The Muessel Brewing Company: incorporation, the 1911 brewhouse, and the dry close

1893 — about 1922

Incorporation and succession: In 1893 the family firm took corporate form as the Muessel Brewing Company, with Christopher Muessel as its president in the last year of his life; he died in 1894. The nomination prints the succession whole: the presidency passed to his son Edward, with his son William as secretary, and the founder's grandsons in the working offices — Walter as treasurer and manager, Adolph as assistant manager. The ground itself kept growing a plant: after 1900 the company raised its office building, and in three years around 1911, in the nomination's building history, "a new bottling house, a large stable, and a mammoth new brewery were built" — the mammoth brewhouse being the plant's statement that, two decades into corporate form and on the eve of the dry crusade's victory, the family expected to brew at scale for a long time. That expectation is the temperance entry's subject; here the building stands as the company's high-water mark.

The dry close: Prohibition ended the Muessel Brewing Company, but not at a stroke. The nomination records the attempt and its failure in one movement: after brewing beer was outlawed the company tried to make near beer, the attempt failed, and the Muessel Brewing Company closed about 1922 — four years after Indiana's own dry law had stopped legal brewing in the state (the Crime section carries the enforcement record; the temperance entry below carries the makers'-side frame). One conflict in the family's end date stands in the record and is printed, not averaged: a National Register-derived summary carried on the Trek.Zone database states that "in 1933, the Muessel Brewing Company went out of business and sold their plant to Drewry's." The nomination itself — the document the summary derives from — says the company closed about 1922 and that the plant, after an enlargement carried out "just before Repeal," was reorganized into Drewry's hands in 1936, as the Drewry's entry below prints. The nomination's own dates govern this section's telling; the 1933 date is preserved here because summaries of the register record repeat it and a reader will meet it.

Between the companies: What the ground did between the family's close about 1922 and the 1936 reorganization, the nomination covers in the single building fact already named — an early-1930s enlargement of the old Muessel plant, with a new bottling plant, undertaken as Repeal approached. Who owned and worked the site in the dry decade itself, the record reached does not say, and the gap is named rather than filled: the plant that Drewry's took in 1936 was an enlarged, modernized one, and the hands that paid for the enlargement belong to the company's endgame, which the nomination compresses into the stockholders' meeting of August 1936 that the next-but-one entry prints.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Muessel/Drewry's Brewery Historic District (2000) — the 1893 incorporation with Christopher Muessel president; his death in 1894; Edward Muessel president, William secretary, Walter treasurer and manager, Adolph assistant manager; the post-1900 office building; the bottling house, stable and "mammoth new brewery" of about 1911; the failed near-beer attempt and the closing about 1922; the pre-Repeal enlargement with its new bottling plant.
2. Trek.Zone, Muessel/Drewry's Brewery Historic District summary — the conflicting statement that the company "went out of business" in 1933; printed as a conflict against the nomination's own text, above.