August H Horn was born in Bavaria and emigrated to America with his parents in 1852. They settled in the town of Oshkosh, Wisconsin and took up farming. On the 29th of May 1856 Horn married Amelia Josephina Schwalm, and, though the Horns and the Schwalms had known each other for years, this union sowed the seeds an enterprise that would last a century.

Horn's new brother-in-law Leonhardt Heinrich Reinhold Schwalm was the owner of a small brewery in Oshkosh's Brooklyn neighborhood. Schwalm offered Horn half interest in the firm for $4500 and Horn accepted. The two partners ran the brewery until Leonhardt's death in 1873. Then Horn ran it alone until his own death on August 17, 1904. The brewery continued on as a family-run enterprise for decades afterwards, surviving Prohibition, merging with it's cross-town competitor (Rahr's), and finally coming to a close in 1971.