Mathias Baur was a great raft master in Apfeldorf and an important timber merchant between Ammersee and Hohem Peißenberg.
Karl Filser has set out on the trail of this personality for the historical yearbook "Der Welf".
Apfeldorf -
Mathias Baur (1808–1882) was one of the great raft entrepreneurs who lived and operated during the heyday of the Lech rafting industry.
For decades he employed countless people in the villages that were mainly on the eastern side of the Lech.
The record books he left behind contain hundreds of entries that testify to his business presence in the region.
If you turn your attention to the people who earned income from his activities, the timber sellers, woodworkers, carters, sawmillers, rafters as well as the craftsmen and day laborers who worked for them, one sees an immense wealth of work carried out by the raft entrepreneur Baur has been brought to the region.
His books provide important insights into the timber industry and the Lech rafting industry in the 19th century, into the handling of business and its changes due to technical progress in the age of industrialization.
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The mechanical cotton spinning and weaving mill in Augsburg, built between 1838 and 1840, was one of the oldest large companies in the textile industry in Augsburg.
In the foreground is the Proviantbach, which supplied the energy and gave the raftsmen the opportunity to bring building materials to the site.
Lithograph by G. Kraus 1840.
© Welf
Mathias Baur had to support his father Joseph Anton Baur, who ran the rafting business, at a young age.
With him he learned everything that was part of the successful operation of this trade.
When his father died in August 1835 at the age of 50, Mathias was 27 years old.
The passport for a raft trip to Vienna, signed two years later by the Schongau judge Boxler, shows that Mathias continued his father's business at a young age.
He was 30 years old when he and five other Lech raftsmen received the order from the mechanical cotton spinning and weaving mill in Augsburg to supply all the wood required for the new construction of a large textile factory.
That was the beginning of a decades-long business relationship with customers from Augsburg.
In his notes, the collaboration with the raft master Joseph Sepp from Reichlingen is recorded, with whom Baur managed a farm in Hirschau and also ran the rafting to Augsburg.
Their trade in Solnhofer stones, which they transported on the Danube to Vienna, was also profitable.
Baur managed to buy large quantities of wood from the forests from Ammersee to Hohen Peißenberg for decades.
After the wood purchases, woodworkers had to be hired to fell what had not yet been felled.
Between 1845 and 1876, Baur signed over 80 wage payments to loggers who were sent into the woods by him.
Some wood sellers allowed only mature logs to be felled, while the young wood had to be spared.
Others had young and old wood cut or the area cleared completely so that poles, sticks, badgers, cones (treetops), sticks and bark could also be harvested.
Baur's wage books contain the names of around 300 people who drove in the woods between 1845 and 1875.
For the truckers, this meant that they often had to cover great distances with their timber loads.
In 1859, for example, Thomas Pröbstl von Wessobrunn took 737 pieces of trees from Lintner's wooden part in Weilheim to Wessobrunn and in the same year brought some of them on to the Apfeldorfhauser Riese
In Baur's legacy there is numerous evidence that the still existing field name "Riesen" in Apfeldorfhausen on an actually existing wooden slide down into the Lech still existed during his lifetime.
He sent dozens of logs to the Apfeldorfhauser camp site, which was high above the Lech.
In 1873 and 1875, Mathias Baur sold wood to timber trading companies in Bamberg and Mannheim, which was delivered on routes that were offered to him by the new means of transport, the railroad, and the Ludwig-Danube-Main Canal, which was completed in 1846.
The new Welf
with an essay about the raft dealer Mathias Baur is available at Schreibwaren Seitz in Schongau and at the Bögle department store in Rottenbuch.
It can be ordered by phone or email from Buch am Bach Peiting.
After the lockdown, the Welf is also on display in the Schongau book gallery.
It costs 15 euros and has 179 pages.
