The Bergdoll Boys, page 6
10 Today, the former 120-acre Louis Bergdoll farm in Chester Township, Pennsylvania, is suburban housing surrounded by Chester Creek, Bridgewater Road, Park Lane, and Baldwin Run. The farm would pass into the possession of Louis, and then his wife, Emma, who sold it to focus on the Bergdoll country estate along West Chester Pike in Broomall, Pennsylvania.
11 Rich Wagner, no relation to John Wagner, is responsible for encouraging the Pennsylvania Historical Commission to place a marker in front of John Wagner’s (American Street, 2018) home denoting the American origin of lager beer. John Wagner smuggled the yeast out of Bavaria and from the Bohemian monks who first brewed the bottom-fermenting beer in the 1300s. Rich Wagner’s book is titled Philadelphia Beer, A Heady History of Brewing in the Cradle of Liberty. By The History Press.
12 Engel and Wolf later became the brewing giant Bergner and Engel.
13 Philadelphia beer historian Rich Wagner graciously met with me to discuss the great breweries of Philadelphia and the origin of lager beer.
14 Brewerytown was and still is an eclectic mix of nationalities northwest of Center City, Philadelphia. The Bergdoll German genealogy has been researched by German and American genealogists and is available online through genealogical websites. Biographer Wiltrud Flothow, who shared it with me, has expertly researched the German Bergdoll family origins.
15 The Philadelphia Library and the National Archives have plenty of information and renderings of architect Otto Wolf’s magnificent brewery and residential designs.
16 Otto C. Wolf was the son of Charles C. Wolf, co-founder of Engel and Wolf Brewery in Philadelphia, with Charles Engel in 1844. Trained at the University of Pennsylvania as an architect and engineer, Wolf’s practice at Broad and Arch streets in Philadelphia also provided the Germanic Gothic designs for the Poth, Betz, Schmidt, Germania, Bergner and Engel, and Welder and Thomas breweries. Wolf’s firm also designed breweries in Pittsburgh, Trenton, Baltimore, New York, Boston, Washington, Florida, California, Cuba, and Norway. U.S. Department of Interior, National Register of Historic Places Inventory Nomination.
17 The buildings are used today as condominiums.
18 Architect Angus S. Wade designed the brewery office building in 1888. It was the reconstruction of a nondescript two-story brick building adjacent to North 29th Street overlooking a massive yard of oak beer barrels. He also designed 44 pressed brick rowhouses built for the elder Louis Bergdoll at 28th and Brown Streets, just a few blocks from the brewery. Wade also designed the Gimble Bros. department store, the Rittenhouse Hotel, and the Hotel Hanover in Philadelphia.
19 A large iron walkway over the main railroad tracks and Pennsylvania Avenue at North 29th Street was still utilized in 2023 with long cast beams stamped Pencoyd Iron Works, a manufacturer formerly located across and upstream along the Schuylkill in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania. The elevated walkway appears in photographs from 1888.
20 The description of the Bergdoll Brewery and the Bergdoll mansion in Brewerytown and events at the massive facility are based on multiple newspapers, insurance documents, government schematics, maps, architectural renderings, the National Register of Historic Places, and numerous walking tours of the old brewery buildings and the Bergdoll brewery neighborhood.
21 Charles Psotta died while visiting with his German family in Badenweiler. His wife Elizabeth traveled to Germany to fetch his body for burial in their Philadelphia cemetery plot.
22 Alfred Bergdoll’s diary suggests that $175,000 was the purchase price awarded to Charles Psotta’s widow, Louis’ sister, Elizabeth Bergdoll Psotta, but no documents of the transaction are available for confirmation. The sum was equivalent to more than $5.2 million dollars in 2023.
23 In contrast, the former Engel and Wolf brewery, renamed Bergner and Engel, had absorbed other breweries and was producing about 300,000 barrels, Betz and Son about 130,000 barrels, Poth and Sons about 150,000 barrels, and Schmidt and Sons about 100,000 barrels of beer. All together, Philadelphia brewers made the city the second largest beer producer after New York.
24 The massive brewery fire of 1887 is described in several Philadelphia newspapers.
25 The Bergdolls’ investment in substantial suburban Washington, D.C. property came at a time when land values around the nation’s capital were escalating rapidly. For decades, it would play a significant role in the family’s legal and political tangles. It’s profiled later in this book.
