Moorhead’s brewery in the 1880s.

Clay County Histories

Markus Krueger | Program Director, HCSCC

After years of fundraising and months of building, our local Rotary clubs have completed Moorhead’s Natural Play Hill and Bike Park. It’s over by the river off First Avenue North, a little east of the Hjemkomst Center, by where the old brewery used to be 120-some years ago.
In 1875, when Moorhead was not yet four years old, brothers George and Joseph Larkin came down from Winnipeg to build our area’s first brewery. On April 10, an excited Red River Star wrote “All that is required of the brewery man is sufficient capital and a good knowledge of the business to make this venture a success.” That wasn’t entirely true. You also had to make beer that people wanted to drink. Apparently, the Larkin brothers didn’t. They went bankrupt the following year.
The brewery was soon reopened by John Erickson. Mr. Erickson was one of the original citizens of Moorhead, here at the town’s very beginning. The entrepreneurial Swedish immigrant began his Moorhead business career by selling wood he chopped. That money led to his first hotel (a canvas tent), followed by a general store, and on from there. The Clay County Advocate on April 2, 1877, said Erickson “runs a stock of general merchandise, meat market, hotel, brewery, blacksmith shop, wood yard, saloon and sells farm machinery. He is prepared at all times to buy or sell anything from an elephant down to a cat.” Soon Erickson could add Moorhead city alderman (equivalent to today’s city councilmember) and mayor to his resume.
The two-story brewery sat about where the new playground’s circular bike track is today, just north of the big jungle gym. Unlike Fargo-Moorhead’s modern-day breweries, Erickson’s Brewery had no tap room to drink on site. They made beer and delivered it elsewhere for people to drink. In 1882, Erickson’s Brewery produced 1,835 31-gallon barrels of beer, which is a bit less than Moorhead’s Junkyard Brewing Company does now.
Mayor Erickson employed a series of German and Czech brewmasters to run his brewery. Six to a dozen men worked and lived at the brewery, doing everything from roasting malt, moving giant blocks of ice for refrigeration, caring for their delivery horses, and probably even building their own keg barrels. They bought barley and hops from local farmers. But they could not match the prices of the bigger regional and national breweries that saved money by brewing on a larger scale, and John Erickson’s many investments overextended him financially. The brewery went bankrupt again in 1895.
Ole Aslesen used to own a brewery in Fargo (2nd Street along the railroad tracks just south of 6th Avenue North) but North Dakota outlawed alcohol in 1890, so he opened a saloon in Moorhead. In 1897, Ole rehired some of Erickson’s workers, bought new equipment, and reopened the Moorhead brewery. Unfortunately, the building burned down on August 30, 1901. The insurance money was not enough to rebuild.
In 2014, friends John Peterson and Art Weidner founded Mainline Hops Farm on John’s family land near Sabin. Both of Moorhead’s modern-day breweries, Swing Barrel Brewing Co. and Junkyard Brewing Co., have highlighted their hops in special-edition beers over the past eight years. Peterson and Weidner were inspired to grow hops in part by local history. John Peterson is the great-great-grandnephew of John Erickson.