Jacob Obermann was born in Darmstadt, Hesse, Germany.  He was the son of a shoemaker and took up that profession in his home country after learning the trade from his father.  Obermann emigrated to the New World alone in the summer of 1843 through the port of New York.

Jacob apparently went straight to Milwaukee where he pursued his training of cobbler.  He either brought his wife with him from the old country or very quickly got to work in America, because his first child was born less than a year after he arrived, in April of 1844.  Obermann was in fact one of the first German immigrants to Milwaukee, so he was nicely established for business when the boys from the homeland started arriving later that decade.

Obermann's father, Joannes Peter Obermann, joined him in Milwaukee in 1846.  Jacob changed professions and opened a grocery store in 1849.  This gradually became a part-time brewery, as they often were in German communities of that era. 

In September of 1852 Obermann suffered two tragedies in the span of a week.  On Monday the 6th Jacob's father died.  He was followed just days later by Obermann's wife, Maria (née Schmitt) who passed on the 14th.  Suddenly Jacob was alone with four children under six.  But the Obermann's long-time domestic servant Barbara Schmidt was there to help raise the children and console their grieving father.

In 1854, with Ms. Schmidt's help, Obermann went full-time into the brewery business, opening the Germania on Cherry and Fifth Streets.  It was just a two story frame structure, but it was, or soon grew to be, the largest in Milwaukee.

Obermann & Schmidt married around this time, and Barbara had her first child with him in 1855.  All in all they would have seven more children together, the final born when Jacob was 55 years old.

The Obermann children grew with their father's brewery.  By 1880 the oldest boy was 34 and the Germania was producing 30,000 barrels of lager beer annually.  When Jacob retired his children were prepared to take the reins.

But it didn't work out like that.  Jacob died at age 68, on April 24th, 1887.  The brewing industry in Milwaukee was a new world by then.  Pabst and Schlitz and Val. Blatz were ascendant, and his sons were not prepared to battle these upstarts.   The company became heavilly leveraged, and when its main lender failed during the Panic of 1893 the paper came due.  The brewery officially failed on August 4th.  

The Germania Brewery went into receivership later that year and was finally sold at auction in 1896.  Philipp Jung purchased the 145,000 barrel/year Germania for $230,000.  It became the Jung Brewery and operated until Prohibition closed its doors on January 16, 1920.

The failure of the wheat crop in Argentina triggered a coup in Buenos Aires and investments encouraged by the Argentine banking firm Baring Brothers collapsed, causing the investment firm to fail.  This led to a chain reaction of worldwide margin calls and business failures that is now known as the Panic of 1893.

As a result of the panic there was a massive stock sell-off. Five hundred banks closed, 15,000 businesses failed, and numerous farms went dormant.  $1.8 billion dollars of railroad lines went into receivership and unemployment in American states went as high as 43% (Michigan).