26 Prior to the Brook’s Law, it was common practice for a child to fetch a pail of beer from a saloon and carry it home to a thirsty parent. After the law, enforcement was minimal, and many saloons continued operating without licenses. The Brook’s Law also inspired the term “speakeasy” from a Philadelphia minstrel show of 1890 with farcical skits portraying violent police raids of the illegal saloons where patrons were warned to “speak easy” upon entering and exiting. Carncross’s shows at the 11th Street Theatre (Opera House) were titled “The Candles” and “Speak Easy.”
27 Louis and Elizabeth Bergdoll’s residence within the brewery house was demolished by 1888 upon completion of the grand mansion a few blocks away on North 29th Street.
28 Rundbogenstil is a 19th-century historic revival style of architecture combining elements of Byzantine, Romanesque, and Renaissance motifs. Its most distinctive features are round-arched windows and doors.
29 Louis Bergdoll the elder’s $4 million estate was equivalent to $115–$125 million in the 2023 valuation.
30 Father and son Bergdolls maintained country homes (farms) in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, southwest of Philadelphia. Louis, the elder, built a farm in Chester Township. Louis, the younger, developed his farm (the Bergdoll country estate) in Broomall, Marple Township, the location of many Bergdoll family activities described elsewhere in this book.
31 While unknown, myocardial infarction (heart attack) and coronary artery disease are the probable causes of death for Louis Bergdoll at the young age of 39.
32 Records indicate Grover’s full name was Grover Cleveland Alfred Bergdoll, a name Emma initially wanted for their firstborn, Louis John Bergdoll. Ironically, President Grover Cleveland also avoided military duty when he was an assistant district attorney in Buffalo, New York. In a procedure legal at the time, he hired a substitute, Great Lakes sailor George Brinski, for $300 when he was drafted into the American Civil War. After surviving the war, Brinski told everyone he received only half the payment.
33 The Philadelphia Times and The Times newspaper nameplates were used interchangeably.
34 It wasn’t until late January 1898 that the Philadelphia County Orphans Court determined that Elizabeth’s 1849 Pennsylvania marriage to Louis Ludwig Bergdoll was valid. The decision allowed the distribution of Louis’ money through Elizabeth’s estate to many charities. However, the news was buried in a small column headlined NOTES OF THE COURTS by this time.
35 One indication of the total amount of money being distributed to the Bergdoll children from their father and grandfather is an 1896 surety bond required before the children’s guardian, Emma’s brother, Charles Barth, could receive funds into the guardian account. The bond was to be $2 million, twice the amount of inheritance anticipated.
36 The litigation over the 644 shares of Bergdoll Brewery stock became an issue over who would have voting rights to determine the company’s future. Stockholders were trying to keep the Bergdoll children’s voting rights away from their mother, Emma.
37 Died unexpectedly may be an understatement. Shockingly may be more appropriate. When he died, the younger Bergdoll was still investing heavily in brewery upgrades, buying real estate, and expanding his holdings. In January 1894, the Bergdolls began investing in New Jersey vacation resorts with the sheriff’s sale purchase of Atlantic City’s Hotel Rossmore for $23,781.
38 Years later, Bergdoll was disinterred and reburied in the large family mausoleum at West Laurel Hill Cemetery across the Schuylkill from Philadelphia, in Lower Merion Township, Pennsylvania.
39 Louis Bergdoll died without a will, so his estate was not subject to public court-reviewed probate. It all, whatever the amount, went to his wife, Emma.
40 Lawsuits and wills filed by Bergdoll family members and brewery principals provided financial information about the brewery.
41 Inflation calculations estimate the profit to be equivalent to about $8.2 million in 2023.
CHAPTER TWO
Emma: The Bergdoll Matriarch
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 1896–1920
“You would think she was the maid instead of the owner of a brewery,” said Harry Feldman about Emma Christina Barth Bergdoll of the Brewerytown neighborhood of Philadelphia. Feldman should know. He kept his eyes and ears open for news of wealthy women who might want to buy what he was selling. Feldman was a Russian Jew who lived two blocks from the German Protestant Bergdolls and sold ladies’ dresses in Brewerytown until he moved deeper into the city to run his clothing store. He recalled Emma as an early riser, working in her garden at the North 29th Street Bergdoll mansion in the first decade of the 20th century.
