The Monument Hill Brewery

On a sandstone bluff two hundred feet above the Colorado River there is a tomb, and a short walk down the ravine behind it, the stone shell of one of the first commercial breweries in Texas. The tomb was built in 1848 to hold the remains of Texans killed in two disasters of the Republic era. The first was the Dawson Massacre of 1842, in which a volunteer company riding to relieve San Antonio was surrounded and cut to pieces. The second was the Black Bean Episode of 1843, when captured members of the Mier Expedition were made to draw beans from a jar, one bean each, and the seventeen men who drew black ones were executed the same evening. The two events are commemorated together because the remains were gathered up and reburied together, six years after the second of them. Heinrich Kreische, a master stonemason trained at the building trades school in Holzminden in Germany, bought this bluff in 1849 and built his house on top of it. In the 1860s he used the spring running in the ravine below to start brewing, and within a decade his was among the largest breweries in the state, supplying La Grange and the country around it. The three storey stone brewery walls still stand in the trees below the house, roofless and being slowly taken back by the woods. The two sites are managed together as one state historic site on the bluff south of La Grange, about two miles off the highway. The view up and down the river valley is why a good many people come.