215 Isabel St W
St Paul, MN 55107, USA

National Register of Historic Places

Statement of Significance:

The Anthony Yoerg House is primarily significant as the residence of one of St. Paul's pioneering industrialists. Yoerg set up the first brewery and the first incorporated entity in Minnesota, and in so doing paved the way for one of the state's most important early industries. The establishment of the brewing industry drew on the skills and habits of an increasingly large German population which settled around the leading brewery sites in uppertown, the east side, and the west side. The Yoerg House is secondarily significant as one of the rare surviving works of Monroe Sheire, St. Paul's pre-eminent master builder during its first two decades, and as one of the few significant local fragments of the once eminent Second Empire style.

Anthony Yoerg was born in Bavaria in 1816 and immigrated to Pittsburg. Pennsylvania in 1845. After three years, he came to St. Paul and in 1850 set up a commercial brewery, a business for which he had been trained in Germany. He began his operation at the upper steamboat landing near the beginning of present-day West Seventh Street, but the soft sandstone terraces across the river and intense competition among a growing number of small producers led him to set up a new and much larger operation on the west side (then the separate community of West St. Paul). The sandstone already was hollowed out into a number of caves and enlarging these created refrigeration chambers for lagering and storage at very little cost. Within ten years, Yoerg's facility was producing 20,000 barrels a year, an impressive figure for this early date in Minnesota brewing.

Yoerg's settlement on the west side was incremental. He began to store beer in the caves as soon as his business had outgrown his first home's attic and cellar, purchased the property on which he was to build his house in 1858, erected his stone brewing complex in 1871, and according to family tradition moved into his new mansion in 1875. Yoerg was likely waiting for demographics to catch up with him. In 1873-1874 a large number of working-class people built small houses on the west side flats; in October of 1874 the West St. Paul Building Association was formed to facilitate new mortgages and attract larger property holders; and in the following month, West St. Paul was officially annexed as the Sixth Ward of St. Paul. By 1875, the west side still only had 1500 inhabitants in a city of 33,000, and Yoerg's mansion was on one of the two or three largest single-family residences in the new ward.

The Yoerg Brewery continued as the largest brewery in the city into the early 1890s, but gradually lost its place as family-run operations were replaced by conglomerates and fermenting caves were outmoded by new technologies. After a hiatus over the Prohibition years, the brewery was reincorporated as the Yeorg Brewing Company in 1933, but by 1953 had sunk into bankruptcy. The house remained in the hands of the Yoerg family and its heirs until 1963. Its most important resident, apart from Anthony himself, was Louis Yoerg. the son who became secretary-treasurer of the business upon his father's death in 1896 and served as president from 1935 until his death in 1950.

The Anthony Yoerg House is secondarily significant as one of the few surviving works of Monroe Sheire executed in his typical but now locally rare mansard-roofed style. Sheire was born in Lexington, New York in 1834 and educated in Detroit, Michigan. According to his obituary, he studied architecture in Detroit and joined his father in the contracting business in 1856. He brought his family to St. Paul in the winter of 1860-61 and joined with the builder Charles Leonard to form a partnership in 1862. In 1866, Sheire's younger brother Romaine joined the firm, and in 1874, the year before the Yoerg House was built, Leonard died and the firm became Monroe Sheire and Brother, a name which lasted until the collapse of Monroe's health and his ensuing death in 1887.

During the peak years of Monroe Sheire's business, between 1862 and 1878. he was the only St. Paul master builder whose skill and success in the design of expensive and large-scale buildings was competitive with the three local architects (A.F. Knight. A.M. Radcliffe, and E.P. Bassford). His most noteworthy projects included lavish stone residences for E. F. Drake (1865, razed) and Alexander Ramsey (1868-72, NRHP) a wood frame residence for his own family (1866, razed), the stone Christ Church (1865-66, razed), and several stone business blocks on Third Street (1865-70, razed). Sheire also handled the construction of several major buildings in which he had minor design input, such as the First Baptist Church (W.W. Boyington, 1875, extant).

Of the dozens of houses and commercial buildings that Sheire designed in the Italianate-Second Empire mix that was his forte, the Ramsey County Historic Site Survey identified only three survivors. Among these and other mansard-roofed houses in St. Paul, the Yoerg House is second only to the Ramsey House in its degree of historical integrity. The Yoerg House forms an excellent companion to the Ramsey House, as a frame version of the same style and a closely related plan.