I used to pass this building by sometimes in the late 1980s while I lived in Terre Haute. It contained an auto-repair shop then. What a dump it was. I remember it being painted yellow, which you could see only through the black grime that coated it.
This whole part of town was grimy then. It looked to me like some sort of industry had been here around this intersection of Poplar Avenue and Ninth Street. But that was long ago and no great use of the buildings had since been found.
The auto shop went out and by the early 1990s, and the building was been refreshed with a coat of paint and the words “E. Bleemel Flour and Feed” painted in the space above the shop windows. The first floor had become an antique shop; E. Bleemel, I learned, built this building and operated his business out of it for many years.
When I visited Terre Haute on this autumn day in 2008, the building had received an even better exterior refresh. I couldn’t tell for sure what it was being used for, but I could see that the building next door was now M. Mogger’s Pub. I was pleased to see this old building continuing to look good.
But I didn’t know its history. In the 1980s there was no Google to research this dingy part of town. But there is now, and what I learned is fascinating.
This building was built in 1837, which is mighty, mighty old for any structure in Indiana. It’s rare to find buildings built before about 1850 here.
This part of town has a rich history in beer — several breweries operated here, the oldest of which opened in 1837 as well. Ernest Bleemel was one of the brewers, and he operated his brewery out of this building for some time before selling it to Matthias Mogger in 1848. That’s the M. Mogger for which the pub is named. Mergers and acquisitions continued and in time the brewery became the Terre Haute Brewing Company. By the early 1900s it was the seventh largest brewery in the United States, and its Champagne Velvet was one of Indiana’s most popular beers.
I’m not sure when Champagne Velvet went out of production — sometime after the 1950s and before I arrived in Terre Haute in 1985. Locals still remembered CV, as they sometimes called it, fondly. The whole Terre Haute beer industry faded away during these years, leaving this part of town to decay.
It was in about 1990 when a new owner took over the Bleemel building and found what is believed to be the original Champagne Velvet recipe in it. A fellow named Mike Rowe (not the one of Dirty Jobs fame) bought the recipe and started brewing it out of another former brewery building on the opposite corner from the Bleemel building. Long story short, the Upland Brewing Company of Bloomington brews it now. I can buy it at the liquor store nearest my home. It’s a light, crisp, American pilsener that packs a stronger alcoholic punch than most beers of its genre.
Even more fascinatingly, it was said for a long time that a series of tunnels connected the various brewery buildings here. The last surviving Terre Haute Brewing Company employees confirmed their existence in about 1990, and then in the early 2000s a crew from the electric company found one of the tunnels while digging across the street from the Bleemel building. Workers described it as 12 to 14 feet wide and 8 feet tall in the center. One worker explored the tunnel for about 25 feet before coming to a place where it had been blocked off.
Since I made this photograph, M. Mogger’s has expanded into the Bleemel building. The owners have refreshed the exterior two more times; if you drive by today, you’ll find the building painted bright blue, and the building next door painted brick red.
There are plenty of things I wish I had photographed before, and the Bleemel Building is in the top ten. I just didn’t document the built environment with my camera until the mid 2000s. Perhaps someday photographs from the past will emerge, among them images from the 1980s. I’d love to compare them to my memories.
Epilogue: About ten years ago, the fellow who regularly cut my hair and I were talking about our pasts and we were delighted to find we both had Terre Haute as part of our stories. It turns out he had an apartment upstairs in the Bleemel building while he attended Indiana State University in the 1970s. He remembered the auto shop and the general deteriorated condition of the building and its immediate environment. Sadly, he had no photographs of the place.
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