Elisabeth Blankenhorn um 1940

In the middle of the gardens, Elisabeth Blankenhorn could often be met during her strolls at the big colonnade. And guess what: it is no coincidence that the oldest wine market in Baden is located in Müllheim.

It was held for the first time in 1872. I had just qualified as a professor at the Department of Agricultural Sciences at the Karlsruhe University of Technology.

In the 1870s, I was also studying the scientific principles of winegrowing. For this purpose, I installed an oenology institute with laboratory, which was a first in scientific research – financed with my own private funds. Its successor is now the Staatliche Weinbauinstitut - Public Winegrowing Institute - in Freiburg.

The 1870s were eventful years which saw many scientific courses being set for winegrowing in Germany. Can you imagine that the honorary citizen and professor sitting in front of you was in touch with ex-revolutionary Friedrich Hecker for many years?

This was despite the fact that his revolutionary friend Gustav Struve not only had extorted 1,000 guilders from my uncle Nikolaus – the then mayor of Müllheim – but also had confiscated his family’s four-in-hand with horses in order to enable his own wife Amalie to travel during the revolution in a manner befitting her rank.

Nevertheless, this did not play a role in our correspondence at a time when Hecker had long been reasonably farming his own land in Illinois, USA. From 1872 to 1880, we exchanged ideas and experiences about tillage, grapevine pruning and care in winter, as well as other expertise.

We met personally only once for a few hours when Hecker visited Freiburg in summer 1873. One day, he even sent me seeds of a particular grape variety in a letter: used as a grafting basis, the “American vine” made a significant contribution to fighting grape phylloxera in Germany.

If you want to know where all these letters were written and read, take a look at my desk in Blankenhorn Palace. It is a craft masterpiece with the scale of a little castle.