Celebrating 120 years: The rich history behind the iconic Garver Feed Mill

By Katie Pulvermacher, Eastside News

Most locals know the Garver Feed Mill as a hub for businesses, including producers, artisan food makers, wellness studios and hospitality providers, as well as an event space that hosts the Winter Farmers Market, but few know the origin of the building.

2026 marks the 120th anniversary of the Garver Feed Mill located on Madison’s east side, and its history runs deep.

United States Sugar Co. factory (1906-1924)

The building originally served as the U.S. Sugar Co. factory from 1906 to 1924. It was established by civic advocates to process sugar beets from 6,000 acres of surrounding land. The factory was crucial during World War I for domestic sugar supply. It was nicknamed “Sugar Castle” for its Gothic windows and turret, resembling a castle more than a factory.

In 1917, the Wisconsin State Journal reported that some workers lived in squalid shacks owned by the company that were “not fit for a dog.”

According to the second edition “East Side Album,” Magnus Senson, a University of Wisconsin chemistry researcher, developed processes for extracting sugar from beets. Sarah E. White, freelance writer and east side historian, connects this process to the Great Plains’ agricultural history, where farmers sought wheat alternatives after an 1890s crisis marked by low prices, extreme weather and high debt. Sugar beets emerged as a viable option.

Tom Sylke’s great-grandfather, Hans Jacob Struck, worked on the construction of the sugar factory. A German immigrant who came to the U.S. in 1884 at 18, he held various construction jobs in the Midwest before settling in Madison. Sylke believes he might have held some position of power, given that he had an office there.

Sylke said the factory processed 600 tons, or 1.2 million beets, daily. Eleven rail lines delivered beets and coal for processing. Some trains transported leftover pulp away as cattle feed.

“There was a sustainability model for running the whole thing,” Sylke said. “It was a fairly big operation there for several decades.”

Although the factory was sustainable in many ways, it discharged vitamin- and sugar-laden water into Starkweather Creek, affecting Lake Monona. This runoff led to the closure of the neighboring Knickerbocker Ice Company, as consumers were reluctant to buy beet-pink ice. In 1924, the factory petitioned for bankruptcy.

Garver Feed & Supply Company (1929-1997)

After the sugar industry collapsed, UW animal husbandry graduate James R. Garver bought the building in 1926 and converted it into the Garver Feed & Supply Company, reducing it to two stories. This establishment served over 200 dealers in southern Wisconsin and combined vitamins, molasses and other additives with grains from area farmers, becoming a key supplier for Dane County’s agricultural sector, according to the “East Side Album.”

“Farms used to be limited in their size, especially when it came to birds, cattle or pigs,” Garver Feed Mill project developer Bryant Moroder said. “The operation of a feed mill allowed the farmer to go and purchase his feed off-site. That allowed the herd sizes to grow exponentially.”

After Garver died in 1973, employees acquired the business and began supplying feed for pheasants, ostriches and emus, along with chicken feed. The late 1980s and 1990s saw a peak demand for ostrich and emu feed in the U.S., fueled by a speculative investment boom, according to The Bulletin, a newspaper in Bend, Oregon.

In the 1980s, the feed mill also began to house artists and small businesses, hinting at its future potential.

“There are all these interesting iterations of not only the big business that was here, the major use, but then there were time periods where others were using it for other purposes,” Moroder said. “It’s kind of neat because now we work with artists. In a sense, it’s a continuation of some of the traditions that were started here for economic reasons.”

White said she recalls how she first became interested in the feed mill.

“When my husband and I moved to Fair Oaks Avenue in 1993, we got a dog and began walking in the wild spaces along Starkweather Creek,” White said. “Naturally, the feed mill was a regular part of our walks. It was still functioning as a pet food production company. The neighborhood would occasionally smell like tomatoes and roasting grain as they made dog chow.”

The building was unable to sustain operations, and in 1997, the company closed.

A not-so-vacant vacant property (1997-2018)

The city of Madison and the Olbrich Botanical Society acquired the Garver property in 1997 to expand Olbrich Botanical Gardens, but those plans never materialized, aside from some storage use.

In 2006, Common Wealth Development received city approval for an arts incubator in the Garver building, but the initiative was abandoned due to economic downturns, leading to two decades of vacancy. Moroder said that many locals share stories from this time, including when the building became known as the “Graffiti Museum of Madison.”

In an Isthmus article from August 2024, contributor Jack Ludkey shares what he recalls during Garver’s period of vacancy.

“Garver Feed Mill wasn’t always a nice spot to take your family or get some work done,” Ludkey said in the article. “It was once an abandoned building, but one that teemed with life, a playground for those brave enough to enter.”

Ludkey described piles of bricks, layers of graffiti, a fort called “Domain 2,” and parties in 2014 that included smashing bottles, burning couches and drinking Everclear, a high-proof spirit.

