Landmarks: ‘Oldest standing brewery in Illinois’ built around water bubbling from deep underground

Many years ago, a short tunnel was cut into a hillside along Thorn Creek, leading to an arched vault made of brick.

At the center of the underground room, a squat, square structure marked the well head offering access to an underground mineral spring.

Clear water had, since time unrecorded, seeped up through fissures in limestone deposits deep underground, forced upward by the same aquifer pressure that pushed its buried source stream through the porous rock.

The artesian spring water bubbling out on a hilltop and then streaming down to the nearby creek may have contributed to an Indigenous American settlement recorded on maps at the current village of Thornton. Not long after those residents were forced to leave, the source of clean, cold mineral water attracted immigrants who thought it would be a good place to brew beer.

They were right. A man named Don Carlos Berry brewed “Berry’s Beer” starting in 1836 in a log cabin at the site, according to information compiled by Thornton historian Debbie Lamoureux. German immigrant John Bielfeldt acquired the land and built a brewery in 1857, and a brewing tradition was maintained there for nearly a century, for a while in defiance of federal law.

An underground built more than a century ago houses the artesian well that became the basis for a series of breweries in Thornton and now, Thornton Distilling Co. The mineral water that bubbles up at the spot once formed a natural spring and at one point was bottled and sold on its own. (Paul Eisenberg/Daily Southtown)

It was that brewing tradition, as well as the water that continued to flow from the artesian well, that attracted Andy Howell and his partners to the site in 2015 when they were looking for somewhere to make single malt whiskey.

“We saw the well when we first toured the property,” said Andy Howell, a founder of Thornton Distilling Co. “We were trying to determine where to open, and that was a huge factor.”

By that time, the building at 400 E. Margaret St. in Thornton was empty. Its run as a brewery lasted into the 1950s but ended amid clouds of corruption and lingering connections to organized crime that originated with the onset of Prohibition in the early 1920s.

The brewery became an industrial complex and the artesian well was sold to the village in 1957, according to the Thornton Historical Society’s booklet “A History of Beer & Brewing in Thornton, Illinois.” It later had incarnations as a tavern and restaurant, but it was vacant for more than a decade when Howell and his partners came to look.

It was “in a state of disrepair,” Howell said, but its long history was a major selling point.

“It was intriguing to learn about the Prohibition gangster history here, but it was really the pre-Prohibition history and the artesian well that really captivated us and made us want to redevelop the property,” Howell said. “We had to gut it, but we wanted to keep the historical significance intact.”

The process took much longer than they anticipated.

“We wanted to just start making whiskey, and now we’re doing property redevelopment,” he said.

The Thornton Historical Society helped with some antique items and photos related to the building’s brewing history, but nobody could find anything depicting the interior of the operation.

They got to work anyway, and uncovered a few artifacts in the process.

When the Thornton Distilling Co. building was being remodeled, a cigar box containing old postcard beer orders from the 1800s fell from a ceiling. One of the cards requests the brewers to "Please send beer tomorrow." (Paul Eisenberg/Daily Southtown)

“A cigar box full of postcards came crashing down from the ceiling when we were doing our commercial kitchen,” Howell said. “They were beer orders from the 1800s written in German and English.”

One of the postcards, in large handwritten script, simply says “Please send beer tomorrow.”

“Stuff like that was incredible to find,” he said.

The postcard and other artifacts from the various incarnations of the building’s history are on display in a room off the main bar area at Thornton Distillery, which opened its taproom and event facility on Repeal Day in December, 2019 — the anniversary of the day Prohibition laws were struck from the books in 1933.

Display cases show beer bottles from the various breweries that operated there before and after Prohibition, and photographs show the operation at various times from the outside. One image from the 1800s depicts barrels being loaded onto horse-drawn wagons near a bridge, above an employee standing on a raft on the then-navigable Thorn Creek.

They didn’t know anything about the inside of the operation until Howell got a message from a woman in Wisconsin who said her great-grandfather had been the head brewer in Thornton years ago. His son — her grandfather — had just died and she found a trove of photographs of the brewery which she shared with the distillers.

“She said her great-grandfather was the brewer for Capone back in those days,” Howell said. “They are exquisite photos. We believe a couple show some famous Chicago gangsters.”

