My mother was born Jane Francis Chloupek. It’s great having an unusual name to enter on those 
government forms that ask for “mother’s maiden name,” or to keyboard it in as a password
on the Internet.  My Chloupek cousins live in California, descended from an early pioneer 
looking for gold.  He had fled Bohemia after the failed Kossuth Rebellion of 1848, settled 
briefly in Wisconsin, and then moved on to the enticing West.

 Last summer (July 2000), I flew from our home in Connecticut to California, with my sons, 
ages 9 and 15, so that we could embark on a cross-country road trip. For me, it was a 
genealogical dream come true. First we visited the final resting places of our Gold Rush 
ancestors.  They are interred in a pretty mausoleum in Oakland’s Piedmont Hills.  Who would 
think to describe a mausoleum as pretty?  Not my sons, who were decidedly not interested in 
poking around old graveyards.   We headed east on 80, pondering the plight of the pioneers 
who walked this route alongside their sturdy, patient oxen.  It took them many months.  We 
reached Wisconsin in four days.

Most of the information I had for my Wisconsin quest came from the internet, downloaded from 
dozens of different websites that display graveyard lists, early census data, county marriage, 
birth and death records and local history monographs. Unseen volunteers tirelessly unearth 
clues about my family and post them for me to discover in a cyber scavenger hunt. But finding 
actual Chloupek graves in Wisconsin’s Manitowoc County was wearing on the boys. I was 
delighted to roam through Evergreen and Calvary Cemeteries photographing their stones.  By 
the time I had driven to Francis Creek and found Polhifka Road, my sons were moaning in the 
back seat.  We pulled into Kossuth Bohemian Cemetery.  It was a hot and still Wisconsin 
afternoon, with clouds of gnats hanging motionless in the thick air.  Long grass and dense 
underbrush enclosed the tiny cemetery in a lush embrace.  Only dirt car tracks led into the 
neatly mowed and trimmed burial ground.  Driving slowly up the path and parking, I got out 
and stood amid ancient gray stones.  The cemetery was beautiful, in a forgotten place, but 
lovingly tended by someone. I felt a rush of gratitude to whoever it was that looked after 
my ancestors in their sleepy garden.  My older son sighed and got out of the car to stretch 
his legs.  He quickly found the first generation of Wisconsin-born Chloupeks, but although 
our research indicated that our earliest-known immigrants, Joseph and Marie, were here, we 
couldn’t find them.  It was such a small place, surely their stones would be nearby! Finally, 
just when we were about to give up, Joseph’s great-great-great-grandson gently pulled aside 
an expansively spreading day lily which nearly enveloped a tall gray obelisk.  The monument 
had been carefully wired together to keep it from crumbling, and again I whispered a prayer 
of thanks for the caretakers of this peaceful place. And there on the obelisk were the words: 
Joseph Chloupek, narozen 18 brez. 1790, zemrel 11 pros. 1871. And on the other side, Marie, 
1800 - 1874.   Someone had left plastic flowers there, and an American flag.  Who decorated 
these graves, distant cousins of mine, or local history buffs?  I briefly imagined coming 
unexpectedly face to face with a fellow cemetery visitor, someone who had my same smile or 
thick unruly hair.

Joseph and Mary Chloupek were born in Bohemia.  Census data collected by the Church of Latter 
Day Saints (Mormon) shows many Chloupeks living in the Boskovice/Sebranice area back into 
the 1600s. Joseph and Mary gave their home as Kutna Hora (Kuttenberg), a small town southeast 
of Prague, on their passport.  They had six children.  Family history researchers know that 
birthdates given on documents such as Declaration of Intent (to become naturalized American 
citizens), passenger lists, passports, State and Federal census, and even tombstones, don’t 
always match. The most likely birthdates for the children of Joseph and Marie are: Anton, 
b. 1826, Wenzel, b. 1828, Alzbeta, b. 1830, Joseph b. 1833, and Emanuel, b. 1836. According 
to family legend, Anton and Wenzel were officers in the Austrian army in Prague and took the 
wrong side in the Kossuth Rebellion. Supposedly, they fled for their lives over the Alps into 
Italy and eventually made their way to New York City, where they sang and played musical 
instruments on the streets until they had enough money to join other Bohemian expatriates in 
Wisconsin.  When he applied for naturalization years later, the younger Joseph gave his date 
of arrival in New York as September, 1848, followed by Emanuel and Wenzel in May 1849, and 
finally their parents, Joseph and Mary, arrived in December 1849. Just to confuse us, Joseph’s 
passport lists his wife Marie, and children Johann, Anton, Wenzel, and Joseph, even though 
they did not immigrate at the same time.   The elder Chloupeks appear on the passenger list 
of S.S. Meta, Bremen to New York, arriving Jan.15, 1850, along with Joseph, age 15, and 
Emanuel, age 11, but there is no record of the others - yet.

