Stuttgart · Baden-Württemberg · Germany
Stuttgart — Schlossplatz and its fountains
The capital of Baden-Württemberg and the big city at the center of the Wildermuth homeland — Rielingshausen, where the name originated, and Marbach, where it became literature, both sit within about twenty-five miles. Robert Earl Wildermuth, the family genealogist, photographed one of Schlossplatz's ornate fountains on his November 1992 ancestral trip; Chuck stood at the same fountains in 2018.
Why this place matters
Stuttgart is the hub Robert Earl used to locate the family's origin villages for everyone back home — his Marbach caption measures the distance as 'about 25 miles north of Stuttgart.' The two monumental fountains on Schlossplatz were installed in 1863 to honor King Wilhelm I of Württemberg, flanking the Jubiläumssäule in front of the Neues Schloss. R.E.W.'s 1992 caption calls the spot 'KonigsPlatz'; the fountains are in fact on the adjoining Schlossplatz (Castle Square) — Königsplatz is the neighboring square along Königstraße. The pairing of his 1992 print with Chuck's 2018 frame adds Stuttgart itself to the Wildermuth pilgrimage route already documented at Rielingshausen and Marbach.
Then & now
Robert Earl Wildermuth photographed one of the two ornate 1863 fountains on Schlossplatz in November 1992, on the ancestral trip that also took him to Rielingshausen and Marbach. Chuck stood at the same Schlossplatz fountains in 2018, on the return visit that retraced R.E.W.'s route through the Wildermuth homeland.
A Schlossplatz fountain — 1992 and 2018
Stuttgart is not a Wildermuth place in the way Rielingshausen is — nobody in the family came from Stuttgart. But it is the city that made the family’s origin villages legible to everyone back in Ohio. When Robert Earl “Bob” Wildermuth — the Marbach chronicler and the family’s genealogist for the Wildermuth and Fleming lines — wrote his captions on the November 1992 prints, he measured everything from Stuttgart: Marbach is “about 25 miles north of Stuttgart,” he noted on the back of the Wildermuthstraße photograph. The capital of Baden-Württemberg was the anchor point of the whole ancestral trip.
The Schlossplatz fountains
The photograph he kept from the city itself is of one of the two ornate fountains on Schlossplatz — Castle Square — the great civic plaza in front of the Neues Schloss. The two matching fountains were installed in 1863 to honor King Wilhelm I of Württemberg, set on either side of the Jubiläumssäule (the Jubilee Column) at the center of the square. Each is a tiered basin with cherubs and lion-head spouts around the pedestal, exactly the fountain R.E.W. framed with the palace behind and, in his eye, swans on the water.
His caption calls the spot “KonigsPlatz.” The fountains are actually on the adjoining Schlossplatz; Königsplatz is the neighboring square running off Königstraße. It is a small slip of the kind his captions occasionally make — preserved here in his own words, with the correction noted, the same way Marbach keeps his verbatim note about Ottilie Wildermuth alongside the dates Chuck’s later research added.
Then and now
In 2018, Chuck returned to Baden-Württemberg and retraced the route — Rielingshausen, Marbach, and Stuttgart — photographing the same places his grandfather had. His frame of the Schlossplatz fountain closes the pairing: the same ornate tiered basin, the same palace square, twenty-six years apart, one generation of the Wildermuth line photographing what the previous one had gone to find.
Source: Robert Earl Wildermuth’s November 1992 captioned print, scanned 2018-03-30; Chuck Eesley’s 2018 Baden-Württemberg photographs. Fountain history: Schlossplatz (Stuttgart), Wikipedia.