For a quick overnight camping trip, we travelled to the collective municipality (Gemeinde) of Sandberg in Lower Franconia in the valley on the opposite side of the Kreuzberg, cleared and settled from heavily wooded land in 1691 to alleviate overpopulation in neighbouring villages, which though remote had too many people to sustain their subsistence farming and forestry due also by dint of their isolation had been spared waves of the plague. 
A remnant of their survival remains in the singular dialect of the villages that make up community that are verging on the unintelligible from one settlement to the next. In the Kirchdorf of Waldberg where the campsite was that was supposedly the case as well. The above increasing numbers of residents through the nineteenth century put stress on the fields and pastures due to their sandy soil (hence the name) and from the 1830s through the next century saw a mass immigration to America, many families from this area settling in Cleveland, Ohio. 
The main building of the campgrounds was an old mill (dating from before an incident during Holy Week pilgrimages to the Kreuzberg when bakers from Waldberg tried to sell their wares but the main town of Bischofsheim asserted their monopoly over baked goods and saw its operations shut down—those who remained resorting to seasonal work, fruit-pressing and collecting berries and beechnuts to survive, relying on remittances from family abroad) on a watercourse coming down from the mountain.
synchronoptica
one year ago: US Republican primary debates (with synchronoptica) plus assorted links worth revisiting
five years ago: the company Kalashnikov is making an electric car, a typical White House press briefing, drought reveals ominous hunger stones plus one French community’s fight to keep McDonald’s out
eight years ago: a word for St Bartholemew’s Day
nine years ago: more Venus Flytrap weirdness
eleven years ago: Six Degrees of Wikipedia plus Staffordshire pottery
