You may remember Brad and Lynn Craig from my You Are Here column of one year ago. For more than a decade, the Muskego couple have been mailing Christmas cards to their friends, bearing a photo of themselves next to the headstone of some great early Wisconsin beer baron or another.
Last year's card -- the 12th in the series -- captured the Craigs at the Madison gravesite of Peter Fauerbach (1831-1886), patriarch of the near-east-side brewery that bore his name until it went out of business in 1966.
Neil Fauerbach -- who, with his brother David and cousin Peter, had revived the family label earlier last year -- was on hand to loan some of the family's vintage breweriana and a case of their new brew for the photo shoot at his ancestor's headstone. Taken on a chilly day in late November, the resulting image shows Brad Craig in a Fauerbach T-shirt and his wife wearing a winter coat and gloves.
Lynn Craig is gloveless for this year's card, and her husband wears a Potosi Light T-shirt. They are in the far southwest corner of Wisconsin near Dubuque, Iowa, in Potosi's Van Buren Cemetery, at the grave of Adam Schumacher (1859-1942), with an arrangement of memorabilia from Schumacher's brewery.
A native of Bavaria, Schumacher arrived in Potosi circa 1879, first working for the old Hail and Vogelsberg breweries before buying the Hail Brewery (which was closed at the time) in 1886 -- the year Peter Fauerbach died. First putting his own name on it, Schumacher renamed it the Potosi Brewery in 1906. It remained in the family until 1972, when it closed.
Today, the Potosi Brewery is being restored, with plans for a museum, brew pub, gift shop, restaurant and beer garden.
