Adolphus Busch - Biography

Biography

Busch was born in 1839 in Kastel, then a district of Mainz in the Grand Duchy of Hesse. He was the second youngest of 22 siblings. The family worked in winery and brewery supplies. He attended the Collegiate Institute of Belgium in Brussels, and left his home in 1857 with three of his brothers for St Louis; Johann, who established a brewery in Washington, Missouri, Ulrich, Jr, who married another daughter of Eberhard Anheuser and settled in Chicago and Anton, a hops dealer that later returned home to Mainz.

His first job in St Louis was working as a clerk in the commission house. He was also an employee at William Hainrichshofen's wholesale company.

He became acquainted with Lilly Anheuser, whose parents had a small brewery which her father Eberhard Anheuser acquired in 1860, renaming it from the Bavarian Brewery to the E. Anheuser Brewery.

He married 17 year old Lilly Eberhard Anheuser on 7 March 1861 in St Louis. They had thirteen children; eight sons, including Adolphus Busch II, August Anheuser Busch I and Carl Busch, and five daughters.

During the American Civil War he served in the United States Army for 14 months. It was at this time that he learned that his father had died and that he had inherited a portion of his father's estate. He used the money to start a wholesale brewer's supply store, and four years later he bought a share in the Bavarian brewery from Eberhard Anheuser, his father-in-law. The company was first called "Anheuser and Company", but at the death of Eberhard Anheuser in 1880, it was changed to "Anheuser Busch Company".

The rapid success of the Anheuser Brewer made its owner independent and permitted him to perform philanthropic activities, such as assisting in the repair of the devastating 1882 flooding of Kastel-Mainz by the Rhine River.

In 1891 Adolphus bought from Carl Conrad the trademark and name Budweiser.

He envisioned a national beer with universal appeal. Toward this end, he created a network of rail-side ice-houses and launched the industry’s first fleet of refrigerated freight cars. However, throughout his life, he referred to his beer as "that slop" and instead drank wine. Success came when Adolphus implemented pasteurization as a way to keep the beer fresh for longer periods of time. The beer could now be shipped all over the country. He was also an early adopter of bottled beer. In 1901 sales surpassed the one million barrels of beer benchmark.

In 1912, Busch constructed the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, Texas, then the tallest building in the state.

The Busches often traveled to Germany where they had a mansion, the Villa Lilly, which was named for Mrs Busch, in Lindschied near Langenschwalbach, in present-day Bad Schwalbach.

He died there in Lindschied in 1913 while on vacation. He had been suffering from dropsy since 1906. His body was brought back in 1915 by ship to the United States and then a train to St. Louis and he was buried in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis.