Avis' 2nd Genealogy tour Baden- Alsace
6 - Searching the Archives

Day Five - Searching the Archives

This is blog stuff & you might want to skip this page if looking for tourist hints.

Pouring with rain. We found the CERARE Archive with some difficulty, as it was tucked behind the building of its address. By harassing an insurance company in the building, we found the actual store of musty documents. There were two helpful girls but at first, it seemed as if we were chasing the wrong school, l'Ecole de Filature. We wanted l'Ecole de Dessin. However, both schools seemed to have been founded at about the same time by the same patrons, Emile & Eugène Saladin. The girls knew Benoit Meyer, the Archivist of Rixheim. We did find out that the Design & Painting School started in 1829 & opened in 1833 with 48 pupils i.e. 4 years before Joseph was born. By 1834, there were 180 pupils. The governors appeared to be mostly the Koechelin-Ziegler family & Godefroi Engelmann (who invented photo-litho onto textiles) were very keen to get good staff from all over - Paris, Besancon, Lille etc & emphasised that they wanted staff that would turn up! Classes were up to 50-60 pupils & seem to have covered all the arts. The girls made us an appointment with another department of the university for the afternoon. While Avis was going through the files, I edited the rest of the photos.

After lunch in the Taverne des Chevaliers Teutoniques Le Viennois, where called for coffee & then had spätzli, which were filling but not exactly cordon bleu but the Gewurtztraminer wine certainly was (E 34.70 with tip), we went as instructed to SIM in a grand 1827 building in Rue de Bourse. This was the wrong place but, after a cabbage of French & German, we ended up in the Library in the courtyard, where they were expecting us after our visit to CERARE & had some books ready. Wow!

The book "Kunstgewerbe in Elsass Lothringen" was published in 1902 (when this was part of Germany) & seems to have been some sort of directory or state of the business. The two schools, of Design & Textiles merged up in 1861. By 1902, the library had grown to 10,000 items. The school's output kept Mulhouse at the top on superior textile production for a long time. The article about the school was fairly short. The librarian, who was on the ball, produced a list of artists of Alsace in the 19th & 20th centuries, published in 1988. This listed three siblings, Henri-Gustave Saltzmann, (1811, Colmar - 1872, Nyon CH, married in Geneva 1856) a landscape painter who exhibited all over the place, his brother Auguste, born in 1824 in Ribeauville & a pupil of his brother Gustave & who became an archaeologist in Syria & Rhodes but also has paintings in the Unterlinden in Colmar (if we'd known...) & their sister Anna, who painted the history of Colmar, but this was no help. We did get a photocopy of an engraving of the two schools but this was the later building, after the putative attendance of Joseph. All in all, the librarian did everything she could think of to help us.

We went back to the hotel, dumped stuff & took the car to Rixheim. We found the Protestant Temple but it was shut. We went to the Wallpaper Museum, E6 each, which is part of the Hotel de Ville, as the whole building, vintage 1726, was once the Zuber wallpaper factory & it was only in the 1970s that it became the Hotel de Ville. I had thought it was rather grand for such a small town. The wallpaper was very interesting. Apart from various patterns, they had rooms filled with whole wallpaper panoramas, some way over the top.

There were also interesting ones in vogue from about 1810 - 1835 which had fades across from one colour to another, the irisé technique. Goodness knows how they did it. After, the other graveyard we had noted on the map turned out to be the Jewish one! Then, we examined the rest of the town, which did not take long, then headed along the Rhine Canal, which we could not see because of the thick woods, to just North of Basel, where there is a bridge across the Rhine which we took. We made our way North by a different road from Saturday & visited the Bacchus Stuben in Bellingen for the best coffee we have had & Apfel Kuchen (E8). It was full (literally) of old people, some eating vast portions. Then, we drove back to Mulhouse by Neuenberg & Route 29, another different way. As we have done as much research as we think we can, we told the landlord (me, in German) that we would leave on Wednesday, which gives us the chance to go up to Heidelberg & we then need not do it next year.

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