Fuhrmann & Schmidt Bottling House and Offices

A Brewery Business in the City

At Washington and Commerce Streets, Fuhrmann & Schmidt had a city facility combining offices, cold storage, and a bottling house. The 1908 brewery-sponsored picture book distinguished this establishment from the main Eagle Run brewing plant. It was a place where the company’s industrial business met the town’s streets and customers.

The book explained the bottling establishment in terms of the people it was intended to serve: private families and hotel tables. Bottles carried the brewery’s products into a different setting from the brewhouse. The company promoted both the cleanliness of the operation and the suitability of its drinks for those customers, using the confident sales language found throughout the booklet.

A Building That Advertised Its Work

A photograph in the same book shows how the building announced its functions. “Offices” was lettered over one part of the frontage and “Cold-Storage & Bottling-House” over another; “Stable” marked an adjoining section. Above them, the facade displayed the Fuhrmann & Schmidt and Eagle Run Brewery names. The picture’s caption identified the company’s main offices, cold storage, and bottling house, together with P. H. Fuhrmann’s residence.

An early-1900s business entry likewise placed Fuhrmann & Schmidt’s steam bottling works at Washington and Commerce Streets. The combination of bottling, storage, offices, and a stable suggests the several kinds of work gathered at one city address: handling a product, administering a business, and preparing it for delivery.

Separate Places in the Brewery Story

The city bottling house was not the whole Eagle Run complex. The main plant, pictured elsewhere in the 1908 book, had its own brewing and storage buildings. Fuhrmann & Schmidt’s later newspaper publicity showed another brewery site in the East End. Keeping those places distinct brings the company’s work into focus: a brewery business could have a manufacturing plant, a city bottling and office address, and a wider system of deliveries without all three occupying the same corner.