The Theodore Hamm Brewing Co. once employed a handful of workers on St. Paul’s East Side, circa the 1860s. With a new dormitory installed for laborers and Hamm, a German immigrant and former saloon owner, at the helm, that handful grew to 75 employees by the late 1880s, and then, under his son’s and grandson’s leadership, into the hundreds, ultimately peaking at 1,300 workers in the 1940s and ’50s.

Hamm’s signature marketing jingle — “From the Land of Sky Blue Waters” — would go on to make Hamm’s beer, and the Hamm’s bear mascot, a nationally recognized brand.

The story of the Hamm’s Brewery, once one of the city’s largest employers, and its one-story to six-story red brick buildings has been less romantic in the modern era, with different portions of the massive brewery campus partition

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