What lies beneath downtown Terre Haute?
Rob Robbins
What lies beneath downtown Terre Haute?
Legends, blueprint, clues suggest underground brewery complex – even a hidden "speakeasy" – along South Ninth Street between Poplar, Oak
Mark Bennett The Tribune-Star
TERRE HAUTE — Every day, pedestrians walk over
perhaps Terre Haute’s greatest lost treasure.
It lies beneath the
asphalt, concrete and grass along South Ninth Street, between Poplar and Oak
streets. Most people with firsthand knowledge have long since died. But legends,
clues and a 105-year-old blueprint linger.
Mike Rowe is almost certain of
one possibility. And Rowe, who’s studied and brewed local beer, has a hunch
about another intriguing mystery.
That city block was once filled by the
nation’s seventh-largest brewery — the Terre Haute Brewing Co. At its peak, the
beer plant produced 46.5 million gallons of Champagne Velvet a year, employed
950 people, and served as the lifeblood of the town in its “Sin City” era before
closing in 1958. Built in the 1880s before refrigeration, the brewery complex
included four cavernous beer cellars, designed to store lager in 181⁄2-foot,
75-barrel wooden tanks at the optimum temperature of 52 degrees.
After
Prohibition ended and modern cooling systems emerged, the brewery largely
abandoned its underground spaces, Rowe said.
He believes those massive
cooling cellars are still intact, under sidewalks, parking lots and current
buildings.
“I do,” Rowe said, grinning. “I absolutely do.”
He also
suspects those old brewery catacombs might contain a hidden “speakeasy” from the
Prohibition days. During that period from 1920 to 1933, the federal government
banned the manufacture, sale and delivery of alcohol. Of course, some bars — or
speakeasies — operated illegally, selling beer and liquor in clandestine places.
Local legends claim that Chicago gangsters frequented Terre Haute in those days.
Given the city’s brewing prominence and its wide-open reputation, it’s not a
stretch to presume those mobsters came here because the Terre Haute Brewing Co.
underground contained a speakeasy.
“That’s all speculation,” Rowe said,
“but it makes a lot of sense.”
Subterranean Terre Haute ‘unique’
Rowe knows a bit about history, brewing and
solving mysteries.
In 1990, while he and his wife, Teri, renovated the
block’s original brewery building — E. Bleemel Flour and Feed on the north side
of Poplar — a guy cleaning out the basement found the long-lost handwritten
recipe for Champagne Velvet. After spending a decade securing trademark rights
and experimenting with the mix, Rowe revived CV in 2000. He restarted the Terre
Haute Brewing Co. in a historic brewing building on the west side of Ninth
Street, and sold CV from the Tap Room bar on Poplar. In 2006, Rowe ceased CV
production to complete a deal with an Indianapolis-based brewer, Brugge,
allowing that firm to make its Belgian-style beers and others in that brewery as
the Vigo Brewing Group.
The revival of beermaking in the past decade
extends a long Terre Haute brewing history, dating back to 1837. While some
remnants of that past can be seen above ground — the current brewery, the
Bleemel building and Stables Steakhouse — the prospect of subterranean tunnels,
cellars and a hidden bar still fascinates many Hauteans.
Author Douglas
Wissing heard those stories while researching his new book “Indiana, One Pint at
a Time: A Traveler’s Guide to Indiana’s Breweries,” published by the Indiana
Historical Society. Wissing trekked all over the state, gathering information
about its beermaking history. The catacombs below the old Terre Haute brewing
district stand out, Wissing said by phone from his home in
Bloomington.
“It’s unique to my understanding of Indiana’s situation,” he
said.
“One Pint at a Time” devotes a full page to Terre Haute’s “lost
speakeasy” and the folklore about a hidden barroom, with dusty mirrors and
glasses still on the tables, quickly evacuated after a 1920s raid by the
authorities.
Rowe interviewed a handful of elderly former Terre Haute
Brewing Co. workers in 1990. They described a tunnel that ran along the
complex’s perimeter, the cellars and the tall redwood casks from the
pre-refrigeration days. “One guy, I remember him telling me he was sure they
were still there,” Rowe recalled.
Much of the old brewery workers’
recollections are shown on a 1905 blueprint of the brewery. The dimensions of
the cellars are breathtaking. The largest measured 74 feet wide by 109 feet
long. The ceilings were 20 feet tall to accommodate the 181⁄2-foot casks. The
cellar ceilings are 12 feet below the surface of the ground, Rowe
said.
“It’s amazing,” he said of the catacombs’ size.
The
perimeter tunnel gave workers access to the cellars and the beer pipeline, which
fed not only the brewery tanks, but also outlets to nearby local
taverns.
Peeking below
A few people living today have gotten a peek at
bits of the brewery’s underground.
About a decade ago, a Vectren crew
installing a gas line along South Ninth Street discovered a tunnel beneath a
sidewalk near the CVS Pharmacy parking lot. Victor Mullen, a veteran gas company
worker, went down through the surface hole with a flashlight.
“It was a
huge tunnel,” said Mullen, now 65.
The crew was told not to trek through
the tunnel. But from his entry point, Mullen saw a tunnel shaped like a
half-circle, or a Quonset hut, running north and south along Ninth Street. It
was 12 to 14 feet wide and 8 feet tall, Mullen estimated, and sturdily built.
“It was well-supported right there,” he said last week.
Mullen has seen a
few underground oddities in his 45 years with the gas company. The catacombs
caught his attention.
“I would’ve loved to have gotten down into those
things,” he said.
With his flashlight, though, he did spot something
curious. About 25 feet down the tunnel, Mullen saw a wooden partition wall
blocking its path. It was gray, with a window and a door, both
closed.
“Whoever went through that door last, locked it and went out on
the other side of the street,” Rowe surmised.
What lies behind that wall
is anyone’s guess.
Rowe got a chance to see a smaller portion of the
perimeter tunnel farther south on Ninth Street. When a backhoe accidentally
collapsed a section near the sidewalk about eight years ago, exposing the
tunnel, Rowe gave the city a copy of his 1905 brewery blueprint. He also briefly
toured the short portion of the tunnel. “It was pretty cool,” Rowe said. “It was
probably the smallest of the whole system.”
He saw holders for sconces
that would’ve lit the pathway, and some conduit. But he saw no
speakeasy.
The possibilities of a lost speakeasy were bolstered when a
similar Prohibition-era underground bar was discovered in Peoria, Ill., with
potential funding connections to the Terre Haute brewery, Rowe said. Wissing’s
new book has rekindled the mystery.
If the city or the State of Indiana
could someday revive and develop the catacombs, they could become a tourism
attraction, Rowe predicted.
“Can you imagine the attention this community
would get if this were [recovered]?” he said.