Pioneer Iowan brewer Simeon (Simon) Hotz was born in Fützen, Baden, Germany. He was educated and trained as a shoemaker in his native land.  In the late 1840s he emigrated to America and first landing in New York he went to Rochester of that state, then south to Memphis, then Holly Springs, Mississippi, all the while working as a cobbler. 

In 1851 he came to Muscatine, Iowa to practice his trade.  In that city he met Miss Barbara Williams, a widow with four children.  They were joined in matrimony on December 27th of that year.

After a while Hotz combined a grocery store with the shoe business, and that progressed naturally to the brewing of beer.  He opened his brewery on Linn & Market Streets, Iowa City, Iowa in 1857.  His partner was Louis Englert and together they brewed until 1860 when Englert left to form his own brewery in another part of town.

In 1864 Hotz took on his son-in-law, Antone Geiger, in the brewery.  The brewery was renamed the Union, and the two continued in partnership until Geiger died in 1876.  At this point Hotz leased his brewery to brewers Joseph Schultze and Conrad Graff, another son-in-law to Hotz.  Eventually Simeon Hotz was drawn back into brewing business and he took over management of his old firm in 1878.  By this time he had grown the brewery into one of the largest in Iowa.

About this time Hotz was involved in a railroad accident in which he received severe burns.  This was compounded by further burns caused by a mishap while making salve for his previous injuries.  Holz's health declined from this point and he died at age 62 on November 6th of 1881.

From that day the brewery Simeon Hotz founded was run by his wife Barbara, who was administatrix of the estate.  In 1885 Conrad Graf purchased the Union and ran the brewery until Iowa state Prohibition finally got around to closing it down in 1888.

On May 3rd 1893 Iowa's Mulct Law went into effect and Conrd Graf reopened the brewery on a small scale.  When Graf died in 1894 the brewery became managed by his widow who soon brought in Chris Senner to do the oversee the brew house.  Senner eventually married the widow Graf and at this point her sons took over brewery operations.  The family switched over to the manufacturing of soft drinks during the Prohibition years, but the firm closed upon repeal in 1933 and never reopened.

Anton Geiger was born in Nenningen, Germany.  He emigrated to America on the 17th of August 1854 at age 21. 

He eventually settled in Iowa City, Iowa, where he met and married Clara Williams in around 1865.  Miss Williams was the daughter of Barbara Williams, a widow now rewed to Simeon Hotz. Holz owned a brewery on Linn & Market streets and upon his stepdaughter's marriage he brought his new son-in-law Geiger into the firm as junior partner.  Together they operated the brewery for eleven years.

Anton Geiger died on the 2nd of May, 1876 at just 43 years of age.  His father-in-law Simeon quit the brewery business for a time and leased the firm to his brewmaster.  Despite the loss of the heir-apparent, the brewery continued in the family for another forty years, until finally being forced into the soft drink business by Iowa's prohibition laws.  The company ultimately faded out of existence in 1933.  

The president of the Confederacy Jefferson Davis orders his general P. G. T. Beauregard to bombard Fort Sumpter in Charleston Harbor, marking the beginning of the Civil War.

Many German immigrants in America who were driven out of Europe in the aftermath of a failed reformist revolution of 1848 signed up for the Union cause.  In fact the Republican abolitionists scrapped the temperance plank in their platform to prevent alienating the Germans.