Who was William J. Lemp Sr., one of the heirs of Adam Lemp

The year 1862 was a tragic one for William: He lost both his newborn daughter and his father.

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There's an iconic photograph of William J. Lemp Sr., taken in his twilight years, after decades of success had given him a wife, eight children, millions of dollars, and one of the largest breweries in the United States. But there is another image of William, in the collection of Stephen Walker, that gives us a window into a different time in the brewer’s life. He was young, hopeful, and ruthless. Transferring a family business from father to son is perhaps always fraught with challenges. And so it goes with the story of how Adam Lemp passed on his thriving brewery to his second wife’s son William and his first wife’s grandson Charles Brauneck. 

First, however, Adam had to bring William to St. Louis. As we saw last week, his attempt to hire someone else to do it ended in failure. Later histories of the brewery state that Adam brought his son from Eschwege to St. Louis in 1848, and recently discovered documents and a strange New York Daily Herald newspaper article confirm this. On Wednesday, August 16, 1848, the newspaper published an account with an accompanying petition signed by adult passengers alleging misconduct on behalf of the captain and crew of the steamer Acadia, sailing out of Liverpool. One of the signatories was Adam Lemp; he and many others were stranded on the famous Cunard Line ship in the dense fog off the coast of Lynn, Massachusetts, and were somehow able to get their message off the boat to New York. 

Likewise, William’s three passport applications from 1894, 1900, and 1903, show that he arrived in America in 1848 from Liverpool on the steamship Arcadia. While the name is off by one letter, this almost certainly places William on board the same ship, the Acadia stranded off the coast of Massachusetts. How exactly did Adam convince his second wife, now married to a successful brewer, George Aulepp, to let their 12-year-old son leave with him? Perhaps he was able to provide evidence of his financial success in St. Louis as an incentive to let him go. And yet, at least one history book perpetuated the face-saving lie that William had emigrated from Germany with Adam in 1836 and had not been abandoned as an infant.

As might be expected from a German-American enterprise, Adam kept firm control and remained the public face of the Western Brewery, even as his son became the foreman. William even attended St. Louis University for a time, but did not graduate. (It was common at the time for young businessmen to take the classes for their particular needs and then go back to work without obtaining a diploma.) City directories show that he lived with his father and stepmother on South Second Street above the saloon; the brewery building was in the backyard. There is no evidence of William having any role in the major business contracts of his father, such as the auctioning of individual lots in the Lemp’s Cave Addition in the St. Louis Commons above their lagering cave.

In 1860, only two years before Adam’s death, William was about to inherit a healthy brewery from his father, as the Federal Census of Industry reported:

“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 [lager] beer valued at $12,000 and 3,000 barrels of ale valued at $24,000.”

If we are to believe a later secondary source from 1883, Adam was producing far more beer: 4,800 barrels of lager beer and 3,500 barrels of “common” beer, which probably referred to ale.

The 1860 “traditional” decennial census of Adam’s household also revealed that the brewery had a staff of nine, besides the Lemp family, living on site. It's not clear if there were more employees who lived elsewhere in the city. One name stands out: John Baitinger, who was 30 years old in 1860. He would graduate from “laborer” to foreman and eventually the Lemp Brewery superintendent on Cherokee Street, working for the family for over 40 years. Baitinger is buried in a respectable family plot in Bellefontaine Cemetery. Not all the brewery’s master brewers fared so well. Another man, Henry “Sweetwater” Nolte, upon his release from the City Workhouse after a 27-year sentence in 1907 for a crime he had forgotten, revealed that he had once “bummed around” with the young William. He was presumably referring to heavy drinking, as the elderly convict admitted that alcohol had ruined his life. Adam would die of cirrhosis of the liver. One must wonder how much of the personal, legal, business, and health problems of the Western Brewery’s ownership and staff were caused by alcoholism.

We also see the appearance of William’s future business partners, the Stumpfs, in 1860, who were busy with their own brewery at the corner of Ann and Decatur streets. Otto, Frederick, and William Stumpf also owned a lagering cave at the corner of Arrow and Buena Vista (today’s Lemp and Shenandoah), which is now the abandoned Falstaff Plant No. 10. The Lemps were not the only brewers maintaining a suburban lagering cave while operating a brewery near the Mississippi River. Otto and William lived at the brewery, and Frederick stayed out at the cave.

Events proceeded in earnest in 1861, perhaps precipitated by the outbreak of the Civil War, which saw William joining the 3rd Missouri Regiment, mustering out as an orderly sergeant in the fall of the same year. While it has been suggested that it was largely a ceremonial appointment, there is no evidence to support this claim. In fact, the evidence supports that the vast majority of Germans in St. Louis were loyal to the Union, often vociferously so in the case of the founder of the Bavarian Brewery, Dr. Adam Hammer. The social circles the brewers inhabited encouraged military service.

Shortly after leaving the Army, William married Julia Feickert on December 3. Julia was the daughter of Jacob Feickert, who was clearly a close business associate of Adam, as the two men had already purchased large, twin burial plots next to each other in Bellefontaine Cemetery in 1858. William J. Lemp also began his partnership with Otto Stumpf, which according to a book published in 1874, ended five years of work for his father, Adam. Adam was continuing to make strategic real estate purchasing, buying lots in Block 8 of the Bogy, Sarpy, and Miltenberger’s Addition—the land south of Cherokee Street from Lemp’s Cave that would one day be the location of his son’s iconic brewery. To understand the purpose of Adam’s strategic purchase, we must go underground to his lagering cave, which does not follow a straight line like the streets above. While the cave house sits right on the north side of Cherokee in the first piece of property Adam acquired in 1842, the cave wandered under the street before turning south at an almost right angle under Second Carondelet Avenue. 

