A Brief History of the Union Brewery in Iowa City

Workers outside a brewery in the 1860s

The Union Brewery in Iowa City felt like a place that survived on nerve alone. Built in 1856 by Simeon Hotz, a shoemaker turned brewer, it grew into a brick stronghold at Linn and Market, a place the Iowa State Register said operated with “a confidence that must be admired, considering the temperance sentiment now fashionable in the Capitol.”

The brewery didn’t just sell beer — it sold identity. Hotz and Anton Geiger were German immigrants who brought their lager brewing with them, and Iowa City drank it up like a man who’d been wandering the prairie too long.

 

By 1868 they expanded into the big building — three stories, beer cellars underneath, steam heat, the whole industrial symphony. Locals wandered in and out of the taproom, leaving footprints in the sawdust and carrying home gossip hotter than the kettles.

Mason Motor Car Company Des Moines Iowa

Mason Motor Co. ad, 1906

The first thing you need to know about the Mason Motor Car Company is that it never should have worked. Not in Des Moines, not in 1906, not in a state where most people still trusted a good horse over any contraption that hissed, rattled, and tried to kill you on a dirt road. Yet for a few bright, reckless years, two brothers with machine oil on their hands and speed on their minds tried to drag Iowa—kicking, screaming, and occasionally bleeding—into the automobile age.

Fred and August Duesenberg weren’t normal. They looked at a peaceful bicycle and thought, What if this thing went 60 miles an hour and tried to shake its rider’s fillings out? The Des Moines Daily News called them “the sort of young men who consider mechanical noise to be a form of conversation.” They were tinkerers, racers, mechanics, engineers—whatever you want to call them—but above all, they were hungry. Hungry for speed, recognition, and the clean snapping sound an engine makes when it finds its rhythm and behaves. So when Des Moines attorney Edward Mason threw some money at them and said, “Make a car,” they didn’t hesitate. They built the Mason, a small, explosive two-cylinder machine that rattled windows, terrified horses, and made its owners feel like they were cheating death—or at least borrowing trouble from it.

 

Raymond J. Bischoff The Iowa Ponzi

Raymond J. Bischoff

“Someday, I’ll be a millionaire,” Raymond J. Bischoff told the kids outside Van Buren School, lighting a cigarette like a man with inside information. “I’m not going to work hard for a living.” 

 The others laughed. Of course they did. Nobody from Fifth & Pine Streets becomes a millionaire, not with a father pulling twenty-two cents an hour at the Independent Malting Company, or driving beer trucks through the West End mud.

 

His mother married a blind man after the divorce, which did nothing to raise morale in the Bischoff household. Frank Davis could feel the world but not see it. Maybe that’s where Raymond learned to fake things — to see with words instead of eyes.

 

He started young. A teenage magazine hustler in the Putnam Building, taking orders, cashing checks, then vanishing like a phantom publisher. No magazines ever arrived, of course, but Raymond did. He always came back, a different man each time.

 

In 1917, he was back in Davenport calling himself Sergeant D. C. Breckenridge of Canada’s Princess Patricia Regiment — a fine, heroic-sounding outfit, except for the minor issue that it had been annihilated at Ypres. Only ten men survived, and everyone of them had a better story than Raymond. But that didn’t stop him. He said the Canadians wouldn’t take him because “Bischoff” sounded too German. So he’d done the sensible thing: shed his Teutonic skin and re-emerged as a full-blooded hero. D. C. Breckenridge.