Johann Christian Plath (entrepreneur)

Johann Christian Plath (born March 5, 1738 in Hamburg ; † July 26, 1817 there ) was a Hamburg timber merchant.

Life

Plath was the son of Hinrich Plath (1712–1787), who fled serfdom on Rügen to Hamburg, a quartermaster for the Hamburg timber wholesaler and combing citizen Paul Faber (1711–1765), and Anna Elisabeth née. Scheel used Rönnberg (1701–1785), daughter of a Lüneburg ship servant, who came to Hamburg as a maid on the city dyke.

Since his father could only work as a roommate in summer and the family had to support the family by selling fish they had caught in winter, the children worked alongside their school days and thus helped to look after the family. In these poor conditions, Christian Plath, at the age of 11, was given the opportunity in the summer of 1749 to accompany the Berlin skipper Gottfried Höpffner on a trade trip to Berlin as a servant . He had met Höpffner because his stepbrother Hans Moritz Rönnberg was employed there as a ship's cook. Via Höpffner, Plath got to know his brother Johann Heinrich Höpffner, who was also a Berlin boatman. He maintained a materials store in Brandenburg an der Havel and offered Plath to learn how to deal with materials there. In 1750, when he was only 12 years old, Plath moved to Brandenburg, learned to trade in materials and returned to Hamburg in 1757. Here he found a job as a clerk at his father's employer, the timber wholesaler Faber. Here he made a good name for himself and was able to get his brother Paul Daniel Plath a job as a clerk at another timber merchant. Thanks to the good earnings of the two brothers, the family's wealth increased. Plath married the daughter of the timber merchant Kort in 1777 and became his father-in-law's business partner. However, this woman died a year later and he remarried in 1781. Plath mainly traded in shipbuilding timber and sold it to Holland, England and France. Due to the Elbe barrier in 1803, however, he lost this lucrative branch of his business and there was also the fact that many debtors became insolvent and could not repay the loans to him. So Plath lost about two thirds of his fortune. In 1806 the French occupation of Hamburg made the timber business even more difficult. Plath handed over his wood business to his eldest son Gottfried Plath (1782–1840) and in 1811 retired to Ratzeburg . Because of the tyrannical occupation of the French, Plath, who was previously decidedly against the soldiery, welcomed the decision of his sons Gottfried, Christian and Wilhelm to voluntarily join the campaign against the French. Plath fell ill in Ratzeburg, returned to Hamburg in 1816 and died there in 1817 at the age of 79.

Due to the poor circumstances of his youth, Plath did not forget his origins even in the prosperity of his later life. So, together with friends, he set up an institution for the poor on the city dyke, since the Hamburg general poor institution, founded in 1788, did not initially cover this area. When the general poor institution later added the city dike, Plath remained its head until he moved to Ratzeburg. His children also devoted themselves to the poor. In 1819, his eldest son Gottfried also became the head of the General Poor Asylum, his son Christian of the same name became a member of the School Convention of the General Poor Asylum and Patron of the Paßmannsche Poor School in 1829 , his son Wilhelm became a pediatrician and adopted three children, his daughter Maria became a child in 1826 Head of a girls 'school in Hamburg and two other daughters, Dorothea and Charlotte, teachers at this girls' school.

family

After Plath's first marriage to the daughter of the timber merchant Kort, he married Christiane Misler (1759–1850), daughter of the senior secretary Johann Gottfried Misler and the Hamburg merchant's daughter Maria Schramm (1734–1777) on July 12, 1781 . This second marriage had 15 children:

1. Gottfried Heinrich (1782–1840), timber merchant ∞ Juliane Caroline Berkhan (1786–1866)
2. Anna Maria (1783–1869), head of the school
3. Christian (1785–1790)
4. Johanna (1787–1790)
5. Dorothea (1787-1790)
6. Carl (1789–1795)
7. Johann Christian (1790–1852), clergyman ∞ Therese Böckmann (1802–1826)
8. Clarisse (1791–1883), educator
9. Johanna Christina (1793-1793)
10. Dorothea (1794–1878), teacher
11. Wilhelm (1795–1877), pediatrician ∞ Amalie Christiane Schütt (1802–1883)
12. Elisabeth (1797-1811)
13. Friedrich (1798–1801)
14. Charlotte, teacher (1799–1880)
15. August (1800–1870), timber merchant ∞ Anna Dorothea Friederika Rothe (1820–1875)

Fonts

• Johann Christian Plath: Fragment of an autobiography . Ed .: Joh. Christian Plath . Rauhes Haus, Hamburg 1851.

literature

• Johann Christian Plath: Fragment of an autobiography . Ed .: Joh. Christian Plath . Rauhes Haus, Hamburg 1851.
• Hans Schröder : Lexicon of the Hamburg writers up to the present . tape 6 , no. 3022 . Perthes-Besser & Mauke, Hamburg 1873 ( facsimile on the pages of the Hamburg State and University Library).
• Bernhard Koerner (ed.): German gender book . tape 27 . Starke Verlag , Görlitz 1914, p. 115–117 (also Hamburg Gender Book. Volume 5.).