Distinctly Montana Magazine

D I S T I N C T LY M O N TA N A • S P R I N G 2 0 1 8 56 In the unraveling of this history, several players are so essential that the story would not have unfolded without them. Julius Lehrkind just happened to have completed a brew master apprenticeship before leaving Germany and making his way to Montana. According to family legend, he picked Bozeman because he liked the quality of the water and the easily accessible barley produced by nearby Dutch farmers. An immense lager brewery was built on North Wallace Avenue, complete with a malting house, wells, and cork-lined refrigeration rooms. As successful as he was, he opened other brewery and saloon businesses around Montana, and built an extraordinary home next to his Bozeman business known today as the Lehrkind Mansion B & B. But prohibition eventually reached Montana, too, forcing the closure of the brewery in 1919. Julius Lehrkind died just a few years later at age 79, per- haps from despair at the loss of his great enterprise. Harlan Olson is a modern day professional rebuilder of vintage horse drawn vehicles with his business, High Country Horse Drawn, located right across the Bridger Range from Sedan. His first teacher firmly believed the best teaching model was to "screw up first", so Harlan's on-the-job lessons about the feel of wood, the types of wood, the qualities of wood, and the capabilities of wood, never left him. After collecting ancient odds and ends along with an old driving horse from an insistent friend, Harlan started developing his childhood passion of restoration and turned it from a hobby into a full-fledged business. e missing link among these people is an immense beer barrel wagon that possibly got its start at the Akron Selle Gear Co. before ending up in Montana. e clue is the stamp on a heavy metal step on the front running gear of the wagon, saying "Selle Gear." Julius Lehrkind needed specialty wagons designed to haul kegs of his beer to taverns and bottlers. e federal tax structure of the day made it difficult for brewers to do their own bottling, so beer was sometimes transported by keg to bottling plants such as the Lehrkind bottling plant in Livingston. Locating their brewery and bottling facilities near the Northern Pacific Railroad was evidently a carefully laid plan. Four draft horses pulled these barrel wagons loaded with some 35 barrels to deliver the product to customers across town and across the state. en tax laws changed, enabling the piping of beer directly to nearby bottling plants. Soon motorized vehicles and trucks were Front step of the Selle Gear The original wheels in the down country brush patch The rebuilding with all new wood of the barrel wagon's wheel The undercoating of the restoration Harlan Olson and Dan Hurwitz with their finished wagon

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