The Bergdoll Boys, page 4
There are no records available to confirm this story. If true, Ludwig Bergdoll was the first of four men in the Bergdoll family to shirk his military duty.
On June 27, 1846, having changed his first name, 20-year-old Louis (Ludwig) Bergdoll arrived in New York aboard the Duke of Mecklenburg’s 399-ton sailing bark, Doris, from Antwerp, Belgium. A few years later, his mother, Katharina, siblings, and half-siblings sold the Bergdoll and Stein homes in Sinsheim and arrived in 1850 and 1851.5 How and why they chose Philadelphia for their new home is unknown. However, Philadelphia and Pennsylvania contained the largest German populations in America in the 19th century, to which shiploads of new immigrants were joined monthly.6
Family history suggests that Louis shipped out from the United States for several months in the late 1840s on a whaling vessel to earn some cash. If he did, it would explain how he rapidly accumulated assets to open his first brewery by 1849 in Philadelphia. Louis first worked at established breweries such as Engel and Wolf and Muller’s, and then, with fellow brewer Peter Schemm, he opened the first Bergdoll Brewery and a beer hall along Vine Street in Philadelphia.7 Within months, he married Elizabeth C. Woll, who had also fled Germany for the United States.
Starting in 1850, Louis and Elizabeth produced eight children, but their first son, also named Louis, died in 1851. Louisa (Louise) came next, followed by Elizabeth (Lizzie). Charles followed, and then, with the birth of their third son in Philadelphia on March 8, 1857, they returned to the paternal family forename with Louis C. Bergdoll. His middle initial was different, but they called him junior.8 Two other children followed: Caroline and George.
The Bergdoll Brewery partnership with Schemm continued until 1851 when Louis, the elder, joined his brother-in-law, Charles Psotta, who emigrated from St. Wendel, Saarland, Germany.9 Bergdoll and Psotta became brewery partners the same year Louis became a naturalized citizen tending to the brewing, while Psotta handled the business affairs.
By 1856, they produced lager beer, which was quickly becoming popular among American beer drinkers, especially Germans. Louis also invested heavily in Philadelphia residential and commercial real estate, owning or holding mortgages on many rowhouses and saloons. He and Elizabeth purchased a 120-acre farm in Chester Township, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, an hour-long buggy ride from the apartment where they lived on the grounds of the rapidly expanding brewery. Chester Creek bordered the northeastern farm portion, and the Philadelphia and Baltimore Central Railroad ran along the creek. Louis and the family could board a Baltimore and Ohio Railroad train in Philadelphia, disembark minutes later at the Upland station near Chester, Pennsylvania, and, if connections were timely, hop on a Philadelphia and Baltimore train to be dropped nearly at their farmhouse doorstep via the Bridgewater station.10
Left: Ludwig Bergdoll, later known as Louis Bergdoll (1825–1894), founded the Bergdoll Brewery in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1849. For years his portrait hung in Philadelphia City Hall, a scene of later Bergdoll family court appearances. Right: Louis C. Bergdoll (1857–1896), heir to the Bergdoll Brewery fortune, husband of Emma Barth Bergdoll, and father of Louis, Charles, Elizabeth, Erwin, and Grover Bergdoll. (Augustus Kollner photos, William L. Clements Library, University of Michigan)
In his book Philadelphia Beer, historian Rich Wagner chronicled the history of lager beer among German brewers of the 19th century. Lager beer begins with special Bavarian yeast brought to America by John Wagner in 1840 and brewed at his Philadelphia home in the Northern Liberties section of the city.11
From John Wagner, the lager yeast was obtained by the brewers Charles Engel and Charles Wolf, who initially made several barrels of lager just for their friends. Their market beer in the 1840s was fruity and bitter ale, which packed a punch in alcohol and was brewed and served at room temperature.
Rich Wagner explains that lager beer requires cold fermentation and aging; therefore, caves were excavated in the earth along the Schuylkill for cold storage. Later, with tons of ice and refrigeration, lager beer was kept cold until sold. With its smoother taste and lower alcohol content, lager quickly became Philadelphia’s most popular beer variety.
