Most men have hobbies. Golf. Hunting. Fishing. Model Trains. What have you. But my husband has a rather unusual hobby. He buys old buildings, tears them completely apart, usually leaving just the outside walls, and then rebuilds them. I’ll never forget the day he started on his very first project in 2017. I arrived home from work to find him standing in the second floor of a building he had recently purchased. I pulled into the driveway and got out of my car. There he was waving at me from the second floor of the house next door. The reason I could see my husband so clearly was because he had torn off the roof and most of the exterior wall of the second floor of the building! He was standing in what had once been our neighbor’s bedroom!! The remaining wallpapered walls seeing sunshine like they had never seen before! The whole room now open to the sky. My brain struggled to make sense of what I was seeing, wallpaper shouldn’t be that close to blue sky and clouds. But there stood my husband, in the bright sunshine, waving and smiling at me from the open edge of a gaping hole in an otherwise normal looking house. He was so proud of himself. I could almost hear him saying “Hey Honey look what I did! I tore off the roof!” I had to laugh. It’s what he does, tears stuff apart so he can rebuild it.

When you are tearing apart old buildings sometimes you find some really interesting things. Inside the kitchen wall of our neighbor’s house Craig found a chunk of scrap wood. Written on it in pencil was a date and the words “3 days since Willy died.” Lying beside the wood, in this spot within the wall, were two very old Hershey Chocolate Bar candy wrappers. Craig brought these home to me, knowing full well that I was going to research the heck out of them until I learned the history. The wrappers were from 1906, which matched the date written on the wood. Willy was a young man by the name of William and he had died from diabetes, at the age of only 13 years old, exactly three days before the date written on the wood. So the phrase “3 days since Willy died” was pretty accurate.

Willy came from a very close family. He and his widowed mother were living in a rental apartment on the second floor of a house. His aunt and uncle, and two cousins, all lived downstairs in the apartment on the first floor. It must have been a great childhood growing up with your cousins nearby. At the time of his death though, Willy’s aunt and uncle were building a brand new house just up the street from where they all currently lived. This new house would become my neighbor’s house, and ultimately my husband’s project when he bought it. It appears to me that Willy’s cousin, John, only a year older then Willy, may have sought refuge in the house his parents had under construction after Willy died. In his grief over Willy’s death, John may have wanted to memorialize his cousin in a way. Maybe John had eaten the two candy bars alone or with another cousin or a friend of Willy’s. To honor Willy, John then placed the wrappers inside the unfinished wall, writing his feelings, 3 days since Willy died” and the date on the piece of scrap wood. I’ve often wondered why Hershey Chocolate bars? John would move into this house just a few months after Willy’s death, living there until he became an adult and moved on to his own home. He always knew that his memorial to Willy was silently hidden in the kitchen wall. Did anyone else know it was hidden there? Hidden until the day my husband tore down the wall and found it, 111 years later that is. So as not to disturb this memorial to Willy, I typed up what I had learned of the history and together my husband and I placed that along with the scrap of wood and the two candy wrappers, inside the new kitchen wall when the building was remodeled. I like to imagine someone else finding that story someday and I hope whatever changes they make to the house, they continue to honor Willy’s memory by leaving John’s memorial to him just as we did.

My husband recently tore apart another building and he found more stuff! As shown in the picture above he found a metal advertising sign for the Harvard Brewing Company of Lowell Massachusetts. It’s not in the best of shape, having spent probably a 100 years or so under the sub floor of a house, but I still had to research it. Boy what an amazing history the Harvard Brewing Company has!! In 2020 Ryan Owen wrote a great article on the history of the brewery for his blog “Forgotten New England.” and in 2017 the Lowell Sun newspaper had also done an article entitled “Remember when? Harvard Brewery”. Both of these written histories gave me a lot to think about in regards to my husband’s latest find.

Havard Brewery was started in Lowell Massachusetts in 1893 and appears to have been somewhat successful until the start of Prohibition in 1920. Although they tried to stay afloat financially by selling soft drinks and “near beer” by 1925 the decision was made to restart production of beer and sell it illegally. It didn’t take long for the government to figure this out and there was a huge raid on the plant in Lowell in August 1925. Reading the historical account was like watching a ganster movie in my mind! Federal Agents trying to beat down the front door of the brewery while employees smashed barrels of beer inside, the floor covered in 5 inches of beer. All of this beer flooding down the front steps, washing away the agents who had finally gotten the door open. Barrels full of beer were rolled into the stream behind the plant in an effort to get rid of evidence. Police chasing down delivery trucks in the middle of the night, finding them in cemeteries offloading the illegal beverage to runners who sped off at the sight of the authorities, smashing their cars into ditches and escaping on foot.

Legal problems faced everyone involved with the brewery and eventually it went bankrupt and fell under bank ownership. That was until Prohibition ended in 1933 and beer could legally be produced again. The brewery was reopened and production was full steam ahead for a few years. Until 1941 when the brewery was purchased by an immigrant with a very German sounding name. Although he was born in Lichtenstein, anti German sentiment was strong in the USA in 1941, and poor Fritz Von Opel got caught up in the Enemy Alien Control Program. Arrested while on vacation in Palm Beach Florida with his family, for no other reason then for having a German sounding name, Fritz was charged for being a “potentially dangerous enemy alien.” Under yet another government program, this one the Alien Property Custodian Act, the federal government took possession of Harvard Brewing Company and all of it’s assets.

Fritz Von Opel fought for years to get his business back, all the way to the Supreme Court actually, but the federal government continued to own the property until 1956 when it was finally sold to a private investor, unfortunately that was not Mr. Von Opel. He never did get the brewery back. In 1956 there wasn’t much left anyway, the buildings had been stripped of their equipment. A fire in 1957 destroyed most of the buildings and then the rest were torn down in 1963 to make way for a new Sears store. Today, in 2023, a Target store sits on the lot in Lowell Massachusetts, hiding all of the secrets of the history of the Harvard Brewing Company.

This history is all very interesting, although I find parts of it very disturbing in many ways. But that’s what history is supposed to do, make us stop and think about what things were like before the time we currently live in. Learning history is supposed to make you think, to wonder if people lived in a time really any different from our own? All of this made me think of a t-shirt I saw advertised on line recently. Printed in big text on the front of the shirt it said “Learn History! And realize people have been doing stupid things for thousands of years!” I loved that!

Now that I know the history of the Harvard Brewing Company it doesn’t solve the mystery of how this advertising sign ended up in the floor of a tiny little house, built in the 1920’s, in Central Maine. Did Harvard Brewing distribute beer this far north? Why would you put a metal advertising sign under the subfloor of a house? Unlike the memorial to Willy in the house next door to us, I won’t be returning this sign to the little house. Not sure what I’ll do with it though, doesn’t really match my decorating style. Suggestions welcome!