Information published by the Manitowoc Historical Society Library in “Occupational Monographs” 
describes how Anton and Wenzel settled in Kossuth, later called Francis Creek They constructed 
a dam across Francis Creek to create a mill pond, and built a grist mill, sawmill, and brewery 
around it. Newspaper accounts of the time describe how many years later, during a spring storm,
the dam backed up with ice and gave way, destroying most of the buildings. The Chloupeks did 
not rebuild the pond, and the stone ruins of the brewery were visible for many years.

Armed with this combination of legends and facts, I set out to find the ruins.  While my sons 
played ball on the lovely grass outside, I pored over books and index cards at The Manitowoc 
Historical Society Library.  Volunteers there kindly furnished me with an 1872 plat map, a 
1982 town map, and I already had a copy of Wenzel’s land grant.  An officer of the Francis 
Creek bank directed me to a building she had heard “used to be a brewery,” and so, leaving 
Joseph and Marie’s bucolic slumber, we drove down quiet country roads, trekked through yards 
and fields, crossed creeks, pored over the maps, and worked up the courage to approach Francis 
Creek residents with nosy questions. People couldn’t have been nicer, and finally we settled
on three old buildings that COULD have been our brewery and mills.  Satisfied, we headed back 
to our hotel, ready to continue our eastward journey.  But the next day, something drove me 
to re-visit the site. There was a broad flat area where a pond could have been, a large, high, 
earthen berm where a dam could have been, and the old stone buildings grouped on the edges.  
The creek still ran through the meadow, although it was hard to see for the trees, bridges, 
and modern road that covered it.  Against all my principals, I walked timidly around the yard 
of a gray stone house, and finally went to the door and knocked. "Hello," I said, "I’m sorry 
to disturb you, and I know I’m trespassing, but I wonder if you could tell me, was this 
building ever a brewery?” “Why, yes!” replied the young man who answered the door. “This house
was built on the old foundation.  You can see the old vaults in the basement, and the long 
stone channel where the water went through.”  Knowing that the Wisconsin countryside is dotted
with old Bohemian breweries, I ventured, “You wouldn’t happen to know the name of the original 
owner?”  “Oh, yes,” he replied pleasantly. “We looked it up at the library. Something like 
Cha-loopka or Kloo-pecka.”    

And so I had found my ancestral home, and my sons were invited in to tour the spacious modern 
house, built with respect for the old stone foundation.  The great-great-great-grandsons of 
Joseph and Maria Chloupek walked in the cool basement where the old vaults remained, and let 
their hands brush along the stones that had been hand-hewn a century and a half earlier.

While Anton and Wenzel worked their mills, their brother John, perhaps tired of the hard labor,
went to California after the Gold Rush. While his son Anthony Henry was born in Kossuth, 
family legend has it that his son Vincent was born at sea in 1854, on the way ‘round the Horn' 
to San Francisco.  Pause for a moment and picture John’s wife, Mary Sullivan of Wisconsin, 
enduring a long sea journey with her new husband (did he speak English?) and two-year old son, 
and, in a narrow wooden berth deep in the crowded, rocking steerage section, giving birth to 
her second child.  I longed to prove this story with a passenger list or an obituary. Vincent 
wasn’t much help, having written on his own 1881 marriage certificate that he was 29 years 
old and a native of Austria!  Interesting, when you consider that his older brother was born 
in 1852 in Wisconsin.  Recently, the Oakland Public Library sent me a page from the 1888 
Register of Voters. Vincent’s cousin Amos, age 24 and born in Wisconsin, is employed at a 
Brass Factory, and Vincent Chloupek, age 33, is listed as a machinist. (Why don’t those ages 
ever match?) And there, under “place of birth” for Vincent, it says “High Seas.” Vincent’s 
naturalization date is listed as “by naturalization of his father.”  Proving a family legend 
is sweet!

Vincent and his cousin  eventually owned the Brass Factory, and his son, Edgar Amos, was born 
in 1888 in Oakland.  Edgar’s daughter Jane was born there in 1920.  Her son John, born in 
Piedmont in 1950, is a fourth generation Californian (if you count that high seas thing), a 
rarity.  This rare bird is my brother, and I am the great-great-granddaughter of Joseph and 
Marie.


THE BREWERY