Remembering Port’s freighter fascination

Paul Wiening was a fixture around the Port Washington harbor for decades, spending the better part of his 60 years on the city’s lakefront.

He was fascinated by the lakers — big boats that brought coal to the We Energies power plant — and would hang out at the plant’s gatehouse and dock office to get a bird’s eye view of the boats that plied the waters of the lake.

His passion was sparked when he was 7 and he toured the 440-foot William F. Stifel, and as he grew older Wiening chronicled the visits of these ships, some of which were 1,000 feet or longer and had to maneuver their way to dock at the utility.

Wiening documented the visits of the lakers with his camera, taking pictures of virtually every freighter to come into the Port harbor from 1956 until 2005, when the utility converted its coal-fired plant to one fueled by natural gas.

“The only ones I missed were those that came in at midnight and left early,” Wiening told Ozaukee Press in 2003.

A collection of Wiening’s photos of the lakers is the subject of “From the Coal Dock to the Soo Locks,” one of two new exhibits at the Port Exploreum. 

The other exhibit is “Port Washington’s Brewing History: A Long Tradition,” a look at the industry from the mid 1800s to today. 

A grand opening for the exhibits will be held from 1 to 4 p.m. Sunday, June 28.

The Wiening exhibit is on the museum’s first floor, which Executive Director Dawn St. George said will always be home to a maritime exhibit while the upper floor will always house a local or Port Washington Historical Society exhibit.

“One of the reasons I wanted to do these shows was to give back to the community,” St. George said. “We would love the community to see this space and see what we have here.”

Wiening’s family donated his collections to the Historical Society after he died in 2005.

“There are thousands and thousands of photographs, not just of Port Washington but of all the Great Lakes,” St. George said. “This is the first exhibit, but not the last, we will do with his collections.”

The Historical Society is in the process of assessing the photos, documenting them and placing them in its collections. Eventually, she said, people will be able to view and purchase copies from the society.

Wiening, St. George said, had one mission — to catalog the big ships on the Great Lakes.

In many ways, freighters are the lifeblood of the lake, moving cargo as varied as ore and lumber to finished goods. They were a familiar sight in Port for decades but today are seldom seen near shore.

In 2003, Wiening told Ozaukee Press that the sight of a laker entering the harbor gave him a rush of adrenaline.

He spent his vacations visiting ports throughout the Great Lakes, photographing the ships and interviewing the captains and crews. He counted many of them among his friends. 

“Sometimes, the captains called me at home and said, ‘Come on down to Smith’s (Smith Bros. restaurant),’” he said.

Wiening became so familiar with the lakers that he could recite statistics and anecdotes about the ships from memory.

He took his passion for the lakers and parlayed it into a business, writing four books filled with his photos and information about the ships and his memories of the boats and their crews.

Wiening’s exhibit includes photos he took beginning in 1955, when he was 11, through his later years. The photos, most of which were taken in Port, are arranged by the decade. St. George said she made sure every photo shows a different ship, with one exception, the 1,004-foot-long Masabi Miner shown at both lake level and from above.

They are supplemented with a six-minute video of drone footage of freighters, “Great Lakes Ships 2019” courtesy of the nonprofit group Boat Nerds.

“It helps you understand the passion Paul had for these big boats,” St. George said.

There’s also a case of related memorabilia, including a ship’s log from the J.H. Hillman Jr. that Wiening had obtained, a We Energies log of ships that docked on the coal dock and records from the CM White showing when the ship docked in Port.

The brewing exhibit spotlights another of the city’s rich business past.

Ozaukee County’s first brewery began in 1844 when John Arnet, an English immigrant, began brewing ale in kettles suspended over a fire near his cabin, selling the beer for three cents a pint.

When German immigrants settled in the area, they found the weather was good for producing barley and hops, and the lumber in the area was plentiful enough to build kegs.

“That’s when the brewing really started happening,” St. George said. “They were already brewmasters, so they knew how to do it.”

Port’s first commercial brewery was the Wittmann Brewery at the top of St. Mary’s Hill, which opened around 1850 and closed in 1894. At its peak, it produced more than 1,200 barrels.

Lakeside Brewery opened on Lake Street sometime in the mid-1800s, and virtually every other large brewery since has been located there, St. George said.

The brewery produced 1,000 barrels a year by 1860 and a decade later its output was up to 1,500 barrels. But after a fire, the brewery was rebuilt and then sold to Gottlieb Biedermann and John Bostwick. The brewery excavated 100-foot-long tunnels into St. Mary’s Hill to lager the beer.

The Biedermann Brewery was bought in 1903 by three Chicagoans, Ludwig and Charles Labahn and George Blessing, a Bavarian brewmaster, who changed the name to the Port Washington Brewing Co.

It was perhaps the best known of Port’s breweries, producing among other beers Premo, tagged “the beer that made Milwaukee furious.”

During Prohibition, all the area breweries applied for licenses to brew soda water “even though that’s not what they really did,” St. George said.

The Labahn family continued to operate the brewery, hosting a community Fourth of July celebration when Prohibition ended in 1933.

But the family overextended itself and after a series of sales the brewery closed.

In 1948, the City of Port bought the brewery buildings, ultimately razing all but the bottling plant, which was given to the Van Ells-Schanen American Legion Post as its clubhouse.

The clubhouse is today the home of Inventors Brewpub, run by Adam Draeger. In the last 24 months, the exhibit notes, Draeger has brewed 213 different beers.

Other microbreweries have set up in Port as craft beers became popular, including Port Washington Brewing Co. run by Jeff Kolar, which operated inside Smith Bros. Restaurant, and Harbor City Brewing Co., run by Jim Schueller.

The exhibit includes a variety of photos, a display of kegs and cases, a number of brewery signs and trays as well as glasses promoting the various beers and breweries.