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Fire, floods and growing greenhouse business doomed Austin social venue that ended in 1912

 

By Tim Ruzek

Heavy rain in spring 1903 caused the Cedar River to rise rapidly in Austin.

Major flooding ensued, especially around the downtown dam where Kinsman’s greenhouses had relocated just two years earlier, north of the German Hall. Both properties — including a grove of trees around the German Hall — covered what today is Riverside Arena’s parking lot along the river.

“Water set in strongly toward the German Hall, and Monday afternoon, strenuous efforts were required to save the approach west of the Bridge Street bridge (2nd Ave NE), a portion of the north side of the approach being washed away,” wrote the Mower County Transcript on May 27, 1903.

While avoiding devastation, the German Hall succumbed a year later to fire in February 1904.

This venue opened April 8, 1892, on Bridge Street. The German Society bought the property to build a hall to better accommodate its group that formed in 1889 but had been meeting in the back of a downtown store.

Germans formed the group and incorporated it under state laws for the purpose of studying the German language and improving its members as well as for literary and social culture.

An October 1892 dedication ceremony for the new German Hall “was not only a very pleasant one but marks the age of progress and prosperity that has made our city so conspicuous during the last few years,” the Transcript wrote Oct. 5, 1892.

Following the 1904 fire, the German Society rebuilt its hall on the same site. Work began in fall 1904 and took nearly a year. 

“The present building is far ahead of the old both in beauty and convenience,” the Transcript wrote Oct. 24, 1905, after the new hall’s dedication ceremony that had 300 invitees.

At the 1905 dedication, a banquet was served with a musical program followed by a grand ball in the new, two-story hall built of cement blocks and featuring a stage.

Described by newspapers as “handsome,” the new hall also featured “convenient dining and reception rooms” with a kitchen and smoking room.

“The German Society is to be congratulated on the completion of so convenient and substantial a building for their gatherings,” the Transcript wrote.

The venue’s main hall was 50 feet long and 32 feet wide, with a finished birch floor, steel ceiling and furniture made of quartered oak. The stage (8 feet deep and 32 feet wide) had a proscenium arch.

“This hall is one of the prettiest gathering places in the city and the society intends to keep it so,” the Austin Daily Herald wrote Oct. 18, 1905. “No public dance will be held here. The society may give a few invitation socials.”

At the time, the hall was planned only for lodge purposes, such as the Bohemian Society and the Order of Railway Conductors and its ladies auxiliary. The German Society would use the hall for its musicals and other entertainment.

At the 1905 dedication, German lodge leaders led a “grand march to the dining hall,” where decorated tables offered “everything that one could desire for an elegant banquet.”

This venue hosted many events by organizations and families but the first “sociable” was in January 1906 by the Ladies Auxiliary of the Order of Railway Conductors consisting of a literary and musical program. The railway group had used the German Hall for its headquarters since 1904.

Other community celebrations also happened at the German Hall.

In 1909, nearly 100 people attended a couple’s golden wedding anniversary at the German Hall, with their children and grandchildren forming a wedding procession. Friends gave $60 in gold to the couple, who also received $50 in gold from their children.

Three years after opening, the second German Hall was hit with an even bigger flood in June 1908, when the city suffered its worst-known flood at that time.

Floodwaters rushing over the downtown dam raged into the Kinsman greenhouses and flooded the German Hall’s basement, greatly damaging the building that survived but only for four more years.

In 1909, A.N. Kinsman, who relocated his greenhouse business in 1901 to the area north of the German Hall, bought 100 feet of the hall’s property to grow summer carnations. Two months later, Kinsman bought the entire German Hall property.

By March 1910, the venue was being called “the O.R.C. Hall” after the Order of Railway Conductors that leased it from Kinsman.

Two years later, Kinsman’s business was being called “one of the largest greenhouse plants in the state outside of the Cities,” the Transcript wrote in 1912.

Later that summer, Kinsman released plans to build another large greenhouse on the German Hall’s property. This expansion removed the hall and overall gave him 14 large greenhouses.

Kinsman remained there until the mid-1960s after damage from the March 1965 flood. The business relocated to Austin’s western edge, where it became Johnson Floral, which closed more than a decade ago.