On a cold February morning in 1934, August Anheuser Busch Sr. , the 68-year-old patriarch of America’s greatest brewing empire, sat alone in the grand French chateau he had built in the Missouri countryside. His body was failing. Heart disease squeezed his chest, gout inflamed his joints, and dropsy swelled his legs until he could barely stand.

Seven hours earlier, his physician had administered morphine, but the relief had not lasted. In the stillness of that morning, he picked up a pen and wrote five words that would echo through generations of his family: “Goodbye, precious mommy, and adorable children. ” Then he let go of the world. What followed would be described by many as a curse hanging over the Busch family.

But it was not a curse of witchcraft or supernatural forces. It was a curse born of wealth, pressure, tragedy, and the unbearable weight of a name that meant everything to those who carried it. To understand the mansion at Grant’s Farm, one must first understand the man who made it all possible: Adolphus Busch, an immigrant who conquered America and whose descendants would pay a terrible price for that conquest. Adolphus was born on July 10, 1839, in Castell, a small German village near Mainz.

He was the 21st of 22 children. His father, Ulrich Busch, ran a prosperous wholesale business in wines and brewery supplies, but with so many siblings ahead of him, Adolphus stood to inherit little. At eighteen, he made a decision that would alter the course of American brewing history. He left Germany, boarded a ship with three of his older brothers, and arrived in St.

Louis, Missouri. St. Louis in the mid-1800s was a raw, bustling river town thick with German immigrants. The Mississippi provided endless fresh water, and the city sat atop natural caves that stayed cool year-round, perfect for storing beer.

Adolphus saw the opportunity immediately. He partnered with a man named Ernst Wottenberg to sell brewing supplies to the dozens of small breweries that had sprung up throughout the city. Among his customers was Eberhard Anheuser, a prosperous soap manufacturer who had reluctantly acquired a failing operation called the Bavarian Brewery in 1860. The brewery lost money month after month, kept running more out of stubbornness than hope.

But Adolphus noticed something else about Eberhard: he had a daughter named Lily, who possessed both beauty and intelligence. On March 7, 1861, Adolphus married Lily Anheuser in an elaborate double wedding. One month later, the Civil War erupted. Adolphus served three months in the Union Army and made shrewd investments that somehow increased his wealth while other men suffered devastating losses.

In 1865, Eberhard brought his son-in-law into the business as a salesman. Adolphus threw himself into the work with ferocious energy, traveling constantly, working sixteen-hour days, convincing owners to stock Anheuser beer instead of the competition. By 1879, the company bore both their names: Anheuser-Busch Brewing Association. What set Adolphus apart was his vision that beer could be more than a local product.

In 1872, he pioneered the application of pasteurization in American brewing, killing the bacteria that caused spoilage without ruining the taste. Then he invested enormous sums in a network of ice houses along railroad lines and launched the first fleet of refrigerated freight cars. Suddenly, Anheuser-Busch beer could travel from St. Louis to California without losing quality.

In the early 1880s, a man named Carl Conrad held the trademark for a beer called Budweiser, a Bohemian-style lager brewed under contract by Anheuser-Busch. When Conrad went bankrupt in 1882, Adolphus purchased the rights to the name, adapted the recipe to American tastes, and made Budweiser the flagship product. He adopted an old European slogan and made it famous: “The King of Beers. ”

By 1901, Anheuser-Busch had surpassed its longtime rival to become the largest brewery in the United States.

Adolphus lived like the emperor he had become. He owned mansions in St. Louis and Pasadena, a hops farm in New York, two villas in Germany, and a private railroad car. He donated millions to charity, including substantial funds to Harvard and Washington University.

In 1906, a cold developed into pneumonia that nearly killed him. His health never fully recovered. On October 10, 1913, while vacationing at his villa in Germany, Adolphus Busch died at age 74. His estate was worth $60 million, the largest ever probated in Missouri at the time.

His funeral was extravagant beyond measure. St. Louis observed a five-minute moment of silence. Leadership passed to his eldest surviving son, August Anheuser Busch Sr.

