Rielingshausen · Baden-Württemberg · Germany
Rielingshausen — Town Square (Wildermuth origin)
The town square of Rielingshausen — Robert Earl's note on the 1992 print is direct about what it is: 'town where Wildermuth name originated.' The square holds the Old Church (1758), the Bürgermeister's Haus, the Town Hall, and the central fountain. On the lintel of one civic building, three Wildermuth names are carved in 1811 as the village's Schultheiß, Bürger, and Heiligenpfleger.
Why this place matters
If any single place is the Wildermuth ancestral epicenter, it is this square. The 1811 stone names three Wildermuths holding civic offices simultaneously: Michael Wildermuth as Schultheiß (mayor), Jakob Wildermuth as Bürger (burgher/townsman), and J. Jakob Wildermuth as Heiligenpfleger (church warden). The family was running the village a generation before Johann Michael Wildermuth left for Marietta, Ohio in 1847.
Then & now
Sandra Sue Wildermuth Clement stood at the fountain on the 1992 family trip; Chuck stood at the same fountain in 2018. The half-timbered Bürgermeister's Haus and adjoining buildings frame both photographs.
The Town Square fountain
R.E.W. framed the square from across the street in 1992 to capture the Old Church behind the Bürgermeister's Haus and Town Hall. Chuck's 2018 frame is a slight repositioning that picks up the same buildings.
Town square — Old Church and civic buildings
Across generations
The 1811 stone door-lintel inscription on one of the square's civic buildings: three Wildermuths named as Schultheiß (Michael), Bürger (Jakob), and Heiligenpfleger (J. Jakob), alongside the schoolmaster Wilhelm Benignus and the pastor M. Sigel.
Alignment: No 1992 frame of this carving exists in the family archive; it is documented here for the first time.
Robert Earl’s note on one of the 1992 prints — the photograph documenting the square as the Wildermuth point of origin — is unambiguous: “town where Wildermuth name originated.”
The 1811 stone Chuck photographed in 2018 puts that claim in carved evidence. Three Wildermuths — Michael as Schultheiß (mayor), Jakob as Bürger (citizen), and J. Jakob as Heiligenpfleger (church warden) — are recorded on a building lintel as simultaneous office-holders in the village in the year 1811. Whatever the genealogical link to the John F. Eesley line on the paternal side, the Wildermuths were Rielingshausen’s civic infrastructure at the time Johann Michael was a child preparing to emigrate.
Sandra Sue Wildermuth Clement appears in the 1992 frame at the fountain — Robert Earl’s traveling companion on the trip and another of the family’s Wildermuth bearers. Chuck’s 2018 frame at the same fountain closes the visual continuity across the generation.