Corporal Herman Ziebold was born in Granion, Freiburg, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.  After his primary education in Germany he apprenticed as a brewer.  He emigrated to the United States in 1854 and after working at breweries in the Indiana town of Lawrenceburg, Chicago he settled finally St. Louis.

Upon the outbreak of the Civil War Ziebold was 24, and he enlisted to fight for the Union.  He served almost the entirety of the war.  After Lee's surrender at Appomattox he lived again in St. Louis, where met Miss Rosa Franz.  They were married in August of 1867.  The Ziebolds then moved to St. Joseph, Missouri where Herman got a job in the Nunning Brewery.  There he met his Josef Hagelin, a man who not only would soon be his brother-in-law, but also his business partner.  In 1871 both families moved to the Great Plains where they purchased the brewery owned by hotelier John Stamm in Atchison, Kansas.

For 20 years Herman Ziebold and Josef Haegelin were partners in the brewery in Atchison.  Ziebold & Hagelin's Southwest Lager & Beer Brewery became nationally famous as the brewery that stubbornly refused to go out of business despite the best efforts of God and the Government.  The firm became defendants in an important Prohibition-related lawsuit that made its way all the way to the Supreme Court.  The firm ultimately won their case as the court affirmed that municipalities had the right to enact laws that forbid the sale of alcohol, under the guise of public health, but could not forbid its manufacture for sale elsewhere.  The Southwest's extensive distribution network on the other side of the Missouri state line sustained it, for the time being.

Herman Ziebold died on the 20th of July, 1891 at the age of 56 years.  Hagelin died on the 25th of January, 1893.  The brewery, thereafter run by the widows of the original partners, continued into the next century, and finally closed, after three decades of defiance, in 1902.

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Associated Breweries