Lorsch is quite important in my family history but when I prepared the first set of lost cities entries, I struggled to find a suitable postcard, other than the ubiquitous Torhalle from around 900 (so a bit older than my records).
As my great-grandparents ran a bakery in the Bahnhofstrasse (station road), I now looked for postcards of that street specifically and found this one:
Not sure if the bakery is in it, and it is a bit hard to check as the building has disappeared, but I will visit and try to find out at some point.
What happened: The old baker, Adam Eberle (born 1863) married his cousin Anna Barbara Schütz in 1890 and set up the bakery at Bahnhofstraße 27 soon after. The town had around 3,800 residents then. He struggled initially and had to rely on agriculture and his relatives in the rural Odenwald region nearby for support. The four children had to help out as well, eg making deliveries. Nevertheless, the bakery ran for several decades, until around 1930. Anna Barbara died in 1934, Adam in 1938. The house remained in the possession of their three daughters until the last of them died in 1973. It was then sold to the city, which ended up demolishing it for road building. So the relevant dates for our series are 1890-1938/1973.
Lorsch, the site of a famous Carolingian abbey from 764, which is a UNESCO World Heritage Site, was a small and very catholic town then, and the family rooted in the protestant hinterland has tended to blame all its difficulties on the hostile environment, but it is hard to check the truth behind that. Today's population is around 14,000. The town now takes pride in the byname "Karolingerstadt" - with no chance of living up to its Carolingian heyday.
Previously in the #lostcities series:
- Elberfeld / Wuppertal 1919 - 1961
- Strasbourg 1901 - 1908
- Minden 1903 - 1952/ca.1970
- Tangermünde 1888 - 1916
- Rheydt 1923 - 1935
- Königsberg 1935 - 1945
- Aachen 1936 - 1940
- Idar-Oberstein 1940 - 1962
- Bad Nauheim 1945 - 1972/1983
- Würzburg 1961 - 1968
- Hamborn inlaws: 1922 - 1979/2015
- Bonn 1929-1934
NB I have now added a second end date to the cities where other family members stayed on after the direct ancestors died. So far, that is the case for Minden, Bad Nauheim and Hamborn.
The Mastodon thread for season 2 starts here.
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