Feldman wondered why the wealthy widow didn’t call on him more frequently to adorn herself in his stock of stylish dressing garments. He found it unusual that Emma would often be wrapped in a cheap cotton summer house dress with an apron, planting and watering flowers or pulling weeds. Or, Feldman and the neighbors would see Emma cradling a wicker basket, walking the concrete sidewalk shopping the German markets, heavily laden with rags and tissues folded in her apron tie. She was unusual, they decided.
To Feldman, Emma was the multi-millionaire Bergdoll widow. He didn’t know her simple background as the youngest daughter of a German miller.
Two decades into her new life in America, the former immigrant maid in the Bergdoll household inherited a fortune when her husband died unexpectedly at a young age. With the approach of a new century, Emma Christina Barth Bergdoll’s life must have felt like three millionaires widowed her. Through the court-ordered distribution of cash, outside stock investments, mansions, farms, vacation real estate, mortgage income, saloons, beer distribution routes, majority stock ownership in the Bergdoll Brewery, and even a medieval castle in Germany, Emma began running her empire from her stately brick mansion on Philadelphia’s North 29th Street. She became the queen of Brewerytown.
With the transition from the Bergdoll men to Emma operating the brewery, people lined up outside her door for jobs, advice, hand-outs of food and cash, and personal favors. And she gave to many of them. She avoided the brewery, leaving the daily operation to managers. Emma preferred to work at home through messengers and a private telephone line to the brewery office.
It’s where the Bergdoll children learned to get whatever they wanted from their mother.
***
Well into the short-lived Edwardian era, the matriarch of the Philadelphia Bergdoll family and majority owner of the massive brewery was still stuck in the long-ranging Victorian style with her five-gored ankle-length flared skirts with inverted box-pleats and circular flounce. Her shirt-waist blouse was ruffled with great gathers at the bosom, and her dangly underarms were often covered with bishop sleeves. She was heavily laden with wool capes and soft furs in the winter. Unseen beneath the floor-length dresses that dragged on the Brewerytown streets were her thick-soled leather shoes with numerous punched and hooked eyelets laced high around her ankles, the same as her parents’ shoes at home in Germany. She seldom wore the removable collar for her blouse because it didn’t fit her thick neck. The tines of numerous side combs pinched Emma’s full-length coarse hair into a bun that splayed wisps of gray down around the brown skin splotches and moles of her sagging jowls. Darkness semi-circled under her eyes.
Since her husband died, Emma seldom kept a regular schedule. Her mischievous sons, the brewery, the banks, her aged mother, constant calls and correspondence from tenants, saloon keepers, politicians, police, lawyers, German churches and hospitals, and the needy and homeless hounded Emma for decisions and money. With her generous checkbook, she tried to accommodate every one of them.
John F. Smith of West Philadelphia remembers Emma in the early 20th century when his father ran a corner saloon next door to the Smiths’ rowhouse, both owned by the Bergdolls. The elder Smith paid rent and split Bergdoll Beer sales proceeds with Emma. One day, Mr. Smith rang up the brewery to ask Emma to send someone over to fix the sagging and rotting boards on the stoop. Later, young John noticed a figure in a worn-out dress and a scarf pulled tight, on hands and knees with a hammer, replacing the steps. He thought it was odd that Ma Bergdoll would send a woman to do the work. Taking a closer look among the planks, hammer, and saw, Smith noticed the workwoman displayed different colored shoes, black and white. He realized that the brewery owner herself had square-head nails dangling between her lips, hammer in hand, performing the carpentry.1 At the time, Emma was worth several million dollars.
Emma Christina Barth Bergdoll was born on July 27, 1861, in Huffenhardt in the northern part of Baden, Germany, the third child of seven to a grist miller in the Neckar River region.2 She arrived in New York on December 13, 1880, with her brother, Karl (Charles) Friedrich Barth, in steerage aboard the S.S. Nederland, a double-masted steamer of the Red Star Line that plied the Atlantic between Antwerp and New York and Philadelphia.
