Antique 1930s Kamm's Ale Label 🍺 Knights Shining Armor on Horses, Mishawaka, IN

Kamm's Ale Label 🍺 Knights in Shining Armor - Kamm & Schellinger Co., Mishawaka, Indiana

Size: 4 1/4" x 3"

This is a really gorgeous label - two knights in shining armor on white horses, one on each side of a big wooden barrel with castles behind them. KAMM'S ALE, Kamm & Schellinger Co., Mishawaka, Ind., 12 fluid oz., and the two lines that date it: PERMIT U-709 and INTERNAL REVENUE TAX PAID. Never used. I have a stack of these, so yours will look just like this one.

🔎 The Permit Number Dates It

When beer came back in 1933, every brewery got a federal permit - the letter U and a number - and from April 1933 to September 1935 that number had to be printed on the label. The "Internal Revenue Tax Paid" line ran on beer labels from Repeal until March 1950. A label with both is from the first couple of years after Prohibition ended, when Kamm & Schellinger was getting its beer back on the shelves.

Indiana went dry at midnight on April 2, 1918, almost two years before the rest of the country. Beer didn't come back until April 7, 1933. That's fifteen years with no legal beer in the state. Every brewery that wanted back in needed one of those new federal permits, and Kamm & Schellinger was one of the first in Indiana to brew again. Business came back fast. Output soon hit 120,000 barrels a year, and the plant got a big expansion and a modern overhaul to keep up.

🏰 Kamm & Schellinger

John Wagner was already brewing and distilling in Mishawaka by 1839, and his corn whiskey sold for 25 cents a gallon. After a fire in 1851 he built again on Center Street in 1853, and that year is still up on the front of the building. In 1870 Adolph Kamm - born in Germany in 1842, brought over at eight, and trained in breweries in Ohio and Indiana - bought Wagner's brewery with Clemens Dick. The two came over from Toledo, Ohio, and ran it as Dick & Kamm until 1880, when Kamm's brother-in-law Nicholas Schellinger bought out Dick. The company incorporated in 1887, and by 1900 it was turning out 30,000 barrels a year, its Pilsner famous around South Bend, Mishawaka and up into Michigan. By 1918 it was making 75,000 barrels a year. Then Prohibition hit, and it got by on K&S Root Beer, soda pop, distilled water and ice. In May 1920 it brought out Arrow Cereal Beverage, a near beer with less than half a percent alcohol, sold with the slogan "It Always Hits the Spot." There was an orange drink called Julade and a mint julep drink called Emral too. The Schellingers pulled out in 1927 and the Kamms carried on. Adolph Kamm died in December 1930 and never got to see beer come back. After 1933 the brewery was back with Kamm's Pilsener, Kamm's Export and this Kamm's Ale. A deadly explosion, a bad fire in 1950 and tough competition from the big breweries finished it, and it closed in 1951.

👑 The Princess City

Mishawaka got its start in the early 1830s as St. Joseph Iron Works, a little town built around a blast furnace that turned bog iron from the St. Joseph Valley into pig iron. In 1834 the first postmaster suggested the name Mishawaka. The Potawatomi lived here first, and their word for the spot means swift-flowing water, or heavy-timbered rapids.

The town calls itself the Princess City, and here's the story people tell. Mishawaka was the daughter of a Shawnee chief named Elkhart, and a white trader called Dead Shot and a warrior named Grey Wolf both wanted her. It's a great tale, but a Michigan writer named Flavius Littlejohn dreamed it up for a book of stories in 1875. Mishawaka loved it anyway. For the city's centennial in 1932, a boulder with a bronze plaque was dedicated to her in Lincoln Park, at her so-called grave. Knights and castles on an ale from the Princess City. Fits right in.

🏛️ The Brewery Is Still There

The old brewery on Center Street didn't get torn down. In the late 1960s it was turned into the 100 Center, with shops, restaurants and a twin movie theater, and it was the place to be in Mishawaka right into the 1980s. It went on the National Register of Historic Places in 1979. Back then the old belt-drive wheels and shafts were still inside, along with the rails for the ice house's overhead crane and a brick vault underground, 40 feet long, where the brewery made charcoal for its beer filters. The L-shaped stable from around 1855, built for the brewery's draft horses and beer wagons, is part of the listing too. When the new malls opened north of downtown, the crowds moved on and the place slowly emptied out. In April 2026 the city's plan commission backed a $41.5 million plan to bring it back with homes, shops and restaurants. It keeps the main brewery building with 1853 up top, the boiler house, the stables and the 262-foot brick smokestack.

The label is lithography, printed one color at a time from separate plates, and I don't think any of the newer ways of printing will ever match what lithography can do. Imagine it framed on your wall.