About Jacob Ruppert Sr,

(Ruppert Brewery Label)

Founder of the Jacob Ruppert Brewing Company. Jacob Ruppert, Sr. was one of the first and most noted brewers in the US. He was born in NYC and was a son of Franz and Wilhelmina Zindel-Ruppert of Bavaria. Under he expert guidance of his father, Jacob learned the brewing trade thoroughly. At ten he began working for his father's Turtle Bay Brewery in Midtown Manhattan which was then only two years old. Work was hard for him and his father, as machinery was scarce during the Civil War. In 1867 he opened the Jacob Ruppert Brewing Co. on Manhattan's then-forested Upper East Side. With a 50 foot square brick building, he opened what was to be the first of many breweries. The Jacob Ruppert Brewery steadily became one of the largest and best-equipped breweries in the world. He eventually broadened his entrepreneurial interests to include real estate which became the biggest money maker for the Rupperts helping them to survive (along with Jacob Jr's interest in baseball) the coming war, Prohibition and Great Depression. Jacob Jr. eventually took over the brewing business and brought it and the Ruppert name to greater fame and glory.Jacob Ruppert, Sr. was a forceful, single-purposed man with a great capacity for work. His charities were numerous but unostentatious.He married Anna Gillig, daughter of brewer George Gillig, and had six children: Cornelia, Jacob, Frank, Anna, George and Amanda, all interred with their father in our family's mausoleum. Jacob died of cirrhosis at the age of 74, an illness brought on by the years of testing the very brew he sold.

Jacob Ruppert Jr,

(Jacob Ruppert Jr with Babe Ruth, Yankees)

Major League Baseball Team Owner, US Congressman, Businessman. A philanthropist, brewer, manufacturer, sportsman, builder, and adventurer, he was the son of Jacob and Anna Gillig-Ruppert, originators of the Jacob Ruppert Brewery in Olde Yorkville of Manhattan's upper east side. He served a Colonel in the 7th Regiment, New York National Guard and was elected to represent New York's 15th and 16th Districts in the United States House of Representatives, serving from 1899 to 1907. He best known for giving New York City the New York Yankees and Yankee Stadium. In 1914 he partnered with Spanish-American War hero Colonel Tillinghast L'Hommedieu Huston (who he soon bought out of the deal)to buy the then-called New York Highlanders, which they soon renamed the Yankees. In 1915, Jacob Sr. died, launching younger Jacob to brewery president as the first sounds of Prohibition began to rumble. The Yankees gave him a source of income to withstand the throes of Prohibition as the team grew to unimaginable fame with the likes of such greats Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Waite Hoyt, Joe Dugan and later Joe DiMaggio. In 1923, he finished building Yankee Stadium, "the House that Ruth built". Becoming ill with phlebitis of both legs in April of 1938, he did not attend the World Series that year. Complications grew and he died at his Fifth Avenue home with family at his bedside. By the time death in 1939, the Yankees won ten Pennants and seven World Series.