by JuliaJaneArt
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Original artwork and Greeting cards by JuliaJaneArt |
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A DUCHATEAU |
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Abelard (sometimes “Abeillard”) Louis Donat Duchateau, a native of Oud-Heverlee, Vlaams Brabant Province, Belgium immigrated to the United States at age 20 years, arriving at Green Bay as a port of entry in July 1856. He initially found work as a tailor in Door County, Wisconsin, moving to Green Bay around 1867, with Felicite, whom he married in 1861. About 1870 with his brother (I Duchateau), Abelard established a liquor dealership in Green Bay, calling it Duchateau & Brother. It was located at the corner of Main and Washington Streets in the heart of the city’s commercial district. The Duchateaus were not only liquor dealers but also rectifiers, that is, blending and compounding whiskeys to achieve a specific taste. They packaged their products in glass with an embossed logo on the front. The company’s flagship brand was “Old Beauford Rye.” Abelard's son, Frank Duchateau, was educated in the Green Bay public schools but left at the age of 16, working first as an office boy and then as a clerk in a shoe store owned by a relative, entering his father’s liquor business in 1885. His first job was as bookkeeper, advancing to manager. The company progressed to being Green Bay’s largest import and wholesale liquor operation. Frank was fully trained and capable of taking over the business when Abelard died in 1889 and was buried in the Green Bay’s Allouez Cemetery. Frank Duchateau was married in September 1890 to Marie Beaupre. a native of Green Bay and the daughter of a local doctor. Three years later she died in 1893 leaving him with a daughter, Olive Felicite, to raise. Frank subsequently married a second time, to Mrs. Julia Lucas O’Leary, a widow whose father had been an early settler of Green Bay. This marriage produced no children before Julia too died in 1911. Despite these tragedies in his personal life, Frank proved to be undeterred and as acute a businessman as Abelard. In tribute to his father, about 1900 he changed the name of the firm to simply “A. Duchateau Company.” Like many other whiskey men of his time Duchateau branched out with a patent medicine called “Dr. Munros’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters.,” said to be a remedy for all type of intestinal disturbances. The label carried a picture purported to be the visage of the estimable Dr. Munro, possibly a fictitious personage. This nostrum eventually would be targeted by the U.S. Department of the Treasury and the Food and Drug officials among purported medicinal preparations with an excess amount of alcohol and reported to be “insufficiently medicated to render them unfit for use as a beverage.” As a result, Dr. Munro’s Celebrated Stomach Bitters thereafter would be subject to a special Federal tax on sales and were branded by Dr. Wiley, head of the Food and Drug administration, as a useless potion. Although the coming of National Prohibition, shut down his wholesale liquor business, Duchateau was able to throw his abundant energies into his real estate interests, including erecting buildings on six blocks in downtown Green Bay. He lived to be 87 years old, dying in 1954.
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