1910: The brewery sells it

Around 1910 Walter Brewing sold the building. The bar stopped being a tied house and became somebody's own place. The records from those years are thin. What is known is that the room stayed a bar, on the same corner, under the same roof, through the last decade before the country went dry. Eau Claire was a sawmill town turning into something else. The lumber was mostly gone by then; the mills along the Chippewa were closing or changing hands. A corner tavern on the east side served the people who stayed: the ones who worked the new factories, the rail yards, the shops on Madison Street. If you have a photograph, a receipt or a name from this stretch, bring it in. This is the chapter with the most blank pages.