Realizing that their German friends and many customers were drinking their lager beer first, Engel and Wolf moved their operations to farmlands along the Schuylkill in Philadelphia, known as Fountain Green. Here they could harvest ice, utilize caves for cold storage, tap into artesian wells, and access the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad to receive hops and barley, coal for electricity, and ship their barrels of lager. Wagner describes the Engel and Wolf Brewery as the first large-scale lager brewery in the United States.12 Engel and Wolf became the beer kings of Philadelphia. Bergdoll and Psotta would soon follow.
Brewed in copper kettles with water from artesian wells along the Schuylkill, Bergdoll Beer was stored and aged in cypress lagering tanks.13 In time, the beer was shipped out in oak barrels, with the Louis Bergdoll Brewing Company trademark burned into the barrel staves. Also available in clear glass bottles with raised vertical lettering spelling B-e-r-g-d-o-l-l B-e-e-r, the liquid gold lager generously filled the Bergdoll family coffers until it grew into a fortune.
Workers from the city’s knitting mills and saw blade factories often drank Bergdoll lagers in Bergdoll-sponsored saloons at the end of their overnight shifts at 7 am and again at 7 pm, seven days a week.
In Philadelphia, Bergdoll Beer flowed in a circle, from the Schuylkill water pumped into the brewing kettles with Bergdoll hops and Bergdoll barley to the fermentation tanks to the Peerless barrel taps, to the mugs, to the men lining the bars, to the tobacco-spitting and floor-mopping waste trough at their feet, to the open gutters in the streets, and then back into the Schuylkill.
These saloons were so crowded that the men often urinated into the shallow trough below the bar to avoid losing their place if they stepped into the toilet room. Embarrassing and insulting women by peeing in an open saloon in the heyday of Bergdoll Beer was not an issue. They were relegated to the back rooms with an exterior door marked “Women’s Entrance.”
Raising a Bergdoll old-style lager beer was part of life in the factory neighborhoods of Philadelphia. Everyone knew the brand, the taste, and the Bergdoll name. Bergdoll wasn’t the only beer in town, however. Before the war, the 33 large production breweries in Philadelphia were famous brands and German family names such as brewing giant Bergner and Engel and others like Poth, Ortlieb, Schemm, Baltz, Betz, and Schmidt. They produced millions of gallons of beer annually.
They sent leather and canvas bags of cash and checks to the Brewers Bank and other financial institutions in Philadelphia. Many of these breweries, saloons, stables, warehouses and supporting businesses like Spaeter and Sons Cooperage formed the community in Philadelphia known as Brewerytown.14 There was an eclectic mix of family neighborhoods, but with gritty streets of cobblestone, brick, or oil-packed gravel and piles of dirty coal and horse manure (often stiff dead horses) scattered about the streets and alleys.
The Bergdolls were an integral part of the community. They lived for many years in a large multi-story apartment at the brewery, and later in a three-story German Northern Gothic brick mansion at 29th and Cambridge Streets in the heart of Brewerytown.
They inhaled the thick, sweet banana-bread aroma from at least 10 breweries in the community, walked to their sprawling facility at 29th and Parrish Streets, crossed the street to shop for Bratwurst at a German butcher shop, and stood for fittings for elegant suits at the neighborhood tailor and dressmaker on the corner. It was their German home away from their German homeland.
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From 1866 to 1894, the insurance survey company operated by Ernest Hexamer created schematic drawings of the breweries in Brewerytown. The Hexamer illustrations were colorful and descriptive and provided documentation for insurance companies of the brewery construction materials, firefighting apparatus, and safety procedures designed to prevent costly fires and accidents.
The Bergdoll and Psotta Brewery drawings and descriptions detail the number of night guards and the purpose of their inspection rounds. The brewers located their primary business convenient to the Engel spur of the Philadelphia and Reading, which was already named for the Engel and Wolf Brewery. The Bergdoll and Psotta Brewery grew to encompass more than three city blocks.
