The brewer who gave Menominee a 50-acre park on Green Bay

John Henes made his living in beer. He came up as a brewmaster, then bought the brewery with his father-in-law Jacob Leisen and ran it as the Leisen & Henes Brewing Company. His real stroke of genius, though, was a machine: in 1897 he patented the Henes-Keller bottling machine, which moved beer from barrels into bottles without losing the fizz. After it came out in 1903 it became the standard rig in the industry, and it made Henes a wealthy man.

In 1907 he spent some of that money on the rest of Menominee. He donated about 50 acres of woods and shoreline at Poplar Point, on the bay just northeast of downtown, to be a public park forever. To lay it out he brought in O.C. Simonds, a Chicago landscape architect known for designing parks and cemeteries in a naturalistic style — winding paths that follow the land instead of fighting it. One of those paths became the Shakespeare nature trail, with markers naming poets and playwrights along the way.

More than a century later the place still does what Henes intended. There is a swimming beach on the bay, picnic pavilions, fishing, and a long stretch of water frontage where you can watch the sun go down over Green Bay. The park opens for the summer season around Memorial Day and closes after Labor Day.

It is an odd and generous legacy: a man got rich keeping bubbles in bottles, and turned the profits into a quiet stand of trees on the water where the whole town could spend a Sunday.