Profile · Germantown, Wisconsin
John Paul Gehl
Son of Michael N. and Mary Anna (Fohl) Gehl of Nenno
$1 million
John Paul Gehl turned a three-room South Germantown creamery into the condensed-milk business that still carries the family name in the village. The son of Michael N. and Mary Anna (Fohl) Gehl of Nenno, he was running his brother Nicholas's plant on the north side of Main Street, just east of Western, by 1896. On April 29, 1897, he married Theresa Neubauer, who had been Nicholas's secretary in a Milwaukee brokerage; Nicholas owed him money, and the creamery became both the debt payment and the wedding present. The couple lived in the house next to the plant. They made butter and cheese until 1909, then installed a vacuum pan and sold condensed milk to candy makers and ice-cream plants. Five horse teams worked a fifteen-mile radius—a pickup system Gehl borrowed from his father's Nenno creamery so farmers did not have to haul milk in. In 1915 he built a condensary on the old Nass lime-kiln land two blocks east, with a railroad siding and drawings by a Purdue engineer named Huntziger. Twins Paul and Irene looked out from a heart on the evaporated-milk label. When Milwaukee passed a 1932 ordinance requiring milk sold in the city to be bottled there, the company opened a plant at 35th and Capitol that drew twenty-five to thirty thousand visitors. Later generations extended the brand; the founding stretch is the house beside the Main Street creamery, and Gehl Foods remains in Germantown.