Special exhibition "The Dream of Green Gold. Rafting on the Enz, Nagold, and Murg Rivers"

Sunday, February 29 – Sunday, May 09

As early as Celtic times, the buoyancy of wood was exploited and tree trunks were transported by water. Until the construction of the railway in the 1850s, rafting was the cheapest way to transport long and cut timber over long distances. By 1900, when the last rafts from the Black Forest drifted north along the Rhine and Neckar rivers, the most glorious period of the timber trade was already a hundred years behind. The exhibition uses a walk-in model raft to demonstrate how rafts were assembled and steered. Films, slides, models, and hands-on areas introduce visitors of all ages to a profession that mixes danger with adventure and the dream of big money.

The heyday of timber rafting began at the end of the 17th century, when the Duchy of Württemberg signed a contract with the Netherlands for the supply of long timber. A first contract a hundred years earlier had failed due to the lack of technical capabilities for transporting long timber on the small Black Forest rivers. Sawn timber, however, had been floated to the Lower Rhine for centuries. In the many small sawmills along the Enz, Murg, and Nagold rivers, the shareholders of the shipping companies had the logs sawn to commercial dimensions and floated them to Heilbronn, Mannheim, Cologne, and Bingen. When the forest-poor Netherlands expanded their shipping fleet at the end of the 17th century, they also turned to the Black Forest to develop new markets. The Black Forest, with its areas still partly like primeval forests, offered a seemingly inexhaustible supply of strong fir and oak timber. This timber reservoir could be exploited for more than a hundred years. Thousands of Dutch timber rafts were sent north. In return, money flowed into the Northern Black Forest Poorhouse for the first time.

However, the gold rush also attracted some shady characters to the region, who exploited the authorities' lack of experience and control for their own ends – portrayed in a unique literary form in the fairy tale "The Cold Heart" (1825) by Wilhelm Hauff. Here, the poet deals with the changing values that, as a result of the international timber trade, threatened traditional economic structures and human coexistence. Whether Hauff had real people in mind or merely based his fairy tale on stories is unknown. In fact, there were raftsmen and timber traders who could have served as role models for Hauff. These include both dubious characters and some of the trustworthy "timber kings" from Neuenbürg, Herrenalb, and the Murg Valley. Names such as Lidell, Benckiser, Rindeschwender, Krauth, and Dürr represent this innovative surge in the timber trade as well as in glassmaking and metalworking.

When you look at the small, winding rivers in the Black Forest today, it's hard to imagine how 30-meter-long logs, tied together to form rafts well over 200 meters long, could be moved along them. This unique feat could only be accomplished with the help of water dams. The rafts were carried on the tidal wave to the next weir, until they finally reached a larger body of water, where the rafts were then tied together to form even larger units. The "stiff pieces" that traveled as capital rafts on the Rhine to Dordrecht have become almost legendary.

By the time the last rafts left the Black Forest, the landscape had already changed considerably: the areas formerly covered with oak, beech, and silver fir had given way to spruce monocultures, which were then planted as breadfruit after clear-cutting. They still dominate the landscape of the Black Forest today. With technological advances, not only did the profession of raftsman disappear; other forest craftsmen such as Harz workers, potash distillers, tar distillers, and charcoal burners also lost their previous trades with advances in the chemical industry. The owners of hydropowered mills were delighted by this development, as their operations could now run smoothly. Spa guests also enjoyed the adventurous raft ride and had a great time. Today, clubs maintain this old craft, and forestry offices support them in the reconstruction of old hydraulic structures and the search for relics in the landscape.

Accompanying the exhibition are guided tours with proven specialists in the rafting trade, as well as a demonstration of rafting, workshops for children, and a "trail search" in the Brotenautal, a side valley of the Enz River. We offer special tours for school classes.