Soon afterward, the Barth siblings entered the large German community in Philadelphia. Emma immediately found work as a sewing machine operator in a knitting mill, and then as a maid in the Bergdoll home. Charles Barth found a job in the Bergdoll brewery and worked his way up to manager. Both positions were probably arranged because the Barths and Bergdolls were cousins.3 Within two years and five months, Emma went from cleaning the Bergdolls’ large multi-floor apartment in the brewery complex to marrying Louis, the younger, and becoming an American citizen. She was 22. Louis was 26.4
Unproved stories within the Bergdoll family suggest that Emma initially intended to marry Louis’ older brother, Charles, who died at 28 in 1883. Another unproved tale passed down in the family tells that while working as the family housemaid, Emma became pregnant. When Louis, the elder, discovered this, against his wife’s disapproval, he required his son, Louis, to marry the maid. However, Emma and Louis’ first child, Louis John Bergdoll, was born on October 9, 1884, well beyond his parents’ May 24, 1883 wedding date.5
Emma and Louis settled into brewery-owned homes in their neighborhood and then arranged to have Emma’s parents emigrate to Philadelphia. Johann Christoph Barth and Margaretha “Minnie” Wilhelmina Doerr Barth arrived with Margaretha’s mother, Eva Elizabeth Schneider Doerr, in May 1886.6
While Louis immersed himself in the brewery business with his father, Emma produced their five children and gave them nicknames: Louis John Bergdoll (Roos), Karl Charles Alvin Bergdoll (Chess), Elizabeth Bertha Bergdoll (Betty), Erwin Rudolph Bergdoll (Werny), and Grover Cleveland Bergdoll (Groff).
Emma’s schooling in Germany is undocumented, but she could read, add, and subtract well in German and English. She understood mortgages, rent, and real estate in her broken English with a thick German accent. She habitually collected all of them.
Emma Christina Barth Bergdoll from a 1927 dime store postcard printed from an 1880s portrait by the Philadelphia artist Augustus Kollner. With her full face accented with makeup, hair in an Edwardian pinless pompadour pulled into a bun, and elegant velvet dress with mink stole, Emma is beautiful and fashionable. Fur shawls, velvet gowns, pearls, and diamond brooches were part of Emma’s early life as the wife of a wealthy brewer.
Only a few images exist of Emma in her younger years. She must have been appealing at 21, suggested people who commented on Alfred’s diary, to attract the son of a wealthy brewer. A 1927 dime store postcard depicting a copy of an undated artist’s oil painting shows a beautiful woman tastefully and fashionably dressed.
An 1892 photograph shows Emma, 31, with her daughter, Elizabeth, 4, her mother, Wilhelmina, 53, and her rather dour-looking and aged grandmother, Eva, 74, in a formal pose in Philadelphia. The three women and little Elizabeth are attired in fashionable dresses of the age, with long dark sleeves, snugly buttoned waistlines, tight high collars, and ballooning shoulder sleeves. Emma’s dark hair is in a tall bun, and she displays a single large pearl dangling from a gold chain attached to a bosom button. Her protruding chin, round face, and thick neck resemble her mother and grandmother. Young Elizabeth looks just like them, only in miniature form.7
In middle age, Emma is intimidating as a short and heavy woman with the circumference of a butcher. She protrudes outward from her breasts with an abdomen resembling a beer barrel’s firm oak staves. When she dresses for warmth in her expensive fur coats and stoles and sits, she appears even more enormous, her ample reserves gathering around her waist. Her full-frontal roundness causes Emma to arch her shoulders back and push her square jaw upward, making one think of her as bossy and determined. She is all that, especially with a revolver tucked beneath her apron.8
Emma Barth Bergdoll, standing, about 1892, her mother, Margaretha Wilhelmina Doerr Barth (left), her grandmother, Eva Elizabeth Schneider Doerr (right), and her daughter, Elizabeth Bertha Bergdoll (Hall). (Bergdoll Family Collection, Historical Society of Pennsylvania)
Later in her life, photographed at the many court trials and trips to Washington for Congressional testimony at the U.S. Capitol, Emma was often pictured in stylish black silk suits and dresses with ample but tasteful jewelry choices and heavy-heeled black slip-on shoes. Her outfits were baggy enough to have hidden a small arsenal of weapons if she desired. One photograph taken on a public street shows her carrying a wicker market basket and holding forward a 10-inch kitchen knife.
With the death of her husband, Emma is independently rich in 1900 but lives what she calls a “simple, plain life, doing some of my own work with my own hands rather than aspiring through my wealth to a society that would have been as distasteful to me as I to it.” She is a force to be reckoned with in the brewery, her kitchen, the courtroom, and the halls of Congress. She captures attention with her broad smile too. She has the face of a happy German. But Emma was not a very happy woman for most of her mature years. And that was due to the escapades of her sons.
