The Muessel family brewery: sons, brands and the ground it gave the city

1865 — 1893

A family firm: The brewery Christopher Muessel built on Portage Avenue was a family enterprise in the directory's plain sense. Three sons entered the business — Ludwig, who became its brewmaster and died in 1884; William; and Edward — and Christopher's grandsons would follow into its offices. The Local History account credits the founder with a mechanic's bent beside the brewer's: he "is credited with inventing a racking machine for filling barrels and a draining rack for bottles" — the unglamorous machinery of a brewery that sold both ways, and the claim is printed as the library's account gives it. The firm's two selling lines divided by package, in the nomination's account: Standard and Bavarian went out in barrels to the saloons, and the bottled line was Arzburg Export, named for the founder's home town in the spelling the family used.

The ground as civic standing: The Muessels' standing in the city is written into its map. West of the brewery the family's land carried the ice pond from which the plant cut its cold-storage ice; the nomination records what became of it — "the pond, drained by the WPA in the 1930s, was part of Muessel Park west of the brewery." A city park bearing the brewer's name, made out of the brewery's own water, is the family's civic monument, and it is printed here at the size the nomination gives it rather than enlarged: the Muessels were proprietors of the city's first brewery for four decades, employers on the northwest side, and the name the west side's park still carries. The family's own great-house chapter of the record — the Muessel houses of the near northwest side — belongs to the Architecture and Wealth sections of this history; here they stand as what the brewing record shows: the founding family of the city's drink industry, whose plant outlived them by eighty years.

The brewery and the game: One piece of the brewery's promotion survives in the register record, and it is printed with its carriers because the carriers conflict. A National Register-derived summary of the district's history records that "eventually there was even a professional football team — the 'Muessel Brewers' — coached by Knute Rockne," and the Indiana brewers' trade publication Indiana on Tap dates the venture to 1913, with Rockne then a Notre Dame senior. Rockne's documented South Bend semi-professional coaching, in the standard history of the era, Klosinski's Pro Football in the Days of Rockne, attaches instead to the South Bend Jolly Fellows Club of 1916–17. The two accounts are printed side by side and not reconciled: a brewery-sponsored professional eleven named the Muessel Brewers stands in the register-derived record with Rockne's name attached, and the documented Rockne record puts his South Bend coaching three years later with another club. Which club history has hold of the truth, the record reached does not settle; the brewery's name on a professional football team, in the years when brewers bought such advertising across the Midwest, is itself the documented point.

Sources:

1. National Register nomination, Muessel/Drewry's Brewery Historic District (2000) — the sons Ludwig, William and Edward; Ludwig's death in 1884; the barrel brands Standard and Bavarian and the bottled Arzburg Export; the brewery pond drained by the WPA in the 1930s as part of Muessel Park.
2. St. Joseph County Public Library, Local History department, Muessel/Drewry's entry (monon.org) — the founder's racking machine and bottle-draining rack; the lake and cold storage.
3. Trek.Zone's National Register-derived summary of the Muessel/Drewry's district, and Indiana on Tap, "Pro Football and Beer: The Relationship Continues" (indianaontap.com, 2018) — the "Muessel Brewers" professional team and the 1913 Rockne attribution; set against Klosinski, Pro Football in the Days of Rockne, for the documented South Bend Jolly Fellows Club coaching of 1916–17, as carried in the national biographical record of Rockne's coaching career.