Who were the Wainwrights, the preeminent brewers who broke the Teutonic monopoly on beer in St. Louis?

Ellis made his greatest mark not on beer, but architecture.

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Not every brewer in St. Louis was German. There was, in fact, one family, the Wainwrights, who broke the Teutonic monopoly on beer in the Gateway City. Their story is fascinating and often forgotten in favor of other, more famous families. Throughout the 19th century, Samuel and Ellis, and then a second Ellis, were preeminent brewers and businessmen, first at a small brewery near the Levee, and then at a larger establishment begun by an older brother of yet another legendary St. Louis brewer. Then, to top it off, the family would help to usher in modern architecture in America by hiring an up-and-coming architecture firm out of Chicago to design an office building in downtown St. Louis.

Samuel Wainwright was born in Pittsburgh on March 6, 1822, the son of a wealthy English ale and porter brewer, Joseph. Much ado has been made in St. Louis brewing history about how German lager beer, introduced to the city by Adam Lemp in the early 1840s, swept in and soon overpowered the old English-style ale and porter market. But contemporary advertisements and industrial censuses show that narrative is not entirely true. Ales and porters continued to be popular alongside their new German lager counterparts, and many German-American brewers also brewed English-style beers. The Cherokee Brewery, operated by German Americans for example, was known for its English-style beers.

Samuel, according to his biography in the Encyclopedia of the History of St. Louis, moved to the city in 1846 and purchased the Fulton Brewery, no doubt receiving help from his prominent brewer father in back in Pittsburgh. Located at Main and Almond streets (one of the east-west tree streets that no longer exists), in partnership with his brother Ellis. According to an advertisement in the German-language newspaper Anzeiger des Westens, dated February 5, 1845, the brothers contracted with a George Wolf on South Second Street, in the heart of the German-American business district (Adam Lemp’s Western Brewery was nearby) to distribute their beer.

We know little about Samuel’s brother, who sadly died in 1849. According to an article dated February 6, 1845, in the Anzeiger des Westens, Ellis was involved in Second Ward politics, and in another article, dated February 11 of the same year, he served in the volunteer fire brigade of the Washington Firehouse, which was attached to the brewery of the same name, owned by the hapless George Schneider, whom we looked at last year in the story of the founding of the Bavarian Brewery. It seems, despite being English American, that the brothers still had to participate, at least partly, in German-American social and political life to do business as brewers in St. Louis.

Samuel bought out his brother’s estate in 1851, or at least he thought he did. In Book U5, pages 297-99 in the archives of the Recorder of Deeds office, we learn that Ellis’s widow, Catherine, sued her brother-in-law over unresolved probate issues. Samuel had served as his brother’s estate administrator, and Ellis had died intestate, before writing a will. Catherine asked for the intervention of two other lawyers to administer her husband’s estate, and eventually, the case made it to the Missouri Supreme Court, where Samuel prevailed against Catherine and several other relatives for his brother’s half of the Fulton Brewery.

Meanwhile, the older brother of Adolphus Busch, George, had been busy building his own brewing business in St. Louis, starting in 1848. Starting first with malt house at Third and Plum streets (Plum Street still exists!), Busch then built a respectable brewery bordered by Ninth, Tenth, Gratiot, and Cerre streets. Partnered with Charles A. Fritz, the industrial census of 1850 reported a sizeable brewery:

“George Busch Brewery, $20,000 capital invested, 6,000 bushels of hops valued at $1,500 and 8,000 bushels of barley valued at $8,000. 6 men at $120 a month, 4,000 barrels of beer and ale worth $24,000.”

Moving on from the Fulton Brewery, Samuel purchased a stake in the Busch Brewery, and as can be seen from the following advertisement, the Busch name continued even though the brewery had new owners:

“Busch’s Lager Beer Brewery of Fritz, Wainwright & Co.: Always available, Lager Beer, Ale, Porter, Malt and Hops in any Quantity, Malt for distilling or brewing of good quality is on hand. Order at the following places: D. H. Evens, 191-3 N. Main Street, the Malt House on Plum Street between 3rd and 4th, and at the Brewery on 10th between Cerre and Gratiot.”

Fritz lasted until 1870, when two new partners joined: Lorenz Lampel and Robert Jacob, and the brewery changing to Wainwright & Co. Contrary to what is often the case for many of these anonymous partners, Lampel is well-documented in St. Louis history. Born on May 2, 1831, in Bavaria, he was trained as a brewer, coming to America in 1853 and then to St. Louis in 1855. He even worked for Anheuser-Busch as a foreman and brewmaster in addition to the Wainwright Brewery and was not just an owner and investor. Lampel was involved in the Wainwright Brewery for 15 years, dying in 1886 after an extensive visit to Germany.

Samuel Wainwright died in 1874, and his son Ellis bought out Robert Jacob a year later in 1875, regaining direct family control of the brewery. Whipple Fire Insurance maps from 1872 reveal a stout but simple brewery building, with a rocky outcropping on one side of the property. A huge mash tub, 19 feet in diameter and 9 feet deep, serviced the brewhouse. An elevator served the caves or cellars underneath brewery. According to Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis from 1876, the Wainwrights had also been operating a separate malt house on Stoddard south of Chouteau Avenue, not far from the brewery. However, for the ambitious Ellis, this brewery was far too small for a new era.

Now the Wainwright Brewing Company and flush with capital in 1883, a new brewery rose just to the west of the old. We know that Ellis hired famed architect Edmund Jungenfeld, who designed many of the building at Anheuser-Busch, as the brewer was sued in court for not paying the full amount of commission of 5 percent of the total cost of the new brewery. Ironically, Jungenfeld died the same year as the judgement, but the case, which he won on appeal against the Wainwright Brewing Company, reveals that the new brewery cost $354,227.30.

And this was one huge brewery, with massive reinforced concrete, brick-faced stock and fermenting houses that dominated the entire complex, according to Whipple Fire Insurance maps. The boiler house, with four steam engines, also featured a 120-foot-tall concrete smokestack, an innovation at the time. The 67-foot grain elevator could hold 50,000 bushels, and the elevator, seamlessly attached to the malt house and brew house, could move the grains quickly between the integrated buildings. This was a thoroughly modern brewery complex, and it is important to realize that the Wainwright Brewery design was demonstrating a new type of industrial form in America.

It’s all gone now, of course, replaced by parking lots. Ellis thought he had a solution to compete with the titans of St. Louis brewing, the Lemps and Buschs: Combine into the St. Louis Brewing Association. Because he turned to British investors, St. Louisans often referred to it as the English Syndicate. The theory was that combining all the small breweries together would create a competitor to the largest breweries in St. Louis. But as Alvin Griesedieck relates in The Falstaff Story, everyone, no matter how incompetent or redundant they were in the new Association kept their old salaries, and the SLBA failed miserably, closing small breweries—that very well may have survived on their own—along with it.

Ellis does have one redeeming final coda to his story. One of his investments involved the construction of a new office building in downtown St. Louis in what would become known as Real Estate Row. Turning to the firm of Adler & Sullivan in 1891, made up of two young architects who had just made a name for themselves in Chicago with the Auditorium Building, Ellis now made his greatest mark on architecture. The Wainwright Building, aided by the words of Louis Sullivan himself, now stands in the annals of history as the first modern skyscraper. A year later, Sullivan designed one of only three mausoleums for Ellis and his wife, Charlotte, in Bellefontaine Cemetery.

Chris Naffziger works as the archives researcher in the office of the Recorder of Deeds of the City of St. Louis. His email is naffzigerc@stlouis-mo.gov.

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