Waldsee

We read in Wikipedia Waldsee (forest lake) is an eastern district of Freiburg with a population of around 5,400 inhabitants. It is named after the local recreational area of the same name. It lies between the districts Wiehre and Oberau in the west and Littenweiler and Ebnet in the east.

Joachim Scheck is surrounded by 60 "followers."

Last Saturday, the CEO of VISTAtour, Joachim Scheck, guided a tour through the district. He went back in history and told us that the area called Mösle around today's Waldsee once had played an essential role in the town's drinking water supply.

 

One of the original well pits

Numerous well pits (enclosures of springs to prevent contamination by surface water) served as drinking water reservoirs. Wooden water pipes (Deicheln) led the water into town, supplying running wells in Freiburg with fresh water.

 

War memorial at Möslestraße.
Remember those taken away from us
 in the world's vastness and our homeland.
1914 - 1918 1939 - 1945
The citizens of the Wiehre

The lake in the forest is an artificial product of the 19th century and originated from two harvesting ice* ponds of the former Neumeyer brewery. In 1878, the Association for the Beautification of the City of Freiburg and its Surroundings took aim at the area around the ponds. The association - an initiative of entrepreneurs and members of Freiburg's "high society" - created local recreation areas around Freiburg where stressed-out city dwellers could relax from their working lives.

*During the cold winters in the past, breweries cut ice blocks from frozen lakes and stored them in caves or deep basements for beer cooling in the following summer.

Looking west: The Dreisam Valley around 1880. In the background, Freiburg.
Left the two forest lakes. A train approaches the Möslestraße stop.
The buildings in the valley's center are those of the Gasthaus zum Schiff (read below).

In 1883, the main lake was enlarged and surrounded by terraced gardens, grottos, and fountains, and two years later, the surroundings named Möslepark took shape.

The shabby rest of the small lake

With the opening of the Höllentalbahn in 1887, crowds of citizens got off the train at the stop Möslestraße. They made the pilgrimage in their Sunday best to the lake, occasionally illuminated with Bengal fire at night. So, contemporaries went into raptures, "When the artificial waterfall soon glistens red, soon green, and foams enchantingly beautifully down into the pond." In 1906, the forest lake glistened in the evening in the light of electric arc lamps and thus met the requirements of modern times."

Waldsee recreation in 1928

Waldsee on February 11, 2023.
The ice is too thin to be harvested.

The district of Waldsse was built into the Dreisam Valley in the 1920s and the 30s

Following was a stroll through the Seepark housing settlement where the "German" Alsace expellees found accommodation after the First World War. The city provided plots of land in Emmendingerstraße, Emil-Gött-Straße, and at the corner of Weiherhof and Tivolistraße, on which the Society of Displaced Alsace-Lorraine Residents built the so-called Alsatian houses.

Built 1775 to 1777

Our guided tour ended at the Gasthaus zum Schiff, where in the 18th and 19th centuries, rafters floating firewood from the Black Forest on a channel passing nearby took a rest.

The crowd waiting in front to get into the vaulted cellar

Tour participants were eager to see the historical vaulted cellar, but Red Baron went home instead. Thank you, Joachim, for the guided tour.

       

Newly built Gasthaus zum Schiff in the evening sun.

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