General Electric and new innovations in malting, the Lemps wanted to revolutionize the critical step their beer’s ingredients took before heading to the brewhouse.
Perhaps what is most unique of all the major capital improvement Billy Lemp and his family took in the years after his father’s suicide is that the new malthouse is the same dimensions and appearance as the 1870s building it replaced. In fact, some sources still list it as the original structure, though we know better due to primary sources such as the American Brewers’ Review and General Electric’s employee newsletter, which clearly state the building was built from the ground up, reusing the cellars of the former malthouse. In fact, I suspect the building permit from September 12, 1906, listed as “Alter brick malt house,” with costs of $3,500 contracted to Hartmann Bricklaying and Construction may very well have represented the costs of either demolition or the buttressing of the old cellars in preparation of new construction.
The building permits, up to this point accurate and afterward again so, become murky as to the exact cost for the new malthouse. There is a permit to “reconstruct a stock house,” for $35,000 with the Gilsonite Co. filed on November 14, 1907. Perhaps this is for the reconstruction of the malthouse, or more likely, city building permits are simply incomplete. Regardless, the descriptions and photographs reveal a fascinating look inside the malting process in an early 20th-century brewery.
The Lemps had already been using pumps for decades in a process known as “racking” where the malt and mash would be forced through pipes throughout their brewery building and cellars. But what is so remarkable about the new pumps installed in 1907 is their sheer size, their reliance on electricity, and how modern they were. Steam power was now clearly obsolete. I will not go into too much jargon and statistics about the new capacity of the malthouse, but rather let the photographs, many of which have not been published in over 100 years, speak for themselves. There also seems to have been some updates to the pumps in the brewhouse for the moving of mash. As a reminder, the malt house was where the Lemps would slowly coax their barley to begin growing, cracking open their husks, then arrest their growth, providing sugars for their hungry yeast to eat later on in the fermentation process after being brewed into a mash in the brewhouse.
Not surprisingly, considering the new demands for electricity, The American Architect and Buildings News and The Daily Bulletin of the Manufacturers’ Record both announced in the late 1907 that Lemp architect Guy Tyler Norton was planning a new power plant with an estimated price tag of $200,000, which at face value was the most expensive building the brewery had ever commissioned. We can assume that Norton designed the building in collaboration with General Electric engineers, who customized their machinery to the Lemp Brewery’s needs. On August 23, 1909, a permit for the iconic smokestack was issued for $24,000 to be constructed by C. Hansen. A few months later, on October 4, 1909, the permit for the foundations for the power plant itself for $8,500 was issued to Hoffman-Hogan. And then finally, on December 1, 1909, the familiar construction firm with ties to the Lemp Brewery, Hartmann Bricklaying and Construction, was issued a permit to erect a “1st Class 3-Story Boiler House” for $65,000. Since these totals do not add up to the earlier reported price of $200,000, I assume the difference can be accounted for in the price of the boilers and other General Electric machinery. Also, one should note that Billy Lemp was going through his divorce from Lillian Handlan at the time, and the courtroom drama did not seem to be affecting brewery construction or operations.
Construction on the new power plant obviously continued into 1910, as other trade journals reported that Norton was continuing to work on its design, but the Lemps were not resting on their laurels. Already they were ordering their brewery architect to design the last major building to ever be built in their name, the New Stock House, which sits at the end of DeMenil Place and Cherokee Street.
The New Stock House is a massive, towering edifice that has sadly been altered by the addition of windows in its upper floors during its ownership by the International Show Company. Regardless, we can still see Billy Lemp and his family were seeking to push the family brewery into a new era with capacity to store huge amounts of finished beer, with new tunnels that would take their product over to the bottling plants to the east. The foundations constructed by Goebel, which cost $8,000 according to their building permit dated July 5, 1911, go down deep into the earth. The footings are also interesting in that they are poured concrete, and one can even see how the wreckers cut out the old stone foundations of the original offices, which were demolished, so the new foundations could be constructed. The stock house then rises for seven stories, and the white glazed brick walls on the interior are preserved. Again, Hartmann Bricklaying and Construction returned to erect this design by Norton, according to the Western Contractor, at a price of $78,000. Of course, since the original offices had been demolished, the Lemp Mansion was now deputized for company operations, and a buildings permit, dated November 8, 1911, reveals the family constructed the famous three-story vault for $1,300, reflecting the house’s new role in brewery operations.
But there is one last detail hiding in plain sight, besides the massive million dollar investment (confirmed by the General Electric article) in their brewery the Lemp family undertook in the years leading up to Prohibition, that bears mentioning. Looking at the south side of the New Stock House, it becomes glaringly obvious that this is a temporary wall—one whose existence has now extended to over a century. Also, looking down the alleyway in between the malthouse and new stock house, we realize the brewhouse sticks out incongruously compared to newer buildings—the replacement would have been set back like the rest of the buildings on the alleyway. Beyond a doubt, the Lemps were planning to reconstruct and expand their brewhouse in preparation for the next generation of their family business—hence the temporary wall on the New Stock House which lies in front of it. It all makes sense in line with their expanding the capacity of the other buildings in the brewery. But then Prohibition came and ruined everything. Billy Lemp was not despondent at letting his brewery fall into obsolescence; quite to the contrary: He was resentful at having spent so much of his family’s fortune in upgrading a brewery that had become unusable overnight on January 17, 1920. A million dollars wasted.
