This blog entry was written by St. Louis local writer James Atchison a couple years back when we relocated our rehearsal space to the Lemp Brewery. Quite the interesting story and background!
DFR has relocated to the Lemp Brewery!
A famous location found in the heart of St. Louis. The brewery and adjoining mansion has a long and intricate history dating back to the mid 1800’s. Sprawling across five city blocks including caverns and tunnels below the Brewery is an absolutely massive complex including some areas that haven’t been seen in over a hundred years. The tunnels which still connect the mansion to the brewery proper were once used as the preferred travel method of the Lemp family who owned and operated the brewery throughout its operational life. After two generations of successful operation, the Lemp Brewery began its spiral down into the record books as the most haunted locale in STL.
The fortunes of the Lemp family and that of at the time 3rd largest brewery in St. Louis saw a change to one of strife and misery after the apparent suicide of owner William J. Lemp Sr. in February of 1904. The following years would see the decline of the brewery and the Lemp family line. Through the advent of the Temperance Movement (Prohibition) and the efforts of Brewing Associations, individual companies like the Lemp Brewery saw their dominance of local and nationwide business threatened, that tied with the string of apparent suicides in the Lemp family from 1904-1949 effectively closed the noose on the Lemp family line. Each death was shrouded in mystery and misdirection. Elsa Lemp’s supposed suicide occurred just days after her marriage to William Lemp Jr. who after selling the Lemp Brewery Complex two years later proceeded to his office in the Mansion where he too committed suicide. Tragedy after tragedy followed the Lemp family from the suicide of a bride still celebrating her honeymoon to the death of William Lemp’s young child in the mid 1940’s. The final nail in the Lemp family coffin was hammered home with the death of Edwin Lemp at age 90. It is believed that Edwin only survived so long because he sold off and removed all ties between himself and the Brewery after the suicide of his brother Charles Lemp in 1949.
Now the Brewery has a new lease on life with business slowly returning after the St. Louis board of Alderman contracted LB Redevelopment to rehabilitate the brewery. LB Redevelopment have plans for the larger buildings to be turned into restaurants and entertainment destinations, as well as a planned 3500 seat event center, the plans include the design and beautification of several courtyard areas and the designing of an 80 room hotel. DFR is right here in the middle of all the action at Brewhouse Studios where sometimes the laments of the lost and tortured souls of the ill-fated Lemp family can be heard in Unison with the music played throughout their haunted halls.
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