Antique 1880s Downer and Bemis Brewing Co. Chicago Check

Size: 9" x 3 1/4" ~ These are hand-completed bank checks — each one carries its own ink and its own small history, so they vary a little one to the next.

🏦 An antique 1880s check on a real Chicago brewery

This is a bank check drawn on the First National Bank of Chicago against the account of the Downer & Bemis Brewing Co. Across the top is an engraved vignette of the brewery itself — a smokestack, a flag, horse-drawn wagons rolling past buildings lettered DOWNER & BEMIS BREWING CO. and MALT HOUSE. The printed date line reads "Chicago, ______ 188_," with only the day and the last digit of the year filled in by hand, and at center sits the era's orange two-cent revenue stamp — a small oval Liberty head the federal government required on checks of this kind. Along the foot runs the engraver's own imprint, Western B. N. & Engraving Co. Chicago.

Every one was hand-signed by the brewery's treasurer and made out to its own payee for its own amount, so no two read alike.

🍺 The brewery behind the name

The brewery itself went back to 1859, at 24th Street and South Park Avenue on Chicago's South Side. By 1864 its partners of record were Corydon E. Downer, Edwin C. Bemis and Harvey Smith, trading as Downer, Bemis & Co.; the firm took the name printed right across this check, Downer & Bemis Brewing Co., in 1869. Its chief brewer, Fritz Hieronimus, had trained in Frankfurt-on-Main, and under him the brewery grew from around 3,500 barrels a year to more than 100,000 by 1891, spread by then across thirteen buildings on a 250,000-square-foot site.

In 1882 the firm became Bemis & McAvoy Brewing Co., then simply McAvoy Brewing Co. in 1887. The McAvoy behind that later name was John H. McAvoy, an Irish-born Chicago alderman who led the City Council through the rebuilding after the Great Fire of 1871. The brewery was sold in 1889 to an English syndicate, Chicago Breweries Ltd., alongside the Wacker & Birk brewery, and kept running under the McAvoy name until Prohibition shut it down in 1920.

💵 The bank, the stamp and the printer

The First National Bank of Chicago — national charter No. 8 — opened on 1 July 1863 under Edmund Aiken, and was reorganized in 1882 under Samuel M. Nickerson and Lyman J. Gage, who later served as President McKinley's Treasury Secretary. The orange revenue stamp printed at the center of the check is a Liberty Head design the U.S. government used from 1875 to 1883 to tax checks of this size; that tax ended for good on 1 July 1883. Put that stamp together with the printed "188_" and the Downer & Bemis name itself, which the brewery dropped in 1882, and this printing pins itself to 1880 through the first half of 1883 — the last stretch the firm was writing checks under the name this one carries.