The Bergdoll Brewery logo and trademark. Featuring a griffin spouting the phrase “Old Style Lager Beer,” and with its talons wrapped around a barrel of beer, the Bergdoll logo was widely recognized. Bergdoll lager was made for working men and women to drink at home and in the many saloons of the Mid-Atlantic region. Charles Barth, Emma Bergdoll’s brother, is listed as general manager. (Bergdoll Family Collection)
Designed by the renowned Philadelphia brewery architect Otto C. Wolf, the multi-story brick and steel buildings with ornate archways and cornices included stables, a brewery house, a malt house, a cooper shop, a bottling plant, beer storage house, offices, and a grain elevator.15 There was also a dwelling house for Louis and Elizabeth Bergdoll, among many residential buildings for employees.16
Brewery workers were allowed all the beer they could drink while on the job. The beer was believed to make workers more content and less apt to complain about the grueling and dangerous conditions of 14-to 16-hour days, seven days a week. The primarily immigrant (German) laborers earned $15 per week, and often, a portion (or all) of that was spent drinking more beer in Bergdoll saloons.
The bottling plant, brewery house, cooperage, administrative offices, and beer storage house were built and updated over many years as the brewing methods advanced in technology.17 A 1979 nomination to the Register of Historic Places describes the one-story, 75 feet by 145 feet brick bottling plant of 1882 as “excellent workmanship with arched openings (which) impart a strong rhythm to the street façade.”
The 1856 brewery house contained Louis and Elizabeth Bergdoll’s residence and was eventually enlarged to six floors for “fermenting, cooling, malt milling, storing, cleaning, and mashing.” The nomination form describes it as “an eclectic mixture of rich detail and exuberant vitality… reminiscent of Italian Renaissance urban architecture.”
Embedded in the exterior brick wall of “a quality of design and workmanship, which is uncommon in today’s industrial structures,” between the third and fourth-floor elevation, is a brick and concrete nameplate, Bergdoll & Psotta 1875. The sign remains there today.
The brewery’s Victorian administrative office building stands three stories with tall arched windows and is capped with a mansard-style roof with many dormer windows facing North 29th Street at Parrish.18 Matching halves of the 24 by 90 feet building are split by “a four-story square tower topped by a pyramidal crown dominating the center of the building and well-crafted Corinthian capitals anchoring the building’s corners. The workmanship is a level that is today irreproducible.”
Cast iron fencing of at least 15 feet surrounded the various structures with elaborate gates across the cobblestone streets. Buttonwood trees lined North 29th Street with their arching canopies providing shade over the brick sidewalk. A railroad track was embedded in the center of Parrish Street—a spur from the Philadelphia and Reading main line along the river—to offload the raw materials and load the barrels of beer for shipment to several East Coast cities. The buildings were initially lit by gas and warmed by the natural heat from the coal-fired kiln and furnaces. Later, steam boilers to generate electricity were encased in brick walls 4 feet thick in case of an explosion. Stables, the cooperage, and elaborate gardens surrounded the brewery.
In the early stages, oak barrels were stored in a large open lot across North 29th Street. Large fermenting barrels were about the width of a flatbed train car, but most were the 54-gallon hogsheads that could be easily rolled and drained off while excess yeast settled to the bottom.
The tallest brewery building was a grain elevator along the main railroad tracks, attached to the brewhouse by an elevated conveyor. The conveyer’s steel bracing cast an eerie shadow with the setting sun across the building.19 The top of the bin structure bore a massive sign with Bergdoll Beer spelled in cursive lettering and facing southwest. It could easily be seen from the rapidly developing center of Philadelphia, about two miles away.20
When operating around the clock, tall brick smokestacks belched coal smoke and soot over Brewerytown. Sweetness floated from the malthouse, stench from the stables. Slightly inclining, 29th Street drained sewage from homes and businesses and horse urine, manure, and slop garbage from the many shops lining the canvas awning-covered sidewalks. The whole city could smell the progress from Brewerytown as the number of barrels of lager beer grew into the millions by the end of the 19th century. The income of the Bergdolls rose into the millions along with it.
In 1877, Hexamer Surveys also profiled a Bergdoll and Psotta brewery in Philadelphia’s Falls of Schuylkill neighborhood, later known as East Falls. The Schuylkill Falls Park Brewery was probably erected for the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, and was located southwest of the Manayunk and Norristown branch of the Philadelphia and Reading, between Indian Queen Lane, Midvale Avenue, and the Schuylkill. It was later discontinued with all brewing focused on the Brewerytown location.
