Vintage 1950s Cook's Bock Beer Label 🍺 Steamboat & Goat Design | F.W. Cook Co., Evansville, Indiana

Who Puts a Steamboat on a Bock Beer Label? 🍺 Vintage 1950s Cook's Bock Beer Label, F. W. Cook Company, Evansville, Indiana

Size: 4 1/2" x 3 1/2"

Evansville does, that's who. This is an unused Cook's Bock Beer label - six white stars across a gold top, a green Ohio River steamboat with smoke rolling off its stacks, the big looping Cook's script, and a goat's head in a green square sitting right between BOCK and BEER. Down the left edge: CONTENTS 12 FLUID OUNCES. Down the right: BREWED AND PACKAGED BY F. W. COOK COMPANY, INC. • EVANSVILLE, INDIANA.

🌽 A Brewery Started in a Cornfield

Frederick Washington Cook, who came to Evansville as a boy with his stepfather Jacob Rice, opened the City Brewery with Rice in 1853 - out in what was then a cornfield on Seventh Street. The 1889 history of Vanderburgh County fills in the family side: the firm started out as Cook & Reis, with Jacob's brother Louis as Cook's first partner, and Louis later sold his share to Jacob. By 1873 Cook owned the whole business himself. It grew until it covered the whole block between Seventh, Sycamore, Eighth and Main, and when Rice died in 1885 it became the F. W. Cook Brewing Co. Goldblume was the beer everybody knew. Fire destroyed the brewery on December 3, 1891, and a new brewhouse and office were finished by March 1893. Then a big fire in 1905 took much of the plant, and they rebuilt again. Cook ran it until he died in 1913 at 81, then his son Henry, then Henry's brother Charles.

The Cooks were never shy. In the 1890s, with the brewery owned by an English syndicate, Cook's cut prices so hard that three of the other Evansville breweries - Hartmetz, Fulton Avenue and the Evansville Brewery - merged into the Evansville Brewing Association just to stay in the fight. And in 1912 a quarrel with the Louisville & Nashville Railroad over hauling Cook's beer went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. The railroad had refused to carry Cook's kegs and cases from Evansville to the dry, local-option towns across the river in Kentucky, so Cook's sued to make it. On January 22, 1912 the Court sided with the brewery: Kentucky's law could stop beer moving from one Kentucky town to another, but it couldn't stop a railroad from hauling it in from another state.

🚂 A Brewery With Its Own Railroad

Prohibition closed it in 1919. It came back in 1933 as F. W. Cook Co., and later as the F. W. Cook Company, Inc. you see printed on this label. My favorite part: the company bought an old abandoned traction line downtown and ran it as the Cook Transit Corporation, with its own little electric locomotive hauling freight. That track was what was left of the Evansville & Princeton Traction Company, the electric interurban that opened its 28-mile line up to Princeton, Indiana in 1903. Interurban service around Evansville ended in 1933, and about a third of a mile of the old line ran down Ninth Street from the brewery to the Chicago & Eastern Illinois rail yard. The locomotive was a "box motor" - basically a boxcar with its own electric motors - and a two-person crew switched out the brewery twice a day, Monday through Friday, moving between 15 and 25 cars. There was a tavern called the Rathskeller down in the brewery basement, and in 1935 and 1936 the brewery even had its own semi-pro ball club, the Cook's Goldblumes.

🏁 Tony Hulman and the Last Days

Here's one Indiana folks get a kick out of. Anton "Tony" Hulman - the Terre Haute businessman, yes, the Indianapolis Motor Speedway Hulman - bought a controlling interest in Cook's around 1950. When the workers went on strike in 1955, Hulman stopped the brewing rather than settle back in. The fight was over pay - Cook's was paying its workers a good deal less than Sterling was paying across town. They sold off the beer already made and closed the doors for good in September 1957, and that was the end of the brewery Frederick Cook had started in a cornfield a century before. The corporation was dissolved in 1961, and in 1965 the old brewery came down. The Civic Center stands on the spot today.

The Cook's brands were sold to Sterling, the cross-town rival that had grown out of that same Evansville Brewing Association, and Goldblume went on being brewed in other places until 1972. Sterling had been sold to Associated Brewing in 1964, and in 1972 G. Heileman Brewing of La Crosse, Wisconsin, bought the brewery. When Heileman pulled out in 1988, a new Evansville Brewing Company took over the old Sterling plant, and it brought Goldblume back until it closed in 1997.

🐐 Why the Goat?

The story most beer folks tell is that "bock" comes from Einbeck, the old German brewing town famous for its strong beer - Bavarians said it as "ein Bock," which also means a billy goat, and the goat has been the bock mascot ever since. Bock was the spring beer, the one people waited for at the end of winter.

📅 How I Date It

Beer labels had to print "Internal Revenue Tax Paid" until March 1950, and this one doesn't have it - so it was printed after that, and before the brewery stopped in 1955. That makes it an early-1950s label.

A great piece for a bock collection, an Indiana breweriana wall, or anybody from Evansville who still remembers Goldblume. You'll get one like the one shown.