One of the principal reasons for the trip was to celebrate the 700th anniversary of recorded Kleppinger family history: we apparently trace to 1310 in the town of Dortmund, with later emigrations to Soest and Pfungstadt. And so we made a point to visit each place, in turn, to see where we're from.
Dortmund is now a major city, but in the medieval period it was a walled town in roughly the shape of an oval, and was a major trading hub for western Germany. The major axis of the oval today is a shopping street, with lots of stores and boutiques, in a nod to its mercantile heritage. Now. we didn't find any Kleppingers while we were there, but we did find two special things. The first is the St Adolphus church, located just north of that major shopping street; it dates to 1250, and so while we explored that church, with its rough stone walls, we could just imagine our earliest ancestors, whose name was Klepping at the time, worshiping in that sacred space--or even helping to build it.
And the second was even cooler than that. Coming just off the main street, in the southeastern part of the old town, was a pretty, tree-lined boulevard with more boutiques, shops, restaurants and sidewalk cafes, and a fountain at its base. The street? "Kleppingstrasse"--Klepping Street! How cool is that? The family history hangs together when telling of our time in Dortmund--apparently we were quite prosperous as wool merchants and traders, even to the point of loaning money to the English crown. And apparently we did well enough, over these last seven centuries, to have a street named after us.
Our next site was the town of Soest, about 25 miles east of Dortmund, where the family moved in the 1600s. Soest, likewise, was a walled city, and today retains much of its charm: it's just a picturesque German village, with timbered buildings, colorful walls, narrow streets, and little squares with a church on them absolutely everywhere. We ate dinner here in a little restaurant off one of those squares, with a waitress who spoke no English. Soest is famous for the green color of its limestone, and so many of the old churches and buildings are built with a greenish tinge to the stone. It wasn't until later that I remembered chemistry class and what makes stone green, and then started to wonder how close we were to the uranium mines that the Nazis were using to try to build their own a-bomb.
Soest was a picture-perfect place, a tiny town with a lot of charm, just as Dortmund was a large city that had retained its charm as well. Our final place, though, wasn't quite the same. I believe that Pfungstadt is the town from which Johann Goerg Kleppinger emigrated to America in 1732, and in looking around at the place on Wednesday (June 30), I can see why he left. It's beige: it's just a plain, simple, almost drab, colorless town 30 miles south of Frankfurt. It's surrounded by factories, so it doesn't even feel very welcoming. We did notice, though, that the landscape around town is reminiscent of eastern Pennsylvania; I could easily see Johann getting off the ship in Philadelphia, looking around eastern PA, and deciding, Yeah, this looks like home: rolling hills, farmland.... The other thing that was notable about Pfungstadt (in addition to its local beer) was a road sign we saw pointing that-a-way to the Town Archives. Oh, if I had a pad of paper, a pencil, and two free days...! But that's not why we were there, I reminded myself; this is the sampler tour, so we can come back another time to find Johann's birth records and the like.
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