Philadelphia Beer author Rich Wagner determined that this was Bergdoll and Psotta’s first large-scale brewery, acquired when they expanded from their Vine Street location. The property, perched above the river and with easy access to the railroad, was the former home of an American founding father and the first Pennsylvania governor, Thomas Mifflin.
Because it contained an elaborate biergarten with picnic grounds, a dance floor, a German band stage, and sausage and kraut facilities, the brewery and biergarten were active for the millions of people who attended the Centennial Exposition. Steamers would drop them along the river’s edge for a short walk to the biergarten while others were off-loaded by trains at the Falls station within a stone’s throw of the beer taps.
Bergdoll and Psotta’s beer production was about 140–160,000 barrels annually when Psotta died while traveling in Europe in 1877.21 Louis Bergdoll purchased his partner’s share in the brewery, renaming it The Louis Bergdoll Brewing Company, for a reported $175,000. From that time onward, it was all Bergdoll beer.22
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By 1887, the Bergdoll Brewery along North 29th Street between Poplar and Parrish was fully developed and produced 160,000 barrels of beer annually. It was operated by Louis Bergdoll and his son, Louis Bergdoll, and sons-in-law, John J. Alter and Charles F. Schoening. Emma Bergdoll’s brother, Charles Barth, was president; Henry Rieger, treasurer; and Albert C. Woerwag, secretary.23 Then tragedy struck.
Friday morning, July 15, 1887, began like any other day at the grand malt house, the six-story main building for the expansive brewery, when, suddenly, the employees of the second-floor mill were rocked by a massive explosion.24
The Philadelphia Times reported that it came from one of the grist mills on the same floor. Storage of damp malt produced the explosion in spontaneous combustion so violent that it hurled large pieces of iron manufactured at the nearby Pencoyd Iron Works in every direction.
Vast stores of grain and hops added fuel to the fire which quickly spread. The brewery was equipped with 1,000 feet of 3-inch India rubber water hose to attach to the city’s fire plugs at North 29th and Parrish. Employees launched into the firefight in the precious minutes before city firefighters arrived on the scene, said the Times. However, by the time the professionals appeared, the main building was in jeopardy of destruction. At that time, it became a question of protecting what was left.
Adjoining the main brewery building was the refrigerator storage house equipped with quantities of liquid ammonia to cool and avoid boiling the hops. Trying to protect this store of chemicals, two firefighters mounted a ladder that quickly collapsed under their weight and hurled them toward the burning building. They escaped unharmed, but the hops, barley, and grains used to make the Bergdoll lager fueled the massive fire. In just two hours, the main five-story building of the renowned Bergdoll Brewery collapsed in a heap of charred beams, bricks, and ashes.
Could the brewery have been saved by the firefighters? It’s unlikely. Spontaneous combustion results from massive stores of organic material that, when wet, produces heat and turns into an explosion that results in a fire. However, the focus of the firefighters is called into question in this blaze. The street was not barricaded from intruding spectators, who were more interested in drinking Bergdoll Beer than fighting the fire, until an hour after the flames were ignited. When the Philadelphia fire marshal arrived, he discovered that some of the Bergdoll employees were in a giving spirit and had tapped a few barrels. Said the Times, “frequent visits of the firemen to the kegs were retarding their efficiency. Some men hung around the kegs and did not attempt to do their share to put out the blaze.”
The fire, and insurance coverage provided the opportunity for the Bergdolls to rebuild. From 1888 to 1890, fire-damaged sections of the brewery were rebuilt and other portions were redesigned and upgraded in classic industrial Victorian architecture. The fire recovery and expansion vaulted the brewery into its most productive era with every barrel tapped producing a gusher of cash into Bergdoll bank accounts.
Copy of a lithograph of the Bergdoll Brewery at the height of its production in the 1880s–1900. The architecture is classic Otto C. Wolf Victorian industrial style. Notice the depiction of an electric cart for hauling beer, an electric car, and the streetcar along North 29th Street. (National Museum of American History)
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As income from the brewery grew, Louis Bergdoll, the elder, continued to invest in Philadelphia commercial and residential real estate, mortgages, stocks and bonds, agriculture products, and resort properties in New Jersey beach communities.
