I’ve been learning not only where the bodies are buried, but where all the old contracts in St. Louis are kept. And those documents tell us more about the three wives of Adam Lemp, founder of the dynasty that turned a small brewery on the Levee into one of the largest brewing companies in St. Louis (before Prohibition).
Courtesy of the Missouri History Museum
Illustration of William J. Lemp
There is a mountain of historical documentation for William J. Lemp, the son of Adam’s second wife, Justina Baum, who was abandoned in Eschwege when her husband fled to St. Louis. There is a fair amount of information about the stepdaughters of the third wife, Louise Bauer. But there is very little evidence about German-born Johannette, the daughter of the first wife, Anna Clermont. A newly discovered contract reveals what happened to that branch of the brewing empire.
Johannette would move to America as well, and she’d marry a man named Justus Brauneck and bear a child named Charles Brauneck. As I’ve mentioned before, Charles would move to St. Louis, no doubt drawn by the success of his grandfather Adam, and marry Albertine Ernst. Both Charles and Albertine would succumb to infection in 1870. But while I originally wrote in 2017 that Albertine appeared to be have been buried in an unmarked grave in Calvary Cemetery, I’m no longer so sure. A Post-Dispatch article last fall revealed that archdiocesan officials removed thousands of gravestones from unkempt graves in the mid-20th century, so it is possibly that Albertine Brauneck’s own stone was removed at that time; there’s just no way to know. I do know, however, that she was denied the right to be buried next to her husband by the Lemp family and instead buried in a grave that cost only $13.
The greater shock lies in a document I recently discovered, a contract that reveals the paltry amount with which William J. Lemp bought out Charles Brauneck, his half-nephew, in 1864. Adam Lemp had bequeathed 50 percent ownership of the brewery to Charles and the other 50 percent to William. When Adam died, on August 23, 1862, the two heirs quickly got to work running the operation. Probate records even include a request to release beer from the cellars so it could be sold before going bad. The new contract also reveals that Charles and William set up a copartnership, based on their inheritance from their grandfather and father, on October 25, 1862. Already on that date, however, there were signs that it was not going to be a fully equal partnership, however, as the name chosen was “William Lemp & Co.”
The contract shows that William Lemp completed his conquest of his father’s brewery when his half-nephew signed away his interest for only $12,000, of which $3,000 was to be paid immediately. The partnership was dissolved on February 11, 1865, the date of the contract’s signing. Promissory notes of $3,000 apiece were to be paid every year thereafter until the full $12,000 was satisfied. William was interested in removing Charles from the picture as soon as possible, as he’d already begun constructing the new brew house on Cherokee Street the year before.
Regardless, while $12,000 was a good sum of money back then, it was a pittance compared to what Charles could have made, had he held onto his 50 percent stake and lived past 1870. (Besides, the health problems that brought him an early death may have been exacerbated by a lack of money.) Granted, a successful brewery employed a worker for about a $1 a day, so even $3,000 a year left Charles and Albertine in good financial status. But they had squandered their money by their deaths, judging from their ostensible lack of financial means in 1870.
William J. Lemp, by comparison, was doing quite well for himself in 1870, six years after buying out Charles Brauneck. According to the industrial census of St. Louis in that year, the Lemp Brewery now had a capital investment of $150,000, 28 employees with annual wages of $28,000, and raw materials worth $196,650, and it had brewed 25,000 barrels of beer worth $250,000. The federal census listed William as owning $225,000 in real estate and $100,000 in personal estate.
Personally, I think Charles Brauneck sold out for far too little money.
Even worse, as the years went by and books about the eminent members of St. Louis industry were penned, his very existence was written out of history. In St. Louis: Future Great City of the World, published in 1876, the biography of William states:
“In 1862 [Adam Lemp] died, leaving the entire business to William J., under whose supervision it has since grown to such magnificent proportions.”
The book St. Louis, History of the Fourth City, 1764-1909, continues the same historic revisionism:
“At [Adam Lemp’s] death in 1862, he assumed full control of the family business…”
And in 1892’s Pen and Sunlight Sketches of St. Louis, the Commercial Gateway to the South, the author continues the canard:
“In 1862, Mr. Adam Lemp died, and the present proprietor [William J. Lemp] succeeded to the entire interest.”
Why is there such an effort to cover up the existence of a previous partner in the Lemp Brewery, albeit for a scant two years? Other famous breweries in St. Louis have never had any trouble admitting that other partners have been involved in their business in the past. Anheuser-Busch, for example, never hides the fact that Eberhard Anheuser and Adolphus Busch were not the first owners of the Bavarian Brewery, and the Griesediecks never tried to conceal the fact that Falstaff was originally a Lemp trademark they purchased. I can understand the animosity William Lemp held towards his father’s third wife, after abandoning his mother in Germany, but why hold a grudge against his first wife’s grandson? Perhaps there are answers out there, but for the time being, at least another chapter in the saga of the Lemps is slightly clearer. And William J. Lemp is looking a lot more ruthless.
