Friedrich Oeß

Friedrich Oeß (born September 29, 1859 in Eberbach ; † February 9, 1941 in Neckarzimmern ) was a German bargee and farmer . He made numerous important prehistoric finds.

Life

Friedrich Oeß came from an Eberbach sailor family and came to Neckarzimmern in 1891 through his marriage to Christine Grimm. Until the 1920s he sailed the Neckar in an old wooden ship , then he gave up shipping and turned to chip carving , with which he created boxes, picture frames, chairs, etc. He also made models of old ships and stilt houses for teaching purposes. In his later years he worked in his son's farming .

In 1926, while plowing a field in Steinbuckeläcker, he found the relief of a Mithras altar from Roman times . The field belonged to the Barons of Gemmingen , whose historical collection at Hornberg Castle contained the stone, where it was stolen in 1965.

When the Neckar canalisation began in 1932 , large earth movements for the construction of the Neckarzimmern barrage took place near Oeß's house . Oeß discovered a stone torso made of greenish sandstone in the earth mass , which possibly belonged to a Roman statue of Mercury . In the bed of the Neckar he also found various dugouts during the construction work . One of these dugout canoes is now in the city museum in Eberbach, another is said to have been burned for heating purposes in the local museum in Mosbach during the Second World War . The Mosbach district monument keeper Palm also received numerous petrified shells and plants from Oeß and passed them on to museums.

When he died, Oeß left behind a large number of other found objects, the value of which, however, could not be measured in 1941, so that a large part of his legacy was lost.

literature

• Karlheinz Götz: Friedrich Oeß - a finder finds recognition late. In: Unser Land , Heidelberg 1994, ISSN  0932-8173 , pp. 126-128.