Tim Spitzack

FACT...

 

A Slice of History Buried in the Bluff

 

It’s a frigid January afternoon and I’m standing in a parking lot on St. Paul’s West Side staring at the bluff. My view is hampered by the checkered pattern of an 8-foot-high chain-link fence so I put my face near the frosty steel, close one eye and peer through one of the diamond-shaped links. My eye travels across several hundred yards of grey asphalt to the foot of the 75-foot-steep vertical bluff and begins a methodical zig-zag scanning of the sandy hillside. Soon I see what I had hoped to discover: a large circular white spot  concealing a significant slice of regional history. The spot is a concrete wall that hides the remnants of one of the most industrious uses of the area’s storied limestone caves. It’s the site of the city’s first brewery, the Yoerg Brewery.

 

The numerous caves that pock the bluffs along the Mississippi River in St. Paul have been used for centuries for many different purposes. Native Americans held peace meetings and worship services in them, early settlers used them as landmarks and tourist destinations, and in recent decades businesses used them for storage. 

 

The largest and most notable caves were destroyed in the name of progress. Carver’s Cave near Dayton’s Bluff was ruined during railroad construction in the mid- and late-1800s and Fountain Cave was buried in 1960 to make way for Shepard Road. Most recently, others were sealed off for public safety after a few incidents in which youth died from carbon monoxide poisoning after starting fires in the non-ventilated caves. 

 

Photos taken before the Yoerg Brewery cave system was sealed show its downward regression. The ground is littered with broken toilets from a plumbing company that owned the site in the 1950s, and the walls are etched with graffiti, a much different “art form” than the images of bears, birds and fish that Native Americans carved into other area caves. One of the most interesting artifacts is a Yoerg delivery truck, now firmly buried to its windshield in sand and debris.

 

Cave-aged beer
Yoerg’s is credited as St. Paul’s first commercial brewery. It was founded by German immigrant Anthony Yoerg in 1848, a year before St. Paul became the capital of the newly formed Minnesota Territory. Yoerg, whose father was a brewer in the Bavarian village of Gundefingen, immigrated to the United States at age 19, settling in Pittsburgh, Penn., before relocating to Galena, Ill. He moved to St. Paul at age 32 and joined forces with another man to open a butcher shop on the West Side. After a serendipitous incident – his business partner skipped town with all of the company’s money – he returned to his family’s roots in brewing. The river valley offered everything he needed to build his brewing empire. The soil and climate were perfect for growing barley, he was able to easily get fresh water from underground springs, and the caves provided natural refrigeration (hovering around 47 degrees) to store and age the beer. 

 

According to St. Paul historian Gary Brueggemann, Yoerg first opened shop near Eagle and Washington streets in St. Paul (near today’s Xcel Center) and remained there for 21 years. By 1870 he was bursting at the seams and relocated to the West Side. There he built a 3-building stone brewery with a steam-powered assembly line and its own copper shop for making kegs. By 1891 it was one of the largest breweries in the state, cranking out 35,000 barrels a year. This put him ahead of other brewers whose names are widely recognized today: Theodore Hamms and Jacob Schmidt. An ad for the brewery suggests why his beers were so popular. It proudly boasts:

 

“St. Paul’s famous caves have been the store houses of treasures and marvelous products since the earliest days for many years not the least of these has been Yoerg Brewing Co.’s beers. Down there, away from the glaring sunlight, many feet beneath the earth’s surface in a wonderful plant where cleanliness and sanitary conditions are the result of painstaking efforts and rigid rules, Yoerg’s Beer is brewed. Visitors are impressed with the lavish attention to details and the precautions taken to insure absolute purity. And again in these great natural caverns, cool and clean and pure; buried away from everything except that which tends to sanitary wholesomeness, the beer is properly aged until the time that it is brought forth for distribution and consumption.”

 

The ad promoted Yoerg’s Special, a dark brew that had “meteoric success” and was “recommended highly by many physicians.”

 

Yoerg died on Mar. 30, 1898 during the height of the brewery’s success, thus he did not have to see it struggle through the challenging times of Prohibition. That task fell on two of his sons, who turned to producing soft drinks and distributing milk to keep the company afloat. Yoerg and his wife Elovina had seven children, five boys and two girls. All of the sons helped manage the business in one way or another over the years, and ultimately three generations were involved before the brewery closed in 1952 after 103 years of operation. 

 

Perhaps the most interesting mark Yoerg left on the neighborhood is the extensive tunnel system he created in the caves. From the main cavern his workers carved out tunnels in several directions, creating a mile-long network. One of the tunnels leads to a staircase that ascends 50 feet to the basement of a Second Empire Italianate style mansion atop the bluff at 215 W. Isabel. Yoerg built that home in 1875 and used the tunnel to get to work. I drove up winding Ohio Street to view the mansion, which was added to the National Register of Historic places in 1989, and to ponder the life of the large family that once lived there. It was in this home that Yoerg passed away. He stayed active with the brewery until just weeks before his death. 

 

As I ruminated on the bond the family shared, I envisioned the scene of Yoerg returning home from work. I could hear the faint clanging of his feet as he climbed the metal staircase, the turn of the door, and then its closing. It was a door that was never closed for long while Yoerg lived there, but sadly is now gone forever. The entrance was removed and sealed in 1962 by a later homeowner, who was unrelated to Yoerg. Yet the bluff remains. And if you listen closely enough you can hear the echoes of another time and place seeping through the fissures of the porous limestone.