1 of 15
Courtesy of Anheuser-Busch Archives
Anheuser-Busch brewery, circa the 1870s.
2 of 15
Compton & Dry 1875, Courtesy of Library of Congress
Schneider Little Hill
3 of 15
Compton & Dry 1875, Courtesy of Library of Congress
Bavarian Brewery.
4 of 15
Compton & Dry 1875, Courtesy of Library of Congress
Third and Elm Streets
5 of 15
Courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis, University Libraries & Missouri Historical Society Library
E. Anheuser Co. Brewing Association Isometric View Detail of Brewery, 1878.
6 of 15
Courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis, University Libraries & Missouri Historical Society Library
Busch Ground Plan and Isometric Projection, 1878 Whipple Special Risk Maps.
7 of 15
Courtesy of Washington University in St. Louis, University Libraries & Missouri Historical Society Library
E. Anheuser Co. Brewing Association Key, 1878.
8 of 15
Cropped view, 1870 Whipple map
9 of 15
Courtesy of Anheuser-Busch Archives
Brew House Yard 1880-2, taken from third floor of Lyon School.
10 of 15
Courtesy of Anheuser-Busch Archives
Brew House Yard, C. 1880, View from second floor of Lyon School.
11 of 15
Courtesy of Anheuser-Busch Archives
General view, 1881.
12 of 15
Courtesy of Anheuser-Busch Archives
Principal Buildings C, circa 1881.
13 of 15
Courtesy of Anheuser Busch Archives
1879 brew house from 1960s photo.
14 of 15
Photograph by Chris Naffziger
Lyon School.
15 of 15
Photograph by Chris Naffziger
Bas-relief Anheuser-Busch advertising piece, Historic Schoohouse Museum (formerly Lyon School).
The Anheuser-Busch Brewery commands South St. Louis like a medieval castle, its distinctive profile recognizable around the world. But many would be surprised to learn that before the iconic 1891 brew house rose above Pestalozzi Street, an earlier—and humbler—brewery stood on the exact spot. Over the course of only one generation, the company Eberhard Anheuser and his son-on-law Adolphus Busch created would see four brew houses built as their brewery grew. All through July, the early history of Anheuser-Busch’s architectural heritage will be investigated, showing how the company assiduously and strategically used architecture to promote and grow its business. But first, the story of the great brewery begins before the Civil War, out past St. Louis’s city limits.
George Schneider was one of several German immigrant brewers settling in St. Louis in the years before the Civil War. According to records, he first operated a brewery at Third and Elm Streets, near where the Gateway Arch now stands.
Note: Since this piece was posted, Chris Naffziger has done further research clarifying Schneider's role, or lack thereof, in A-B history. Read his four-part revelations.
Looking at old fire insurance maps, there does seem to be the remnants of a brewery on the southwest corner, the circular brewing kettles marked out in one building. Nearby, as was common, the 1875 Compton & Dry View shows a large building housing a beer garden was still operational in the 1870s. But Schneider had already left downtown in the 1850s, apparently growing restless in the bustling center of the city, and headed south to the area north of the United States Arsenal.
According to Ernst Kargau, writing in a German language tour book of St. Louis, the new location of Schneider’s brewery was rustic at best:
“Between Lynch and Dorcas Street lay, on the east side of Carondelet Avenue, a not very high hill, on which the little brewery of Georg Schneider, who in the early 1850s had run the Washington Brewery on Third and Elm Street, was located. Related with said brewery was an Ausschank (Simple Bar, Draft Beer), and for the security of the visitors of the aforementioned on their way home, there was the small staircase leading up from the street fitted with a handrail to which those who swayed a little bit could hold on to if the necessity arose. In the hill itself was a cellar, which was honored with the name ‘Felsenkeller’ (Cellar in the Rock), although there was no trace of rock to be found. On the same side of the avenue, close to the Arsenal, was a Biergarten, which went by the name of Arsenal Park and where people went to dance on Sunday evenings.”
Looking again at the Compton & Dry View from 1875, there appears to be a curious little hill in the place where Kargau said it should be, with a small building on it. Was this the since-vacated location of Schneider’s first South St. Louis brewery? Regardless, Schneider had already moved up the hill to a new location due south of the current 1891 Anheuser-Busch brew house, where according to tradition he found a cave that was adapted into lagering cellars. German style lager beer, of course, required lower temperatures and brewers were quickly discovering that the caves and sinkholes gave builders a head start on constructing these subterranean chambers that would be filled with ice harvested from the frozen Mississippi. In fact, in 1875, there was still a large sinkhole or abandoned quarry just to the east of the brewery. Logically, there were other fissures in the karst topography nearby. Schneider’s new 1856 brewery architecture reflected antebellum buildings, as Susan K. Appel writes in her dissertation on Midwestern brewing architecture; it was simple, utilitarian, and built right over the lagering cellars.
But unfortunately for Schneider, the Bavarian Brewery was not used by a sufficiently talented brewer, and went bankrupt, owing thousands of dollars to creditors. Suffice to say, and sparing the complete list of intervening owners, the brewery building ended up in the hands of one of its creditors, Eberhard Anheuser, in 1861. Apparently Schneider went on to secure some modicum of success. After burial in the old Holy Ghost Cemetery in South St. Louis (the current site of Roosevelt High School), his family was sufficiently successful to buy a large family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery, where he was reinterred in the early 20th Century. And of course, once Schneider was gone and Anheuser had secured his new brewery, he turned to Adolphus Busch to operate it.
