From Source to City: Voyaging the Milwaukee River by Tim John
Tim John had no idea his great grandfather was Frederick J. Miller, founder of Miller Brewing and one of Cream City’s legendary beer barons. “I didn’t know we were connected to the brewery until I was 12 years old,” says the author of The Miller Beer Barons. His father, Harry John, was president of the brewery in 1946-47 but was deposed by the family to halt his lavish philanthropy. “He was so quiet, so hurt by that,” John continues. “He never even drank beer. I had to figure out the story by myself.”
With his father’s death in 1992, an enormous family archive came into John’s hands. “I like to tell people I never brewed beer or sold a single bottle,” the author says. “We lived nicely but weren’t wealthy—my dad gave away most of the money to a foundation. He kept so many papers that I thought, ‘There’s a book in here.’”
With a MA in history from UWM, John was trained for the task. In his 2005 book, The Miller Beer Barons, he followed his great grandfather’s trek to America amidst a wave of German immigrants who transplanted their love of lager to the New World, where English ale had been the popular brew. Miller arrived in Milwaukee circa 1855 with a good deal of cash from the sale of his brewery in Southern Germany. The Braumeister wasted little time before establishing the brand that still bears his name.
John dived into his father’s archive and mined family memories to assemble a copious narrative. The Miller Beer Barons is focused on the brewery when it was a family business before 1970. Afterward, it was swallowed by a succession of corporate owners starting with Philip Morris.
From Source to City
In his new book, From Source to City: Voyaging the Milwaukee River, Menomonee River, and Kinnickinnic River, John travels to the headwaters of the Milwaukee River and explores its many tributaries and their role in shaping the city’s maritime and industrial history. “When I finished Miller Beer Barons, I wanted to write another book. It took me 20 years, 500 pages, hundreds of images, historical poems that refer to exact places or people—a poem about Solomon Juneau or a Milwaukee River bridge. The Milwaukee River begins south of Fond du Lac and I did travel along the rivers all different ways—by canoe, kayak, by bike, by driving.”
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
The terrain of Downtown Milwaukee before settlers arrived in the 1830s is unimaginable from today’s perspective. It was marshland dotted with islands, fed by the three rivers that are the subject of From Source to City. “I tried to think about what the area was like in earlier times. In Wauwatosa, a cart with two oxen took people across the Menomonee before the first bridge was built,” John says.
From Source to City’s focus is pre-1900, but history seldom stops at precise date on the calendar, and much of John’s material touches on later developments, including digressions on the development of the Milwaukee County Park System and a network of creeks (some of them buried in concrete) more extensive than most Milwaukeeans realize.
With the massive amount of material John sorted through, and the many roads (and streams) traveled for research, how did he decide what to omit? “If I included the excised writing, the book would be 100 pages longer. There is an amazing amount of information on these rivers. Authors could write multiple books about them without much overlap. I determined what wording moved the narrative and what didn't. I removed the nonconforming and redundant prose,” he explains.
Fortunately, the degradation of Milwaukee’s rivers from industrial pollution has been reversed. “To understand the status of the rivers' cleanliness, I use the concept that the cleaner the rivers become, the earlier we would have to search to find them in that same condition,” John says. ‘In other words, are the rivers as clean as they were in the 1860s, the 1850s, or earlier? I assume that in 1830 they were pristine. I believe that their condition is comparable to their condition in the early 1840s when corporations had yet to dump dangerous chemicals into them. Most of the problems in those days came from human and animal waste and animal carcasses.
“The water quality is superb compared to my youth, when the streams smelled and looked awful. We have a ways to go to remove the toxic legacy in the sediment. When that happens, I will be the first soul to jump in to enjoy downtown Milwaukee from its rivers.”
