John Henry Charles Huxhold, Sr. was born in Hassel, Germany. He emigrated to America in the late 1850s and settled in Chicago . It was there he met his wife Sophia M. William. They were married in 1861. Charles, or C. H. J. as he is often referred, was a saloon owner in the Chicago neighborhood of Dunton until the mid 1860s when he set out west to Austin, Minnesota. He thought it might be a good idea to set up a brewery in that town so in 1869 he and fellow German immigrant Johannes Wagner opened the City Brewery along the Cedar River. Unknown to the two men the local newspaper, the Mower County Transcript, was on one hand very much allied with the temperance movement and in the other held a long suit of cattiness. While the newspaper dutiful published the brewery's notices for a couple of years, soon enough the two town institutions began to publicly quarrel. It was a classic case of Bornson's adage 'Never argue with a man who buys ink by the barrel'. The partners sold the brewery to Jacob Weisel in 1877 and J. H. C. Huxhold moved south to Stacyville Iowa and established another brewery along the Little Cedar River. He ran that brewery for four years before pulling up camp and setting out again, at age 50, this time for Omaha. In Omaha Huxhold became engaged in a grape growing business. He died there on February 17th, 1911 at age 78 years.