Residents were lured to lucrative business as way to make ends meet during difficult times
By Sharon Roznik
Action Reporter Media
FOND DU LAC, Wis. (AP) - In the 1920s and early '30s, the Holyland east of Fond du Lac was a bootlegger's paradise.
The Depression made it hard for the German-Catholic immigrants who settled in the area to make a living, but Prohibition created a market for illegal booze, and some of these pious churchgoers jumped at the chance.
As stills fired up and the moonshine flowed out of barns and faux cheese factories, family secrets, attacks by federal agents, Al Capone sightings and even murder were the result.
John Jenkins, who researched the subject for his thesis at Marian University in Fond du Lac, told Action Reporter Media that residents from these sleepy farm communities were lured to the lucrative brewing, distilling and selling of illegal moonshine to make ends meet during difficult times.
The business of illicit liquor supplied jobs during the toughest years of the Depression. Freight transporters, coal dealers, farmers (corn to make corn sugar), auto mechanics and barn owners in Fond du Lac County profited or at least earned enough to put food on the table.
"I grew up on a farm with seven kids in our family, and I can tell you it was a struggle. People got into this business just to survive," said Bill Casper, who as a child lived across from one of the largest and most well-known bootleg operations in the area.
The Holyland, the name given to Catholic communities within miles of one another, was a unique fit for the job, Jenkins said. It was geographically isolated, had access to the railroad for delivering liquor ingredients and was comprised of residents who felt that Prohibition was anti-immigrant, anti-German and anti-Catholic.
The German Catholic's deep faith was reflected in the names they gave their communities, such as Saint Cloud, Marytown, Johnsburg, Saint Anna and Mount Calvary.
But pay during hard times took precedent over piety.
"While I was interviewing one man, he commented that I looked stunned," Jenkins said. "I replied that I thought these were pious people living in the region, the kind who went to church every Sunday."
"On Sunday, yes," the man replied, "but what we did the other six days of the week made life fun."
Casper said he first learned about the business of bootlegging sometime in the late 1930s.
As a youth living in Malone, which is between Johnsburg and Mount Calvary, Casper bailed hay with his father at the neighboring farm. At one point the boy looked up and noticed a large hole, as big around as a bushel basket, cut into the barn's roof. It was a telltale sign, revealing where there once was a smoke stack from a still for making moonshine.
"I asked my dad about it, but he didn't really want to talk about it," said Casper, now 84. "Everything was kept secret, and nobody knew nothing about anything that was going on."
The barn still stands today along Silica Road off of Fond du Lac County W in Malone.
Just down the road from the barn in Malone was Olig's Cheese factory, or so it was called.
"The cheese factory was a front," Casper said. "Years later, when my Uncle Alex Casper was in a nursing home, he told me about carloads of sugar that came into the train station in Malone. It was his job to unload the train car and transport the sugar to the cheese factory."
The mash, or fermented grain, was brewed in large vats at the cheese factory, then transported to the barn, where it was boiled in the still to complete the process and bottled for nighttime transport by truck.The Malone operation churned out moonshine using simple ingredients: sugar, water and yeast.
As a teen, Casper discovered a huge collection of bottles in a hidden room in the hay mow of his family's barn. In that moment, he realized that his father was storing the glassware for the moonshiners who were brewing across the road.
"People didn't even tell their families what they were doing because there was always danger from the feds (federal agents) who were hanging around, of maybe someone getting knocked off," Casper said.
The late Ludwig "Louie" Karl faced that danger one night and lived to tell about it. Karl was part of the Malone moonshine operation from 1930 to 1935, as well as other whiskey operations in the area. He related his story in an audio recording in the 1970s made by a grandson.
Karl, who was a plumber by trade, worked for the moonshine operation as a lookout. He sat through the night at a fork between two long driveways. One driveway led to the barn, almost undetectable from County Road W. He gripped a rope that ran across a field to a bell in the barn, and if he saw police or federal investigators coming, he would warn his colleagues by jerking the rope to ring the bell.
One night during an ambush, Karl was shot in the back by federal agents.
"I was in the hospital and they fixed me up ... I walked out a couple days later when I felt better," he said.
Two years later, Karl was tried and fined $250 for his wrongdoing.
In just one night, 24 50-gallon drums of "alky" could be made and shipped out, Karl said. Shipments went north to New London and south to Chicago. Most of the operations' earnings were spent paying off law enforcement officials and neighboring farmers to "keep their mouths shut," he said.
Asked about rumors that the famous Chicago mobster Al Capone was connected to the Holyland operation, Karl claimed to have seen him around the area. Old-timers relate stories of Capone's deep involvement in a Marytown bootlegging operation and another located between Mount Calvary and St. Peter. Stories say the gangster rented a room year-round at the Columbia Harbor hotel in the nearby town of Pipe and killed a prostitute at the hotel and a young still hand at his Mount Calvary-St. Peter operation.
Karl said the business of bootlegging was addictive. The more money he made, the more he wanted to make.
"And the more you made, the more you spent," Karl said. "You just wanted to make a bigger operation."
Fred Sieber, 89, was 7 years old during the winter of 1932-33 when men from Chicago showed up and asked to rent the abandoned Cheese Factory his father owned and his family lived above in a small apartment in Mount Calvary. A winter-long whiskey operation ensued, and to mask the sweet smell of alcohol, Sieber's father sprayed the youngster with perfume each morning before he headed off to school.
"I remember plenty - all kinds of things, like their two-ton trucks going in and out and their big electric lights (in the cheese factory) burning all through the night," Sieber said.
The cheese vat that was converted into the main still was 17 feet high and could hold 650 gallons of mash, Sieber recalled, with a daily output of 17 gallons of pure ethanol (193 proof).
One time, the moonshiners dumped corn mash in the yard, and Sieber's father fed it to the cattle. The tipsy cattle swayed and stumbled, unable to find the barn-door exit. Once outside, the cattle meandered about and had to be escorted by cattle hands back into the barn for the night.
One of the deadliest accounts of the area's murky Prohibition past is the 1932 murder of Gregor Neiss of Mount Calvary. According to archival newspaper accounts, Neiss was found with two gunshots wounds to the back of the head and a bottle of moonshine tucked in his pocket. His body lay where Taco Bell now stands on East Johnson Street in Fond du Lac. At the time, the airport was located across the street.
An investigation revealed Neiss was playing a dangerous game of posing as a federal agent in an attempt to extort local bootleggers, most of whom were linked to Chicago gangs.
Bruno Kraus is another Holylander who spent his childhood near a large bootleg operation outside St. Peter and said it was often visited by "g-men." Kraus, now 92, can remember laying awake at night and hearing vehicles with headlights off "run fast up and down the driveway," like a car chase scene in a movie.
Victor Sippel, born in 1918, grew up outside Mount Calvary during the Depression years. He estimates one out of 10 people he knew in the Holyland was involved in the business of moonshine. One man was thrown in jail for six months, he said.
Although his family was not involved in the illegal trade, Sippel said they, like everyone else, accepted it as a fact of life and looked the other way.
"It still amazes me to this day that there was so much moonshine being made in all these little towns," he said. "I know, because I saw it with my own eyes."
Published: Tue, Jan 05, 2016
