He is and will always be a veteran of Ochsenfurt: Gerhard Wingenfeld, born in 1948, simply has to tackle everything that has to do with his hometown. And so he couldn’t say no when Heinz Schleßmann presented him with his idea for a booklet about the Ochsenfurt sand makers on the Main. The former river skipper had already collected a lot of material, which Gerhard Wingenfeld was then able to build on in his further research. After about a year and a half, a book has emerged that covers far more topics than just the work of the sand makers.
Gerhard Wingenfeld can still remember them from his childhood days. They always sat in the Fröhlich wine bar on Badgasse, he says. Strong men with real characters. Her work was a heavy drudgery, says Wingenfeld and describes her everyday life in the new book. These people provided an ingredient that was important for the construction industry: sand, which was deposited in shallow areas on the Main and had to be dug out of the water into the Schelche in laborious manual work.
Search the archives
The sand was brought to Ochsenfurt with the long transport barges and brought ashore there, again with strenuous work. It was only in the 1960s, after the construction of the new barrages that there was hardly any sand that could be extracted, that the era of sand scoops came to an end.
In search of detailed information as well as image material, Gerhard Wingenfeld first visited the Ochsenfurt city archive – and found less than expected there, in particular hardly anything about the Main bridges and the barrage near Goßmannsdorf. Because the buildings on the Main should also have their own chapters in the book. Wingenfeld therefore extended the circle significantly and tried his luck in the State Archives in Würzburg and at the Water and Shipping Office.
The yield was richer there, and Wingenfeld discovered facts that he had not known about before. For example, that the Schwenk cement works wanted to build a plant in Ochsenfurt in 1939, below the Wilhelmshöhe. The company had even acquired land; among other things, 150 apartments should be built. However, the project was rejected because the wind from the plant planned to the west would probably have carried a lot of dust and exhaust fumes into the city.
New Main Bridge was planned differently
Gerhard Wingenfeld also traced the history of the Main Bridges. If the very first plans for the construction of the New Main Bridge had been realized back then, Ochsenfurt would look different today. In 1938 there had been a planning variant that envisaged a road course over the Klinge, Brunnenstraße and Floßhafenstraße as well as the construction of the new river crossing at this point – i.e. west of today’s New Main Bridge. However, as Wingenfeld knows, the project was abandoned because the traffic would then have flowed too far past the old town.
The barrage near Goßmannsdorf is another building that was originally intended to be somewhat different. Shortly before the start of the Second World War, planning had already begun and the plan was to build the barrage on the Gossmannsdorf side. The later straightening of the Main then led to the barrage migrating to the Kleinochsenfurt side.
Gerhard Wingenfeld found something about the barrage in the archives that he did not want to withhold from the readers of the new work: In 1952, the ferryman Andreas Schuhmann felt compelled to write a complaint to the Würzburg Waterways and Shipping Authority. He complained that his small passenger ferry, which runs between the Thierbach estuary and Kleinochsenfurt, had run out of customers since people used the jetty at the lock. It is now difficult for him to make ends meet for his family with 13 children. The ferryman was successful. After his complaint, only authorized persons were allowed to use the jetty.
But the new book not only traces the history of the buildings on the Main and the various professional groups such as fishermen and raftsmen, several chapters are also devoted to the everyday life of the people of Ochsenfurt on the river, complete with numerous photos. Whether it’s about the women on the washing boats, the children in the bathing establishments or the holiday trips by boat: the Main played a very decisive role in the everyday life of the people of Ochsenfurt. Gerhard Wingenfeld is pleased that he can now make this information available to all interested parties in a well-edited form. “For me, that’s work at home,” he says.
The book “Ochsenfurt am Main – sand makers, fishermen, raftsmen and buildings on the Main” by Heinz Schleßmann and Gerhard Wingenfeld is available in the Ochsenfurt bookshop at the tower and costs 26.50 euros.
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