Ann Laemmlen Lewis

Our Saturday outing this week took us back to Leingarten to see my cousins, Jutta and Martin, Elly and my Tante Marie. The drive from Frankfurt is about 1.5 hours. We were so happy to go back and spend a day with family.

The vineyards are resting now, after the harvest. We drove through them on our way to having lunch at the Hörnle restaurant up on a mountain top above the vineyards.

The view from on top of the mountain is towards Dürrenzimmern, Nordheim and Brackenheim–all towns where my family members come from.

It was fun to watch the hang gliders floating over the fields.

Looking down at the town of Dürenzimmern:

In the summertime these mountain top Biergartens are packed full of people. Today we had the place to ourselves. They close for winter next week.

We had a great traditional German meal–venison stew, chicken, Spaetzle and salad. YUM.

These are the little villages in the area. My people come from these places.

We drove down into Dürenzimmern after lunch. There is a very old church there. Sadly, it was locked. The sign says it’s the first Evangelical (Lutheran) church in Wuerttemberg. It was built in 1620.

We were lucky to have clear skies today. It’s been wet and rainy here. Martin’s maize has all been harvested from the fields behind his house. The corn/maize is cut, chopped and put into large silos where it ferments and gives off gas that is harvested as biogas or energy. None of the maize is used to feel people or animals, but the waste left is spread back into the fields as fertilizer. 9% of Germany’s total electricity comes from biogas and power generation.

The sugar beets have also been harvested (Zukerrüben). We saw some piles of harvested sugar beets still in the fields in huge mounds. Each beet is about the size of a huge yam.

Martin explained how each farmer marks the stakes at the end of the rows he owns. The plots are small, some just a fews rows, and each farmer generally has rows scattered throughout the area, not all in the same place.

You can see which rows were hand picked, and which were harvested by machine. The machine-picked vines still had the stems.

Many of the Laemmlen vineyards lie under the Heuchelberg Turm.

Today we had time to climb up the Turm to see the views. This is a very special place to me. It’s one place I can be SURE my grandparents, great-grandparents, and all their children and families walked/climbed. IN THIS VERY PLACE, for generations. Everyone climbs this Turm. It’s the landmark of this area. I thought about them as I climbed up the 80 or so narrow circular stone steps.

The church in the middle left of this photo is the Lorenz Kirche, across the street from Grandma Elsa’s home and across the street from Grandpa Rudolf’s home. This is Grossgartach, now called Leingarten.

Martin and Jutta’s home is just behind the red-roofed farm. Martin’s father, Helmut Laemmlen is the son of Grandpa Rudolf’s brother, Heinrich. Across the street from their place (to the left) is a horse riding club.

This photo gives you an idea of the small plots of vineyard. The vineyard rows go between the roads. Martin farms 11 plots, none of them contiguous.

Each farmer marks his rows with colored paint or markers indicating which rows are his. The division of land between sons is one of the reasons my Grandpa left Germany in 1929. He could see that his future as a agricultural student would be limited by the size of the land available for him to farm.

Before heading back to Frankfurt, we spent some time visiting with Tante Marie and Elly, Martin’s sister. Elly lives in Wiesbaden and comes home to help Marie on the weekends. Marie is doing much better than when we saw her a couple of months ago. She is so dear.

It was a wonderful day. I’m so grateful for my family here.