Andy Howell holds an enlarged photograph of a group purported to include Chicago area mobsters sitting outside the brewery in Thornton, though he hasn't been able to verify the claim. Head distiller Ari Klafter said he would love to discover the name of the brewery owner's dog, so they can name a product after it. (Paul Eisenberg/Daily Southtown)

Though they can’t say with certainty, an undated photo of a group of men smoking cigars and having drinks in front of the brewery might include Prohibition era Chicago mobsters Johnny Torrio and James “Big Jim” Colisimo.

“That would be a very significant photo if we can substantiate that it’s them,” he said. “It looks just like them.”

Stories about the property’s gangland associations are rampant, and Howell has verified a few through such sources as old Chicago Tribune stories, including one in which one of the largest Prohibition raids in the Chicago area caused a temporary waterline rise in Thorn Creek as barrel after barrel of beer was poured in.

Patrons often share their own connections to the building’s shady past, but most of those can’t be substantiated, either.

“We take all of that with a grain of salt,” Howell said, though Thornton Distilling Co.’s signature whiskey line is called Dead Drop, a Prohibition term referring to stashes of hooch hidden for later retrieval by customers.

One of the enduring legends is of the tunnels supposedly hollowed out as escape shafts for when feds paid untimely visits. One of the tunnels was purported to lead to a house still standing across the street on the other side of the creek.

“I have yet to find it, but people promise me they’ve been in that tunnel,” Howell said. “That would be an impressive feat by a bunch of gangsters to run a tunnel under a body of water.”

Andy Howell holds an antique tray advertising Frederick's Premium Beer, which was "brewed with pure artesian well water" drawn from a source below the brewery on Margaret Street. (Paul Eisenberg/Daily Southtown)

If the tunnel existed, it was likely obliterated when an apartment building was erected next door to the brewery. That development wiped out much of the old brewing operation’s underground infrastructure, including old cellars where lager beer could be stored below the frost line in controlled temperatures before the advent of refrigeration.

It also destroyed the 100-foot tunnel leading to the underground vault where the artesian well head still gurgles away as it as for eons. Modern pumps and copper pipes now enable the distillers to draw large quantities of the mineral water when needed for production, but when not in use it still flows under its own power to an outlet and drains to Thorn Creek.

More so than the old brewery’s gangland history, it’s that ancient water source and the pre-Prohibition history of beverage making that continues to fascinate Howell and Ari Klafter, the head distiller.

“The water is the absolute key,” Klafter said. “Most brewers and distillers have to treat water to get it to a proper profile. The great thing about the water here, and it’s been tried out for over 160 years, is it’s already exceptional brewing water for beer and for spirits.

“The fact we had it here and it had been used for generations and we could draw from hat was extremely interesting to us.”

The same limestone beds that were excavated for over a century in Thornton act as a deep filter, removing iron and other dissolved metals and adding minerals. Municipal water sources often filter out the minerals while adding a small amount of chlorine as a disinfectant.

Daily Southtown

Twice-weekly

News updates from the south suburbs delivered every Monday and Wednesday

For Klafter, that adds to his product’s terroir — its sense of place — along with malt and other ingredients sourced from as close as possible, mostly from Illinois.

Its owners claim Thornton Distilling Co., which opened in 2019, is housed in "the oldest standing brewery in Illinois," a structure that dates to before the Great Chicago Fire in 1871. (Paul Eisenberg/Daily Southtown)

It’s not the typical way whiskey has been commercially made, Klafter said, but they’re not working in a typical distillery.

“We say it’s the oldest standing brewery structure in Illinois,” Howell said. “We say ‘standing’ because there were a few older ones that burned down in the Great Chicago Fire.”

It’s a legacy of history he and Klafter are doing their best to embrace as they forge their beverage business’ future.

“I feel there’s a certain responsibility to all the generations of brewers that came through this space before Andy and myself,” Klafter said. “They worked here for so long, and I want to do them justice in the product we’re making and the work we’re doing.

“There’s a sense here of picking up where our predecessors left off.”

Landmarks is a weekly column by Paul Eisenberg exploring the people, places and things that have left an indelible mark on the Southland. He can be reached at peisenberg@tribpub.com.