John Miller was born Cobleng, Prussia. His family emigrated to America in 1854 and settled in Sauk County, Wisconsin where relatives owned farmland. John found employment in a mill near Baraboo but quit at age 19 to work the fields with his family. Among his neighbors was another family of Prussian immigrants, the Leinenkugels. They were brewers in the town of Westfield. John took up a friendship with a younger son Jacob Leinenkugel, despite the latter being more than 4 years John's junior. In 1864 John courted and married another Prussian emigree, Susanna Welter. The next year Leinenkugel married Josephine Imhoff. In 1867 both men decided to form a brewery of their own. For a location they picked Chippewa Falls, Wisconsin, a nascent village 150 miles to the northwest, deep in the woods of Wisconsin. The community was a Railroad loading point for timber corralled from Lake Wissota on to the Chippewa River. The West Wisconsin Railway had just extended tracks to the river and the logging camp had sprung up at the intersection. The partnership was christened the Spring Brewery after the Chippewa Spring upon which the brewhouse was built. The combination of pure water and thirsty loggers was a good one for the brewery. Soon they expanded operations and production, and both families and employees lived together in the large house on the brewery grounds. Then in late May of 1880 John's father died. This sent John, as the Chippewa Falls Weekly Herald suggests, into a period of spiritual doubt. When John's wife died three years later Miller quit the brewery business altogether, selling his stake in the Spring to his best friend Jacob. Jacob Leinenkugel commissioned a towering obelisk for Susannah's headstone, and in October of that year it was placed atop her grave in the Catholic Cemetery. She would be joined under the monument by Jacob's father Mathias in 1885 and Jacob's wife Josephine in 1890. John Miller died on the 13th of August, 1906 at the age of 68 years. The brewery he helped found, now called the Jacob Leinenkugel Brewing Company, is still in operation to this day.

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