Only a couple of years after acquiring the Bavarian Brewery, Anheuser and Busch enlisted in the Union Army. Contrary to local legend, while the two were famously loyal to the federal government, the brewery’s cellars probably never hid weapons from the nearby Arsenal. Nathaniel Lyon had already moved most of the weapons long before the Lindell Grove Affair, and the one mention of a St. Louis brewer smuggling weapons involved a Dr. Hammer, who had once owned a partial stake in the Bavarian Brewery. Since he no longer owned any interest in the brewery by the 1860s, Dr. Hammer did not have the caves at his disposal. Likewise, accounts, such as the one in The German Element in St. Louis by Albert Bernhardt Faust, explain the doctor immediately delivered the weapons to loyal German-American enlistees.
But as history does show, and has been written about elsewhere extensively, Busch was clearly talented at the art of running a brewery, as the Bavarian Brewery soon required a new brew house. In 1869, less than a decade after new management took over, Anheuser and Busch were turning to the talented Edmund Jungenfeld to design a new brew house. Preserved in numerous photos, Compton & Dry, as well as fire insurance diagrams, this new brew house shows a new understanding of the importance of the building’s role in marketing beer. While the old Schneider brew house was plain, the new brew house shows a great panache, ornamented in the Italianate style with ornamental quoins and fenestration. Anheuser and Busch clearly sought to differentiate their brewery from dirty, polluting industries—cleanliness of course critical to beer production. Likewise, and probably not coincidentally, Busch bought out Anheuser’s remaining partner, William D’Oench, in 1869, showing the young brewer’s optimism in his operation. For Budweiser Beer enthusiasts, this brew house was the location of the first brewing of that famous drink, in 1876.
The 1875 Compton & Dry View shows a flourishing and expanding, and newly named E. Anheuser and Co. already beginning to take over more blocks around the original core. Telling, however, despite its name, Busch now held 238 shares in the new company, compared to his father-in-law’s 140. The old brew house was still standing, as can be seen in a promotional painting; the brewers wisely built the 1869 brew house just to the north to facilitate continuity of production. Giant malt kilns, where the brewing ingredients would be roasted or dried, were already beginning to tower behind the brew house. Large ice houses sat out in front, holding the harvest from the previous winter. But ironically, for all of the talk and popular lore around St. Louis about the importance of river ice and lagering caves, the brewery in the 1870s was already in the process of moving beyond those relatively primitive cooling methods. Anheuser-Busch pioneered the first use of artificial refrigeration, negating the need for cellars and ice houses (ice was still used in railroad cars) on the brewery property. Ice required huge, ungainly buildings, as can be seen in the maps and photographs. Jungenfeld, the brewery architect used by Busch and most St. Louis brewers, was even taking out patents on ammonia pumps, used for early refrigeration compressors.
While busy working on new refrigeration for brewers, Jungenfeld was already designing a new brew house that opened in 1879—the success of Budweiser had already rendered their 1869 brew house too small. If it had not already been demolished by this time, Schneider’s brew house was torn down, and as before, the new brew house was built adjacent to the current operating brew house. The brewery had a knack for publicity, and seems to have used the 1879 brew house’s completion to incorporate the new Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association. Production jumped, from 105,234 barrels in 1879 to 141,163 barrels in 1880. All the ingredients were brought to the top floor, and then the beer worked its way via gravity down into the cellars.
Jungenfeld shows a new approach to the design of the 1879 brew house; it is compact and four stories tall, with two stories below ground. Switching from the Italianate style to what could be best described as early Romanesque Revival, or as Appel describes it, Rundbogenstil, the brew house is capped with a pyramid hip roof and cupola. Also, and apparently at this time, the 1869 brew house received a new fourth floor, unifying the brew house facilities. Outside of the brew houses, the brewery campus was growing rapidly with numerous new railyards and malt houses. The pioneering use of bottled beer also necessitated the construction of bottling facilities. The 19th Century and Romanticism argued for the beauty of picturesque, irregular arrangement of buildings, and the brewery carefully arranged its new malt houses to match the street grid, creating a seemingly organic composition of red brick edifices and towers. Surely Busch would not have missed the obvious connection to the castles along the Rhine River near his birthplace, perched here and there among the mountains. A promotional painting on tin commemorates the expanding brewery; more so than any modern corporation Anheuser-Busch linked its identity to the beauty of its architecture.
Amazingly, the 1879 brew house still stands, though slightly altered, just to the south of the famous 1891 brew house that tourists visit today. Unless there is a previously unknown building still surviving somewhere, that brew house is the oldest structure on the Anheuser-Busch campus built by the brewery. The Lyon School House, later the brewery’s offices (from where those amazing views of the brewing were taken in the 1880s), was built by the St. Louis Public Schools in 1868. Likewise, the 1879 brew house is probably one of the oldest surviving industrial buildings left in the entire city, and represents a fascinating link to 1870s brewery design from a period where most structures no longer exist. But of course, again, in just over a decade, Anheuser-Busch was growing so meteorically that a new brew house was already needed in 1891.
Special thanks to Brittany Brandt, Lisa Derus and Tracy Lauer at Anheuser-Busch, Jacklyn Barron at Weber Shandwick and Stefan Kraus for help on this article.
Chris Naffziger writes about architecture at St. Louis Patina. Contact him via email at naffziger@gmail.com.