“Madison has changed so much,” Ludkey said. “Some people never knew it was different. I grieve for that abandoned feed mill. Even though it’s hard to defend keeping a rotting building when it could be a place of opportunity for businesses and artists instead of a place for kids to be weird.”

The building later narrowly escaped demolition after neighbors sent more than 300 handwritten postcards to the mayor’s office.

“It was the neighborhood that actually hired a local photographer by the name of Zane Williams, and he did this photography essay of Garver to showcase how amazing the building was and could be,” Moroder said. “That then turned into this postcard campaign. All these postcards with those photos were printed, signed and sent to the mayor’s office.”

White was a member of “Friends of Garver,” attending city meetings and writing letters for the building’s restoration. Due to significant support, the mayor’s office and the community agreed to give the building another chance.

“It was really the neighborhood stepping up and saying this is too unique, too special of a building to let this be torn down,” Moroder said. “In fact, today, if you were to come to Garver, you’d see some of these pictures from Zane Williams on the walls.”

Garver Feed Mill (2019 to Present)

Moroder has been involved with Garver for over 10 years. He brought Madison community leaders to Chicago to meet Baum Revision, a historic rehabilitation company. After touring Garver in November 2013 with the developer and a Madison alder, they decided to save the building.

“This is a building that has been here for a very, very long time and had a meaningful impact on the way that our community, our neighborhood is structured,” Moroder said. “There are a lot of people who understand it’s a historic building, but they probably just don’t understand the real history behind it.”

Moroder said Garver’s restoration was far from easy, requiring a lot of discovery due to the building’s condition. They had to stabilize parts of the structure for safety before beginning work, which often involved adding or repairing brick and installing new roofing systems.

The restoration also focused on repurposing old building materials, including railroad spurs, I-beams, steel sheets, fire doors, harvesting bins, silos, light fixtures and bollards.

“Think about all of the energy that went into building this building originally in 1906,” Moroder said. “Rather than tearing it down and using all new energy to build something new, we’ve essentially recycled that old building and that energy. Saving an old building is the most sustainable thing that you can do.”

The restored 60,000-square-foot complex now hosts 15 businesses and has generated an estimated $85 million in economic activity. Since opening in 2019, Garver Feed Mill has supported 247 jobs and generated $23.7 million in annual GDP growth. It has attracted over $7 million in annual visitor spending, contributed $3.425 million in tax revenue, welcomed more than 300,000 visitors each year and directed $5.3 million to market vendors.

“To think about how it was sort of this relic of the past, this historic building that had gone to ruins, and then to have turned it around into this place that has created 247 jobs,” Moroder said. “All this economic activity at the local level is really a great story.”

Garver is about half the height of its original structure. Renovations revealed old bricks that had likely been used to fill the ground beneath the new floors, meaning there’s about six or seven feet of old brick below the current flooring. Features like low windows and bricked-in archways show that the building’s original design had a significantly lower floor height.

“Tearing down the brickwork and preserving the building underneath and then storing all the bricks in the basement — that’s a lot of hard work,” Sylke said. “I was just surprised to hear that they did that if they didn’t absolutely have to.”

Garver Feed Mill plans to host a 120th celebration in July, allowing people with firsthand knowledge of the building to share their stories.

“The neighborhood had an important role in saving the building, and we’ve activated the space to create an environment that is accessible and available to the community,” Moroder said. “We want to recognize its history as an important landmark on the east side of Madison and hopefully create more of those opportunities to see Garver survive and thrive for the next 120 years.”

During the grand opening in November 2019, Allison Sylke, Tom Sylke’s daughter, participated in the bricklaying ceremony to honor the mill’s history.

“I don’t think my great-grandfather, or my grandmother or even my mom would ever have expected this place and that story to ever register on anybody’s radar ever again,” Tom Sylke said. “The first brick laid in the building was put in by my daughter in the building that her great-great-grandfather had built. I’m grateful for the fact that my daughter understands a little bit better where she came from.”

Moroder said people should look for the return of Food Truck Fridays starting May 22 and Madison’s first Destash, a market designed for artists to sell and buy used art supplies and crafting material.

For information on the 120th celebration and other summer events, subscribe to their monthly newsletter or reach Garver’s social media pages.

“The opportunity that Garver presents is there’s really something for everyone every day of the week,” Moroder said. “What we have here is a lot of different experiences, whether it’s tasting great food, experiencing great art or connecting with a small business. The background of all of that is you get to do it in this really cool historic building that has all this east side history and character.”

White said both the feed mill and the surrounding green space are significant to the east side.

“Being surrounded by historic buildings helps us remember we are stewards of what the past has left us and what we pass on to people who come after us,” White said. “The original ‘Sugar Castle’ was the product of land grant university expertise, grounding it in the Wisconsin Idea — a progressive Wisconsin tradition of which we should be proud.”