Dr. Greg Brick
The West Seventh Street neighborhood of St. Paul was also known for its breweries. In 1871, Frederick Banholzer acquired the North Mississippi Brewery, which had been established in 1853. In 1886, Banholzer Park, an outdoor beer garden, opened, buoyed up with balloon rides to Lilydale, across the river. After Frederick’s son William died, the brewery […]
Beginning as the Minneapolis Brewery in 1866, the Heinrich Brewery, as it came to be known, existed until 1903. The area was dubbed “Brewery Flats” because the Noerenberg Brewery (whose lagering caves are utterly inaccessible today) was also located nearby. These breweries, along with others, merged to form Grain Belt Beer in the 1890s, which […]
Minnesota’s first brewery, which produced lager beer, was established in 1848 by Anthony Yoerg, in St. Paul. Yoerg, like many St. Paul brewers to come, was a native of Bavaria, the cradle of the German brewing industry. It wasn’t until 1871 that Yoerg moved to the location that was to be so closely associated with […]
The Community Reporter is a monthly newspaper with a circulation of 12,000 serving the Fort Road neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. In 2007, the editor invited me to contribute a feature about my investigation of historic caves under that part of town and the two articles that resulted were published in August and September. While […]
A three kilometer reach of the Mississippi River gorge near downtown St. Paul, Minnesota, is known locally as “Mushroom Valley” because of the abundance of man-made mushroom caves in the sandstone bluffs. Mushroom growing lasted a century, from its introduction by Parisian immigrants in the 1880s until the last cave ceased production in the 1980s […]