The story of August and Herman Schuenemann begins in Ahnapee - the modern day Algoma, Wisconsin. There, near the base of the Door County peninsula, the brothers grew up among fishermen, farmers and sailors.
In Ahnapee boys dreamed of life at sea just as surely as do boys in every generation. They heard stories of exotic ports, dangers survived, and fortunes won and lost. They watched and listened as sailors, home from their voyages, did and said things that would have made their mother either shrink in fear or blush in embarrassment. And they decided that this was the life for them.
August Schuenemann was four years old when he and his parents first arrived in Ahnapee in 1857. Herman was born eight years later in 1865 on the farm that his parents were developing. When he was born his father was serving in the Union Army in Mississippi.
This bird's eye view of Ahnapee was drawn in 1880. By this time the Schuenemann family had moved off the farm and were living in the German ward of the small town. Their small home was not far from the Catholic church which was on the hill north of the river. That area is on the right in the artist's rendition.
The Schuenemann brothers learned to sail first hand by crewing on the small cargo carriers that sailed into Ahnapee with goods and sailed out with cedar posts, telegraph poles, shingles, cordwood, lumber, wheat, fish, and the odd passenger.
The schooners and scow-schooners that they learned to sail on were small two-masted and shallow draft vessels with centerboards like the one pictured to the left.
The sailing life took August and Herman to the cities of Milwaukee and Chicago where the lumber and grain markets were flourishing. There they found opportunities both on land and on the water.
While August stuck closer to the water and owned a series of schooners that he bought when they were already well-used veterans of the lake, Herman had the entrepreneurial spirit that inspired him to be a business men in the city.
South Water Street was the market street of the ever-expanding city. There Herman Schuenmann was a familiar figure, first as a lake captain, and later as a partner in a grocery business.
It was here, too, that Herman developed his own unique business, the Northern Michigan Evergreen Nursery. From the growing and the cutting, to the shipping and marketing, Herman became a master of the Christmas tree business.
Typically, Christmas trees were wholesaled by the captains of the tree vessels that came to Milwaukee and Chicago. Grocery store owners bought them and then resold them to their customers much as the owner of this grocery store near Chicago's Navy Pier was doing for Christmas, 2003.
But Herman Schuenemann took the innovative approach of selling his trees directly from the deck of his boat where it sat moored in the Chicago River by the Clark Street bridge. Lit by electric lights and festooned with a banner that read "The Christmas Tree Schooner. My Prices are the Lowest," Captain Schuenemann's tree ship was the start of an urban legend that has survived nearly a century.
Both of the Schuenemann brothers died tragically while bringing Christmas trees to Chicago - August on board the schooner S. Thal in 1898, and Herman on the schooner Rouse Simmons in 1912.
Barbara Schuenemann, Herman's wife carried on the business for another 20 years. With the help of her three daughters she continued to bring trees from northern Michigan by railroad. Once they arrived in Chicago, they were loaded on an old schooner in the river for sale, evoking the "Christmas Tree Schooner" of Capt. Schuenemann's day.
In modern times the United States Coast Guard has emulated the Christmas Tree Ship tradition and combined it with a charitable mission. The ice breaker Mackinaw, based at Cheboygan, Michigan, has been used to bring freshly cut evergreens to Chicago where they are distributed to families that might not have been able to afford to have a Christmas tree.
Just steps away from where the Coast Guard's ice breaker docks, a memorial honors the memory of the many sailors like Captains August and Herman Schuenemann who navigated the Great Lakes in the days of the sailing ship.
