Chatfield Bottling Company

Image Copyright La Crosse County Historical Society

Haley Gagliano

Have you ever heard of spruce beer?

Spruce beer is flavored with the buds, needles or essence of spruce trees.

The beverage created from evergreen needles has a resinous, piney flavor — which is an acquired taste. It can be alcoholic or non-alcoholic, and it has been around for centuries. In the 18th century, the British navy depended on it to prevent scurvy, and American colonists, surrounded by evergreen forests, were fond of it as well.

Charles Chatfield of La Crosse founded a bottling company in 1885, where this glass bottle was filled.

Consumers used to buy their soda, drink it and return the empty glass bottle to the company that owned it. From there it would be washed and rebottled with a new drink. Because of this, the glass was thicker and higher quality than glass bottles we think of today, and the bottles all proclaimed the name of the company that owned them in embossed glass. Chatfield, along with H. Griswold, were the manufacturers of spruce beer along with cider, mineral water and other beverages.

Chatfield was born on Sept. 24, 1838, in Albany, New York. He was a Civil War veteran who was well known for being versatile. He worked several different jobs aside from being a soldier and traveled around the country before settling in La Crosse in 1865.

In 1856, Chatfield journeyed to Michigan and operated as a lumberman for three years. After this, he traveled to Illinois, where he eventually enlisted in the Army on Sept. 25, 1861.

Chatfield moved to La Crosse in 1865 and stayed for the remainder of his life. While he found a home to settle down in, Chatfield remained a busy man and constantly found new ways to occupy his time and pay the bills.

He worked as a carpenter in La Crosse from 1873 to 1881. In 1881, Chatfield established his reputation as a manufacturer where he began producing all types of carbonated drinks, and eventually became a spruce beer manufacturer.

Chatfield had a lingering illness his last two years and died on March 12, 1903, at his home.

This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on November 16, 2019.

Eddie Littlejohn’s Nazi flag

Peggy Derrick

Native Americans have served in the U.S. Armed Forces since the American Revolution, even though they were not granted citizenship and the right to vote until 1924, with the Indian Citizenship Act. As many as 25,000 saw active duty in World War II.

Five of those who served were the Littlejohn brothers from Brownsville, Minnesota, members of the Ho-Chunk Nation.

Four of the Littlejohns — Edward, Warren, Lawrence and Howard — joined the U.S. Army, while Woodrow joined the Army Air Corps. Three served in the South Pacific, and two in Africa and Europe, and one, Howard, was killed at the Battle of the Bulge. The other four survived to return home to the poverty and prejudice they had grown up with.

At the time of their enlistment, newspapers featured them in articles that said things like “heap big trouble is in store for the Axis.” Even in the act of recognizing the Littlejohns, white society parodied them with stereotypes and tried to diminish their sacrifice.

Eddie Littlejohn was certainly proud of his exploits, and he chose to memorialize them on this Nazi flag he brought home as a souvenir. Littlejohn served under General George Patton, as a combat engineer, in North Africa, Sicily and Italy.

The flag is large, 56” by 37.” The black swastika is screen printed onto the white wool circle, which is sewn onto the red wool background.

The appliqued white circle has irregular edges and looks homemade, which raises the possibility that it was sent home first, and later sewn back on to a red wool background.

This theory is supported by one of the handwritten inscriptions on the white circle: “Greetings-Salutations, from Eddie.”

This flag is especially significant because of the way in which Littlejohn has taken the Nazi symbol and co-opted it to make it a record of his own exploits as a soldier. The standard symbolism of a manufactured item is here merely the backdrop for the story of the individual who claimed it.

Littlejohn has painted and stenciled on the history of his service over the surface of the flag. It reads in large stenciled black letters on the red ground: Invasion of Axis Europe; Africa, Sicily, Italy; 1943; Eddie G. Littlejohn.

Also on the white background around the central swastika he has written with very fine penmanship the names of individual battles and places where he had served: Salerno (the site of the Allied Forces landing in Italy on Sept. 3, 1943), Volturno (site of the German defensive line), and the Battle of Scoglitti (site of the Allied invasion of Sicily). And there are a young man’s cocky nose-thumbing: to Berlin, and Heil Hitler and his flag.

Flags are representative group symbols that have been around as long as there have been textiles.

The practice of taking trophies in battle probably goes back even longer, and this flag was certainly Littlejohn’s trophy. It is what textile historians call a “user-modified” object: the original meaning of the flag has been subsumed in the meaning given to it by one Native American soldier. It is this personal story, overlaid on top of the backdrop of the Nazi symbol that makes this such an interesting artifact.

Unlike nearly every other artifact described in Things That Matter, this flag does not belong to the La Crosse County Historical Society: It is on loan to us from Eliot, the son of the Eddie Littlejohn. Eliot himself is a veteran, having served in the Vietnam War, and he takes pride in the legacy of his father and his uncles.

Eliot Littlejohn left the flag with us in the hopes of seeing a small display about his father’s military service.

LCHS does not presently have a public gallery space to put up such a display. However, we dream of someday having an exhibit that would tell stories of local Native American veterans, for there are many Ho-Chunk veterans.

An artifact like this giant swastika needs to be displayed and interpreted with thoughtful, sensitive context.

There is nothing innately “cool” about Nazi paraphernalia, and the world is sadly full of such items. As an authentic WWII artifact, it is important; but as an artifact that documents the experience of a young Ho-Chunk soldier from the Coulee Region, it is an irreplaceable treasure.

This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on November 9, 2019.

La Crosse Cigar Box Tramp Art

Amy Vach

Image Copyright La Crosse County Historical Society

Catalog Number: 2015.024.001

Wooden boxes have often been saved over the years and then given new life storing things like trinkets, receipts, recipes, and sewing supplies. Sometimes these boxes were altered by adding initials or stickers, and other times the boxes were reconfigured entirely.

This box is a piece of tramp art made from parts of a La Crosse cigar box from the Pamperin and Wiggerhorn Cigar Company. The manufacture of cigars was a big industry in La Crosse after the turn of the twentieth century and the city has been the home to over 20 cigar manufacturing companies.

Tramp art is a style of folk art typically made from wooden cigar boxes. Cigar boxes were a one-time use item because Federal laws prohibited their re-use. Boxes were readily available due to the popularity of cigar smoking and were sold for mere pennies. This art form is made by cutting a series of small notches in the wood with a knife and layering the wood to create a variety of three-dimensional patterns such as pyramids, ovals, stars, hearts, and others. Anything from picture frames to jewelry boxes to armoires was created in this style.

Sometimes the artwork from the cigar box was incorporated into the final design; however, most of the paper labels that were once inside this box have been torn away, but the Pamperin and Wiggerhorn logo is still present beneath the lid. The layers of the box that create the pyramid shape are held in place by small nails.

As legend has it, tramp art was named after the artists. People thought that vagabonds or tramps made these pieces as they traipsed around the world. However, these pieces took a great deal of dedication and attention to detail to create; they are not something that could have been done on the road. Tramp art was primarily produced by the working class and was influenced by European woodworking styles. In the U.S., tramp art was popular between the 1870s and the 1940s. This box falls right in the middle of that period with a date of 1901, as is written on the bottom of the box.

There were a lot of tramp art pieces created in Wisconsin. While the artist of this piece is unknown, it represents a nationally recognized art form using a local cigar company’s discarded boxes.

This article was originally published in the La Crosse Tribune on November 2, 2019.

This object can be viewed in our online collections database by clicking here.