Anton Heeb was born in Hesse-Kassel, Germany.  He emigrated to America at age 24 in 1835, arriving in the port of Baltimore.  He lived in that city for a short time then moved to Newark, New Jersey.  By 1838 he had moved to the St. Louis, Missouri, a city that at the time was on the western frontier of America.

In August of 1838 Anton Heeb married Elizabeth Fleischhauer and they had one child before she died a few years later.  Heeb married again to Carolina Knopf in 1845, but she also died just a few days after giving birth to their first child Laurenz in February 1846.  In November of that year Heeb married once again to Katharina Gehrig.  In addition to being a very brave woman she was the daughter of Joseph Anton Gehrig, a brewer who had just arrived in St. Louis from Switzerland.

The elder Gehrig at age 49 had obtained employment at the Washington Brewery in St. Louis and there he met and took under his wing fellow brewer and Swiss emigre 22 year old Matheus Tschirgi.

Gehring was not in America to be in somebody's employ.  He wanted a brewery of his own.  He saw opportunity in the Territory of Iowa, specifically in the river town of Dubuque.  In the spring of 1846 Gehrig and Tschirgi journeyed 350 miles up the Mississippi to a brand new town that had never before seen a brewery.  But when Gehrig died in August he left a fully functioning brewery in the hands of the apprentice brewer Tschirgi.  Heeb and his betrothed received the terrible news along with a request to come help young Tschirgi in the Dubuque brewery.

Reports say that Heeb was an experienced brewer and maltster, but the St. Louis City Directory of 1847 lists Anthony Heeb as a brick maker.  Nonetheless Heeb got married, wrapped up business in St. Louis and by the next spring he and his wife had arrived in Dubuque.

Iowa had now become a state and Dubuque was growing quickly.  With Heeb in charge the Dubuque brewery started making money and the Heeb family started growing as well. Ultimately Anton and Katharina had nine children together.

The Heeb brewery grew too.  In addition to being the first brewery in Iowa it maintained its position as the largest brewery in Iowa too.  Tschirgi eventually moved on to found other breweries throughout Iowa.  Heeb stayed put, ultimately guiding the brewery for 41 years until his death at age 76, on the 23rd of January 1888.

In 1892 the Dubuque Brewing and Malting Company was brought into the Iowa brewery syndicate, and over the next four years Iowa anti-saloon laws convinced the brewery to close.

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