In order to create a second entrance, Adam needed to buy the aforementioned Block 8 and dig a new manmade entrance straight down into the bedrock. He then built a new stone cave house, in similar appearance to the first one, on his new property; it is still visible in Compton and Dry’s Pictorial St. Louis in 1876 and survived incorporation into the First Bottling. Besides creating more room for lagering beer, Adam was also possibly creating a “one-way” movement for his kegs; freshly brewed beer went down the old shaft, and then the lagered beer was hoisted up the new shaft, eliminating the need for the barrels to move backward in the cave. He also completed his new Italianate villa at this time, hoping to move out of the central city to enjoy the fresh air of the countryside near his expanding brewery interest in the St. Louis Commons.

The excitement of the new marriage, cave capacity, and business partnerships were tempered by tragedy in 1862. The first blow to William came with the death of a newborn daughter on the day of her birth, July 4. She was buried without a name in the Feickert family plot, where she remains to this day, even after the construction of her father’s huge, less than half full mausoleum on the other side of the cemetery. Then, just over a month later, Adam finally succumbed to cirrhosis on August 23. He must have been expecting his impending death, as he updated his will only a couple of months before dying. Charles Brauneck, the grandson of Adam by his first wife in Germany, arrived in St. Louis from Evansville, Indiana, to inherit his half of the brewery.

The shrewd William found himself in a perilous position in the final months of 1862. He was invested in two breweries. His partnership in his father’s brewery was with his half-nephew Charles whom he probably barely knew, and with whom he may have had little loyalty. His other partnership with was with the Stumpf family whose loyalty surely ultimately lay with each other and not with an outsider such as William. He also was forced to pay his stepmother a monthly stipend for the rest of her life, as I wrote before in 2017. But William did have the loyalty of his employees such as John Baitinger, and he now had to act fast to secure financial stability.

For the time being, there is evidence that he worked with Brauneck. As I wrote last year, they cooperated when they petitioned the probate court to release finished beer from custody for sale before it went bad. Likewise, advertisements from 1863–1866 continue to identify the brewery as A. Lemp & Co., perhaps choosing to honor the shared heritage of the two partners, putting aside egos. Likewise, while William bought out Brauneck for $12,000 in 1864, the Edward’s Annual Directory for St. Louis published in 1866 actually lists him as “Brenneck Charles (W. J. Lemp & Co.). While no longer a partner, he seems to have continued to work for his half-uncle William.

With William’s stepmother Louise moved into Adam’s villa, he now took up residence in the apartment above the saloon and brewery on Second Street and worked to extricate himself from the Stumpf partnership. For some reason, and it is not clear, William Stumpf was not willing to allow him to exit the partnership. Perhaps Stumpf was concerned with the loss of capital or simply could not afford to buy him out. Regardless, after a few years, the Stumpfs and William parted ways by 1866, and he was free to focus on the Western Brewery. 

Meanwhile, his quarterly payments to his stepmother Louise would slowly become less and less of a financial burden over the 30 years he was forced to pay $1,500 annually in quarterly installments. Adam had failed to consider inflation, so as William became wealthier and wealthier, and $1,500 devalued more and more, Louise fell into more and more financial distress. She was destitute when she died in 1893, and William swooped in and bought his father’s villa out from under her heirs from her first two marriages. Her probate file even states that he “forgot” to pay the final installment before she died.

William was also busy buying huge swaths of land south of his father Adam’s original cave property, and plotting the construction of his new brewery that his father had envisioned but never had the chance to build. While construction probably started in 1864 in the shadow of one of the forts that guarded the city during the Civil War, the Edward’s Annual Directory for 1866 shows the new brewhouse open for business. John Baitinger had been promoted to foreman, and a new steam engine required the hiring of employees to operate and maintain it. There were at least five brewers on staff and four teamsters by 1869. The saloon on Second Street employed at least three bartenders.

By the 1870 census, at the age of 34, William owned real estate valued at $225,000 and a personal fortune of $100,000. Perhaps to match the aggressive growth of his business, he listed the militaristic northern German kingdom of Prussia as his place of birth, not Hesse-Kassel as in other documents. The 1870 industrial census listed further accolades, describing a brewery that would have been unrecognizable to his father in 1860.

“William J. Lemp, Brewer, Capital $150,000; 25 horsepower steam engine; 1 grinder, 2 washers, 2 coolers; 28 male employees over the age of 16 with a yearly payroll of $28,000; Materials: Malt: 204,166 bushels worth $190,000, Hops: 60,000 bushels worth $6,000, Coal: 200 tons worth $650; Production: 25,000 barrels of lager beer worth $250,000”

Perhaps more importantly, his family was healthy and growing. His wife Julia, now 29, had given birth to three children by then: Anna, 5; William Jr., 3; and Louis, 5 months old. Five more children would join the family living in the new house he had built for his in-laws, Jacob and Elizabeth Feickert, on land once owned by Adam’s old business partner John Kaeckell. The rest of the 19th century would herald nothing but success for the immigrant from Eschwege.

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