A summer outing at the old Hamm’s Brewery

I found this picture last winter on a random website and there was a caption that had the name of this group, what the event was and the year this picture was taken, but stupidly I didnt save it and I thought all was lost…until now!

I went to the Minnesota Historical Society database and did a few various searches and I finally found it! Ironically this picture was loaded backwards on their site so I had to flip it and add some fancy editing to clear it up a little to make it out to be what it is here.

Also, in order to write this article, I had to wait until spring to go over to the brewery and attempt to take the comparison shot without any snowdrifts in the picture…talk about delaying a post haha.

So what I originally thought was the proper angle was actually the wrong angle! The backdrop of the group photo was actually taken facing east on Minnehaha from Payne Avenue and not facing north from across the street by the bottling department looking south which I originally thought below …..

Instead here is the actual angle recreating the shot ….

And just for good measure here is a postcard from that time depicting the same angle….

I tried to do a similar angle of where the group was standing in the picture, and as you can see, things are very different but at the same time, some things are the same.

I will add that the original picture is a great shot because you can see the decorative design of what the brewery once had back in it’s early days, way back before they tried “modernizing” it in the 1950’s and ruin most of it in this modern picture above.

If the trees of today where not there you would be able to see the hill and possibly the old location of Theo Hamm’s house. There also looks to be houses along the street in the original photo that no longer exists today due to brewery expansion.

So on to the info of the picture itself! The group gathered in the photo is of the Tuxedo Club of St Paul and it was taken sometime between 1904 and 1907. So what was the Tuxedo Club you ask? Well as much as I could find it was a club that was based in St Paul and they wore tuxedos….. just kidding.

But if I had to take a wild guess of who they were, I would say it was a society club where they could wear fancy hats, smoke cigars, drink Hamm’s and do that laugh where you tilt your head up slightly and go har har har…. you know.

I also found that they had a establishment at 230 Mounds Boulevard where most of the gatherings took place, which is just a hop skip and jump away from where the Hamm’s Brewery was in operation back then.

I’m guessing the club is no longer around today because nothing came up in any search I attempted which is too bad because I would’ve loved to find out more. The house in the second group shot also looks like its not in existence today and was most likely demolished due to frontage road rerouting during construction of Interstate 94 because nothing is on that spot when I did a google map search.

So in closing, hats off to the Tuxedo Club of St Paul for having an outing at The Hamm’s Brewery on one summer day back in the early 1900’s, hope you had some great Hamm’s samplings.