The first brewer: the question, and the Muessel ground

1852 — 1865

The record opens with one man: The National Register nomination for the Muessel/Drewry's Brewery Historic District frames the city's brewing history in a sentence: Christopher Muessel's was "the first of three breweries that operated in South Bend during the latter part of the 19th century and well into the 20th century" — the other two being Kamm & Schellinger of Mishawaka, carried in this section at boundary size below, and the South Bend Brewing Association of 1903. No earlier brewery appears in any source — not in the county histories, not in the nomination's own historical sketch, not in the digitized 1883 city directory, whose classified pages carry exactly one brewery, Muessel's. The statement stands at that strength: on the record reached, commercial brewing in South Bend begins with Christopher Muessel, and any predecessor would have to be found in the undigitized directory and license record named in this section's gaps.

The man: Christopher Muessel (1812–1894) was a brewer's son from Arzberg, Germany — the nomination prints the town "Arzburg," and the bottled brand his company later sold carried the same spelling, "Arzburg Export" — who learned brewing in his father's brewery before emigrating. When he reached South Bend, the nomination says, sources vary between 1852 and 1853, and the variance is printed here as the record gives it. He married and began his first brewery on the east bank of the St. Joseph River at Vistula Avenue and St. Joseph Street, on the city's east side. The nomination states the first plant's course plainly: it was eventually outgrown, because Muessel believed that "for good beer, you must have pure water."

The move that made the brewery: In 1865 Muessel bought the ground the brewery would occupy for the rest of its life: a large parcel — the nomination, citing his purchase, gives more than 136 acres northwest of the business district and west of Portage Avenue, "far out in the country" in the nomination's words — where he sank artesian wells. The site history told by the Local History department of the St. Joseph County Public Library, on the Monon organization's South Bend–Mishawaka tour page, adds the inventory the move let him build: he "used the land not only to build his brewery but also to create a lake and cold storage facilities," drawing cold storage ice from the lake he had made. The 1883 Farr's city directory, read first-hand for this section, catches the mature plant in a single line — "MUESSEL, CHRISTOPHER, Sr., Muessel brewery, Portage av near city limits" — and shows his workmen in its pages: a beer deliverer at the brewery, brewers boarding and lodging across the German west side. By 1883 the brewery the riverbank start-up had become was the northwest side's anchor industry, and it is the only one of the three breweries of the nomination's frame that was this city's own from first brick to last case.

Sources:

1. National Register of Historic Places nomination, Muessel/Drewry's Brewery Historic District, listed 28 December 2000 (NRIS 00001543), text read first-hand at historic-structures.com — the "first of three breweries" frame; Christopher Muessel's Arzberg origin, emigration dated 1852 or 1853 ("sources vary"), the first brewery at Vistula Avenue and St. Joseph Street, the 1865 purchase of more than 136 acres west of Portage Avenue, the artesian wells and the "pure water" judgment.
2. St. Joseph County Public Library, Local History department, Muessel/Drewry's entry on the Monon organization's South Bend–Mishawaka tour (monon.org) — the lake and cold-storage facilities at the Portage Avenue ground.
3. Farr's South Bend City Directory, 1883, digitized text read first-hand (Internet Archive, southbendindiana10unse) — the classified and alphabetical listings: Christopher Muessel Sr. at the brewery, Portage Avenue near the city limits; the brewery's deliverer and workmen in the alphabetical list.