Konary (Wińsko)
Konary [ kɔ'narɨ ] (Wińsko) ( German Kunern bei Winzig ) is a district of the municipality Wińsko (German Winzig) in the powiat Wołowski of the Polish Voivodeship of Lower Silesia .
Geographical location
The district is located in Lower Silesia, about 13 km north of Wołów (Wohlau) and 57 km northwest of Wrocław (Breslau).
history
Cunern (later spelled Kunern) belonged to the Duchy of Wohlau, which was ruled by the Silesian Piasts until 1675 . Then it fell as a "settled fiefdom" to the Crown of Bohemia and in 1742 to the Kingdom of Prussia . A part of the places came to the now smaller Wohlauer Kreis, which in 1815 was assigned to the administrative district of Breslau , in 1818 it was again delimited differently as the Wohlau district and in 1939 was renamed as a district “uniformly for the empire”. Kunern always stayed in the core area around Wohlau. It consisted of Ober- and Niederkunern with 284 (1792) and 319 (1939) inhabitants. The village did not have its own church. Most of the Protestant Christians were looked after by the parish in Herrnmotschelnitz (from 1945 Moczydlnica Dworska), the few Catholics belonged to the parish in Krehlau (from 1945 Krzelów).
Franz Carl Achard
The manorial estate in Kunern with an area of almost 670 hectares was bought by Franz Carl Achard in 1801 , had the "White Silesian turnip" grown and three existing buildings for beet processing were set up between the castle (manor house) and the farm on the eastern hill. The first sugar production campaign began here in April 1802: 16 tons of raw sugar (a yield of four percent) were obtained from 400 tons of beets from the previous year's harvest.
In March 1807 the factory burned down during the Fourth Coalition War and five years later between Dorfstrasse and Schloss (i.e. to the west) it was replaced by a smaller building as an apprentice sugar factory (the outer walls were one meter wide) and a residential building for the apprentices (2). Achard continued to train people interested in this new "training institute for sugar production from beetroot", but had to give up in 1815 for health reasons. He died on April 20, 1821 and was buried in the Protestant cemetery in Herrnmotschelnitz. The estate remained in the family's possession for two generations and then changed hands.
Appreciation
During his time in Berlin up to 1800, among many other activities and successes, Achard had increased the sugar content of Silesian fodder beets from 1.5 to four to five percent through targeted selection. He developed the equipment and the process for extracting sugar from beets and from 1802 he ran the world's first functioning factory in Kunern. This made it possible to reduce or replace the import of cane sugar (so-called colonial sugar ). Unfortunately, it was not until after 1830 - over 30 years after the beginnings in Kunern - that beet sugar production expanded significantly in Germany through the construction of new factories. The Association for the Beet and Sugar Industry of the German Reich donated a memorial stone in 1886 and had Achard's grave in Herrnmotschelnitz restored.
The teaching sugar factory was later used as a distillery and as a granary. The importance of the building was not recognized until 1911 - that's why the Association of the German Sugar Industry bought it and wanted to set up a museum here. After 1918 the house changed hands again and was last used as an apartment for French forced laborers. At the end of January 1945 the building burned down and the stones were used for other purposes. In 1964 the site was redesigned: the foundation walls were permanently preserved, and since then there has been a memorial with a ceramic relief depicting Achard. The larger plaque from 1964 bears the inscription: "At this point (more correctly it should read: in this community) the world's first beet sugar factory was built in 1802, the founder of which was FC Achard". The smaller plaque was only put up in 2002 to commemorate the year 1802.
Literature (selection)
- MFG Leonhardi: Earth description of the Prussian monarchy. Zweyter Volume, Halle 1792, p. 537.
- Johann Adam Valentin Weigel: Geographical, natural history and technological description of the sovereign Duchy of Silesia. Fifth part. The principalities of Liegnitz, Wohlau and Glogau, Berlin 1802, p. 114.
- Michael Rademacher: German administrative history from the unification of the empire in 1871 to the reunification in 1990. Wohlau district. Diss. Osnabrück 2006.
- Hans-Heinrich Müller, Corné J. Aertssens and Jürgen Wilke: Franz Carl Achard: 1753 - 1821. Biography. Berlin 2002, 688 pp.
- Andrzej Wilk: Information from January 2020.
- Hartmut Boettcher: Franz Carl Achard, the founder of beet sugar production, died 200 years ago. In: Wohlau-Steinauer Heimatblatt, Rothenburg ob der Tauber, 23rd year, 2021, issue 4, pp. 11-12.
Web links
Personalities associated with the place
- Franz Carl Achard (1753–1821), German scientist, developed and operated the first factory for producing sugar from beets