The Emporia Gazette

May 28, 2012

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Perhaps nearly lost in memory is the most infamous underground space of all in Emporia: the site of the Macke Brewery built into the northwest side of Perley Hill on the east side of the ESU campus.

Frederick H. Macke, a German brewer from Topeka, was invited by town founder Preston B. Plumb to develop his business just outside of the city limits, and eventually Macke spent more than $25,000 to put it into operation. Facing west toward present-day Welch Stadium, the main building of the brewery was long and rambling with stairways extending down into an underground cave. The cave had two rooms, the first consisting of four vaults with concrete floors. The ceiling was water-tight, arched over with brick and stone sixteen feet high and extending 200 feet in length. The vaults were so dark that a lantern was always required. A door in the back wall opened to the inner cave with a back wall of solid limestone. Its sides, too, were bricked. In 1870 the brewery advertised beer and ale on short notice, with a good stock constantly on hand.

In Bob Hodge’s research, he found that “The Brewery” became a great resort for people who had “that tired feeling”. Bob writes, “Many a high old time was had within its walls and in the shade of the grove planted with the design for establishing a beer garden. The glasses and steins tinkled together during the social game until far into the night, when weariness and necessity for rest to prepare for the morrow’s labors compelled the parties to break up and the guests to depart.” Have beer halls changed so much today?

On Sunday night, May 29, 1879, an incident occurred at The Brewery which changed its reputation forever. A party of railroad men lounged and drank long enough into the night that a row began. Peter Butzet (or Burgtie), an employee of the brewery, was shot and killed. Some claimed he shot himself accidentally while trying to hit a man over the head with the butt of a loaded shotgun that discharged, hitting him in the bowels and groin. Another man, Macke’s son, was shot in the wrist, while still another man was shot in the head. The doctor and the sheriff were called, and a number of men jailed.

With the temperance drive growing in the state, the Kansas Legislature of 1881 enacted a Prohibition Law that prohibited the manufacture and sale of intoxicating liquors. Mr. Macke voluntarily closed The Brewery, but, as he had a large amount of beer left on hand, he tried to sell off his stock.

Arrested in May of 1882, Macke refused to pay his fine and was sent to county jail. When appeals to both the District Court and the Kansas Supreme Court failed, Macke had to pay not only his original $1,300 fine but court costs for three courts. He spent the final 18 years of his life, eking out a living farming and charging admission for tours of his underground vaults complete with their vats, kettles, malt mill and kiln, hogsheads and memories. Some reports tell of College of Emporia students and Emporia Normal School (ESU) students imprisoning students from the rival school in the vaults of the now-defunct brewery

After Mr. Macke’s death, the buildings and vaults were extensively vandalized by town boys. Mrs. Macke came upon the boys in the act of destruction, ready to light a huge bonfire. She soon sold the buildings and land, and the last vestiges of the house and brewery were removed. But the vaults remained. A new house was built on the site, and below it two flights of stairs extended from the kitchen of the house to the cave door, where another longer flight of stairs went to the floor of the cavern. A reporter (perhaps William Allen White) in the Emporia Weekly Gazette wrote on December 26, 1907, about his experience visiting the cave.

“The cave has two rooms. The first or outer one is dry; a concrete floor and water-tight ceiling make it an excellent cellar, but since there are no windows, it is so dark that a lantern is always necessary. A door in the back wall opens into the inner room. Near this door a hollow sound of water falling in the darkness gives one a shivery feeling. The floor of the inner room is partly covered with water, the brick walls and ceiling are slimy with moisture and great drops slip through the bricks overhead, gleam a moment in the lantern light, and fall with tinkling splashes into the pools below….On the ceiling the dripping water has left tiny stalactites, which may be broken off, but they are so brittle that they crumble in the hand. The maudlin stream of water that babbles to itself, flows from a small opening near the top of the back wall. The opening is scarcely large enough to admit the body of a man, even the body of a man in a hurry to get in…The hole is said to continue upward to an air hole near the top of the hill. The back wall of the cave is of solid limestone, and is the only natural wall in either room. The water has worn a shallow groove for itself in the stone, and has carried the lime down and deposited it on the pebbles which cover the floor. These deposits have a frost-like appearance. Every little twig, or bit of rubbish, washed down from the opening on the hill at the upper end of the airhole, is soon coated with lime, if it remains in the water.”

So that was the cave 100 years ago. What has happened to it? Dave Sielert, who began working for ESU in 1957, remembers a cave perhaps 35-40’ deep, brick-lined and in good shape. He felt that it was probably over 10’ high and wider than 15’. He was in the cave numerous times and was surprised when the decision was made to bulldoze the northwest side of the hill to make way for parking lots down below. They used the dirt and rock as fill for the leveling the parking lots.

In a Loren Pennington interview with Riley Stormont, long-time facilities supervisor at ESU, Stormont said that the cave was completely torn out trying to make a parking area down the hill to the north of Wilson Park. As Stormont said, they got clear to the back end of the cave. Dave Stormont admits that he was never in the cave, but he does remember his dad saying that previous owner had been a dairyman, and that the cave was used to keep the milk cool.

Wilson Park above the caves on the east side of the ESU campus was donated by the Dr. Clyde Wilson family in 1937 as a recreation area for the university. Articles about the donation and the park mention that an Indian village once sat on the site, the highest point in Emporia, but no mention is made of the caves and the brewery that also burrowed into the side of that hill.

Bob Eklund wrote in an Emporia Gazette article that the cave was dug by Macke and was some 100 feet long and 15 feet wide. This differs from an Emporia Times article from June 7, 1895, which states that the combined length of the four vaults went 200’ into the hill. If there were four vaults in 1895, apparently a third owner, Nathaniel Reider, who purchased the area in 1908, tore down at least one of the vaults. A 1992 book by Cindy Higgins entitled Kansas Breweries and Beer states that Reider, a dairy farmer, stored farm implements in the cave. Dick Weatherholt, physical plant supervisor for ESU today, says that heavy equipment was stored there by the university. He tells that probably in the 1960s parts of the ceiling of the cave came down, and the site was deemed unsafe. The cave at that time, he believes, was filled in.

It is sad to think that an ancient cave that served the Indians for long generations and housed Emporia’s first brewery was to meet its end because of the need for a parking lot.