, born December 29, 1865. August faced challenges his father never endured: the anti-German sentiment of the First World War, then Prohibition, which banned the manufacture and sale of alcohol entirely. August diversified the company into corn products, baker’s yeast, ice cream, soft drinks, and refrigeration units. The company survived by refusing to die.

August found solace at Grant’s Farm, 245 acres in St. Louis County that his father had purchased in 1903. The land had once been owned by Frederick Dent, whose daughter Julia married a young army officer named Ulysses S. Grant.

Grant himself had built a rough log cabin there in the 1850s. When Adolphus bought the land, he kept the name Grant’s Farm and turned it into a private hunting preserve. In 1910, August decided to build a mansion there worthy of the Busch name. Architects drew inspiration from the great European palaces of the 16th through 18th centuries.

The exterior used red brick, a nod to German tradition, with French Renaissance elegance. Construction took three years and cost $300,000. The mansion featured 26 rooms, 14 bathrooms, and six Tiffany stained glass windows depicting a stag in a forest. A perforated ceiling allowed music from the third-floor ballroom to drift down through the entire house like music from another world.

For a time, life at Grant’s Farm was everything August had dreamed. But the pressure never stopped. By the early 1930s, his health began to fail. Heart disease, gout, and dropsy became his constant companions.

On February 10, 1934, alone in his room, August Anheuser Busch Sr. made the choice that shattered his family. His lawyer would call him as great a leader in saving the industry as his father had been in creating it. Leadership passed to his eldest son, Adolphus Busch III, born February 10, 1891.

He was capable and hardworking, guiding Anheuser-Busch through the end of Prohibition in 1933. But he was not destined for a long reign. On August 29, 1946, he collapsed at Barnes Hospital from a cerebral hemorrhage. He was only fifty-five.

The presidency then fell to his younger brother, the man the world would come to know as Gussie. August Anheuser Busch Jr. was born March 28, 1899. Where his father and brother had been serious and restrained, Gussie was bold, brash, and larger than life.

He loved parties, women, and spectacle. In 1933, to celebrate the repeal of Prohibition, he introduced the Budweiser Clydesdales, massive draft horses hitched to a red beer wagon. They became the symbol of Anheuser-Busch. In 1953, when the owner of the St.

Louis Cardinals baseball team was convicted of tax evasion and forced to sell, Gussie stepped in. Anheuser-Busch purchased the Cardinals for $3. 75 million, keeping the team in St. Louis.

Under his ownership, the Cardinals won six National League pennants and three World Series championships. Gussie also made Grant’s Farm his home, filling the estate with exotic animals and opening it to the public in 1955. It became one of St. Louis’s most beloved attractions.

But his personal life was turbulent. He married four times. Behind the laughter, darkness gathered. On a cold day in December 1974, his youngest daughter, eight-year-old Christina, was killed in an eight-car collision on Interstate 270.

Gussie, seventy-five, was devastated. The following year, his own son August Busch III orchestrated a boardroom coup, forcing his father to step down as CEO and chairman. Gussie never forgot the betrayal. In 1976, another tragedy struck: his son Peter accidentally shot and killed his best friend with a loaded Colt .

357. Peter was charged with manslaughter. Gussie died on September 29, 1989, at age ninety. The city mourned the loss of a legend.

The mansion at Grant’s Farm, once a symbol of triumph, now seemed haunted by sorrow. The Busch name continued to attract tragedy. August Busch IV became CEO in 2002. In 1983, as a twenty-year-old student, he left a bar with a young woman who was killed when his Corvette crashed.

He claimed amnesia and was never charged. In 2008, he presided over the sale of Anheuser-Busch to the Belgian company InBev for $52 billion, ending 156 years of family control. In 2010, his girlfriend was found dead in his mansion from an accidental overdose. He was never charged.

The mansion at Grant’s Farm stands today, beautiful and silent. The public can tour the grounds, see the Clydesdales, and glimpse the chateau through the trees, but the doors to the mansion itself remain locked. The family that conquered America could not conquer the ghosts in their own halls. The curse, if there ever was one, was not supernatural.

It was the curse of expectation, of pressure that crushed even the strongest men, of a legacy so heavy it broke those who tried to carry it.