My previous post on this thread might have cast doubt on Marpeck’s competence as a civil engineer due to the runaway logs. However, he did similar work quite successfully for the city of Strasbourg a few years earlier.
Marpeck arrived in Strasbourg in the fall of 1528, after leaving his native Rattenberg, Austria in January and spending the intervening months in Moravia. In the spring of 1530 he negotiated, on behalf of the city, a 30 year lease for woodlands in the Black Forest and a waiver of tolls on wood transported from there by river. He implemented that plan over the following year, but at the end of 1531 was banished from Strasbourg due to his beliefs and moved to Canton Appenzell, Switzerland.
The logging was done in the hills north of Hausach, Germany. Dams were built across the stream and logs piled up behind them, so that as the snow melted and water accumulated behind the dam, it would break and send the logs hurtling downstream to the Kinzig river at Hausach. This photo from October shows the normal flow of the Kinzig, but in the spring the adjacent floodplains would likely be under water.
At that point the logs were tied together to form rafts; the rafts were connected end-to-end and piloted downstream to the Rhine at Kehl, opposite Strasbourg. This photo on a historical marker in Hausach shows a reenactment of a 90-meter flotilla, but reportedly 600-meter assemblies were not unheard of.
From the lumber yard at Kehl, the logs were cut into firewood and sold in Strasbourg’s market at Place Kleber, where today on market days you might find a fast food stand obstructing the view of the Gutenberg statue. For the next century or so, this wood was called "Pilgram timber."
Rafting of this sort had been done earlier in the region, but apparently Marpeck’s innovation was the dams that facilitated the transport of logs down to the main river. As he found out at Augsburg, upstream dams work a whole lot better than downstream dams.
During his time supervising the timber harvesting in the Black Forest, Marpeck must have also found time to do some church planting work in the region. Not much is known today about these fellowships, except from letters he wrote to them in 1540 and 1555.
At Gengenbach, midway between Hausach and Kehl, the
Flößerei Museum shows the history of rafters and rafting, and also has upstairs a display on the Schwarzwaldbahn, the railway line through the Black Forest that solved the problem of elevation change (without exceeding the grades that locomotives of 150 years ago could handle) by lengthening the route with loops that resemble a meandering river.
Rafts not destined for Strasbourg’s firewood supply were reassembled at the Rhine to form wider barges and loaded with cargo. The flößerei would steer them downstream, sometimes as far as the port of Rotterdam, selling both the cargo and the wood, then make their way by land back to the Black Forest to repeat the trip.
These were the type of rafts used for the mass deportation of Anabaptists from Canton Bern in 1710-1711 (with the Amish and the Swiss Brethren on separate rafts since they were not quite yet on peaceful terms after the separation).