On the Yahara A-Z

H.

Hess Cooperage – Somewhere back here in the Schenk Corners neighborhood, no more than a few blocks from Riverside, at an arterial that is old of landscape and the streets and buildings many still

original, stood the old cooperage of Frank Hess and Sons from 1904-1966.  A bygone trade by hand anymore, it can only be realized, by biking by the storefront of One Barrel Brewery across the street – and I assume which took its historical name from the cooperage – imagining the work and craft shaping white pine in the steel frames day in and day out.  It takes a moment to leap back to a bygone time when the steel barrel did not exist and that any liquid that needed to be transported by the likes


of such a made barrel and that such an industry would be in great demand especially in Wisconsin, the brewing capital of the states.  You imagine that the cooper of old times on the great seas before plane and car and railroad would carry its own cooper to keep them repaired and in shape.  "The finished wooden barrels were heavy, and could dry out, leak or break.  Quite often a single stave might crack or break, requiring repair.  Hess, like many other cooperages, also spent much of their time repairing used and damaged barrels sent back to them by the breweries."  To construct, all sawing and planing for the staves that were crafted by power tools. As many as 35 men worked here at one time, to saw and craft...and to hold those steel hoops in place they had to retrieve cattails from the local waters surrounding in Madison. "You can't make a beer barrel without cattails.  We put a cattail leaf between every stave.  This helps to keep the barrel from leaking." We can picture the old time taverns emptying

those crafted barrels out their backdoors along the Atwood and Winnebago streets.  Down Williamson along the Yahara river and those barrels drying out and cracking after only that one use and would leak forever after.  During prohibition, as alcohol dried up, so to speak, the cooperage stayed on for the dairy industry. "Of six cooperages operating in Wisconsin at the time, Hess was the only one that managed to remain open during the "dry" years.  With an upswell in business after prohibition, so too came along the very demise of the industry that this family had followed for its living for a generation and in "November 1965, the Hess Cooperage factory produced the last white oak barells ever to be manufactured in the United States.  As more things than is easy to imagine the old barrel stands as a relic of technology that used to stand for a craft and trade but is not replaced by an unknowable process.  Many enclaves along the east of Madison have maintained the veneer of the old and the crafted, the beer is still important, but the men outside the back door of the old cooperage no longer stand under hot heat awaiting their truck of white pine for the carving to barrels.