“A man is made of meat, and meat shall sustain him.“

Abelard Carmichael (pictured to the left) was born on September 18, 1842 in Bramble Brook, Indiana. His father, Abeodan, was a wealthy New York farmland owner. A self-taught physician, Abelard became a front line medic for a regiment of the Union Army during the American Civil War. After becoming embroiled in a heated argument with his commanding officer over the meat content of wartime rations, he was dismissed from the military as unstable after slapping his commanding officer in the face.

Confronted with the growing popularity of diets high in vegetables, he began to campaign against what he termed “plant product propagandists”. Dr. Carmichael published a series of ten pamphlets under the heading The Ten Virtues for a Healthier Life. These pamphlets found an eager audience, and they became a rallying point for the pro-meat movement. In 1869, Abelard Carmichael founded the meat advocacy group, Folks for the Eating of Meaty Animals (FEMA) and fashioned himself The First Pope of Meat. In 1871 in Bramble Brook, he founded the FEMA-administrated Bramble Brook Carnatarium as a facility for the chronically ill to be healed by the power of meat. Carmichael also operated Carmichael’s Spiced Meat, a medical meat dispensary, from the bottom floor of a small, downtown Bramble Brook building.

On October 8, 1902, Abelard Carmichael died at the age of 59. His ambitious son, Eldridge Carmichael succeeded him as The Second Pope of Meat. In 1905, Eldridge Carmichael leveraged FEMA’s considerable fund surplus to purchase the ailing Indiana Spiced Meat Consortium. Rebranding the stores as Carmichael’s Spiced Meat Huts, within five years, Eldridge Carmichael operated the largest food business chain in Indiana. In 1912, the Governor of Indiana named Eldridge Carmichael an honorary Duke of Indiana for his economic contributions to the state. Eldridge Carmichael fully embraced his status as “Meat Royalty” and began calling himself “Duke Guapo” in public. By the 1920s, Carmichael’s public persona as Duke Guapo was so intertwined with the identity of the restaurants that he formally renamed the chain Duke Guapo’s Spicy Meat Hut. Since then, each new Pope of Meat has been fashioned as the new Duke Guapo and is the public persona of the organization in addition to managing the Duke Guapo’s restaurant chain and being the philosophical leader of the FEMA meat advocacy organization.

Today, Duke Guapo’s Spicy Meat Hut and FEMA are run by Abelard Carmichael’s sixth generation descendant, Baltazar Carmichael, who’s face graces the current Duke Guapo’s logo at the top of the page. Due to draconian changes in medical regulations, Bramble Brook Carnatarium is no longer a medical facility and now operates as the Indiana Museum of Meat History.