by Nancy Yos

Created on: August 17, 2009   Last Updated: April 18, 2011

A friend who collects stamps and other interesting documents recently gave me this, an envelope or "cover." Inside is a wine order written in English on a German language form. Destination: the Jacob Brenner Wine Company of Doniphan, Kansas, May 1904.



The customer, John Gruenewald of Wayne R.F.D. Q. (?) Nebraska, ordered ten gallons of Red Seal at $5.35, "extra packing" for 25 cents, and requested "wine corks not to (sic) big" for another dollar. Grand total, $6.60. Incidentally Mr. Gruenewald also had that excellent handwriting which bespeaks the epoch of fine-nibbed fountain pens and painstaking schoolboy classes in penmanship.

I hedge my bets and say it appears to be a wine order only because how can I know, before doing some historical digging, the intent of the customer confidently filling in a German language form? What with the corks and the packing and the gallons wanted, it looks as if the customer might have been ordering wine making supplies, not potables for his cellar.

But no. How remarkable are the tools which the modern world - only a little more than a hundred years after Mr. Gruenewald placed his order - gives you for historical digging. I have only to click "new tab," and open a few windows, and there laid out before me is the history of the Jacob Brenner Wine Company.

The Brenner family, led by brothers Adam and Jacob, arrived in this extreme northeastern corner of Kansas (here it meets the states of Iowa, Nebraska, and Missouri) from Deidesheim, Bavaria, in 1857 and 1860. The federal census for that latter year lists Jacob Brenner as a grape grower. Adam and later Jacob's son George would all settle down to the wine trade virtually in each other's backyards for years.

Strangely, though, the Brenners unknowingly arrived and began to farm, build houses, and sponsor churches just when the local town, Doniphan, began a long and irreversible economic decline. Only founded in 1852, the town seemed beautifully situated for both agriculture and commerce: its farm lands were rich, it stood right on a bend of the Missouri river handy for river transport, and after 1870 it was a stop on the Atchison and Nebraska railroad - also a good thing for grain transport. Adam Brenner built an $18,000 grain elevator at this time, which tragically burned to the ground in 1872.

But Doniphan's main problem seems to have been simply that there were other, bigger towns nearby, to which businesses and populations naturally gravitated. Atchison, Leavenworth, and St. Joseph,

• 1
• 2
• 3
• Next Page >>