4 – Modrava Information centre
The village of Modrava (Mader in German) was founded in 1757 as part of the ‘woodworkers’ colonisation wave, just as Prášily or Vchynice-Tetov. However, it is likely that a smaller fishing village had already existed here 20 years prior to that. Since 1804, it was a centre of one of the five forest districts of the Schwarzenberg estate.
In 1826, the entrepreneur Franz Bienert (1788–1866) from Varnsdorf bought a mill house from Jakub Gruber and rebuilt it into a sawmill. The sawmill’s specialised in processing resonant woods, which demand special selection and methods of processing. Evenly grown spruce trunks with high density were picked out and then cut along the fibres. After that the excess resin was extracted by putting the wood in water and letting it dry. The wood was cut down in winter and in spring it was soaked in water for a couple of weeks, then dried and chopped for material for string instruments or piano boards were cut. After that the material was soaked for four more weeks, then dried and bleached in the sun. The product was then shipped out across Europe as well as to America.
In 1832, Bienert received an imperial privilege for exclusive right to produce resonant wood for 10 years, another for an improve process of production and an individual privilege for the production of ribs. The initial consumption was 500 cords, later around 1000 cords annually. In 1855, Bienert opened a similar sawmill in Stožec. At that time, he was already employing 50–100 people both in the sawmill and in the forest. The privileges kept being extended by two years up until his death when his wife took over the running of both mills. Due to large competition however, the production went down, and the wood had to be imported from far away. The widow sold the sawmills to prince Schwarzenberg in 1871, and he proceeded to close the one in Modrava and move the company to Stožec in 1880. To this day only the part for storing and drying out material has still survived. Another Šumavian sawmill which specialised in resonant wood was in Kvilda. It was run by Bienert from 1820. Apart from this specific way of processing, the wood here more common ways of usage here too – Šumava had several paper mills and Šusice had a match factory.
The roots of match production in Sušice reach back to Vienna, where a pharmacist called Štěpán Römer started making relatively newly discovered type of matches – phosphorus matches. The flammable mixture was prepared by his wife and Marie Urbanová in his laboratory. The wooden sticks were prepared by Vojtěch Scheinost, a joiner apprentice from Sušice. He fell in love with Marie and decided to take her back to Sušice with him, where they both continue making matches. They started the business in a burned house on the square. The town council gave Scheinost permission to produce matches on October 31. 1839. The beginnings were hard, the couple sometimes worked even 20 hours a day and sold their products on the markets. The demand grew quickly and Scheinost found employees – he employed whole families, including children. According to contemporary sources, in 1842 (though it was very likely a year earlier), Scheinost began to cooperate with a local Jewish businessman Bernard Fürth. He bought the enterprise soon after that and Scheinost became the production manager. The town gave Fürth permission to make matches in 1843.
The working conditions were not ideal. Low wages, long hours and the aforementioned child labour were nothing unusual in those days. But the demand continued to rise sharply and the original space stopped being enough, and so the various stages of production got scattered around town – the former inn ‘V Ráji’ (In Paradise) became the management office, the wooden sticks were made in the hall, and tied into bundles in the hallway and attic, the parlour became the laboratory, the shed stored wood. Elsewhere the matchboxes were made, elsewhere the materials were stored, elsewhere the phosphorus was made. The finished products were stored in Fürth’s house no. 130. It was thus necessarily to build a factory building, which happened in 1844. The new building initially had 244 employees, three years later it was already 350. To fit that many people, it had to be extended by another wing.
Matches from Sušice soon made good name for themselves and became the town’s pride, despite the fact that Bernard Fürth was not very popular because of his Jewish heritage. The district and town authorities supported him because he was an crucial employer.
Local materials were used for manufacture, mainly Šumavian wood, and the factory soon started making its own phosphorus and stopped being dependant on complicated and expensive transport from abroad. This led to a lower price of the product and even higher demand in Bohemia, Europe and overseas. Vojtěch Scheinost was very fond of innovations and himself designed several machines which sped up production and made it more effective; for example a machine for making round matchboxes or a machine for dipping the sticks into the flammable substance which up to then had to be done by hand. Eventually he added more complicated machines.
Bernard Fürth died in 1849 but his name remained as a brand even when the company was taken over by his son Daniel and later by his two grandsons, Ernst and Bernard. Vojtěch Scheinost left the company in 1865 and founded his own match producing business which, though not unsuccessful, never reached the same success as Fürth’s. After Scheinost’s death on March 10, 1894, his sons Ferdinand and František took over the production.
Scheinost’s and Fürth’s match producing companies were not the only ones in Šumava. There were others in Dlouhá Ves, Kvilda, Strašín, or in Nová Huť, but the most famous ones were the two in Kašperské Hory. One of them, open between 1872 and 1902 was also owned by Bernard Fürth and was somewhat of a subsidiary to the large factory in Sušice. Another was founded in 1873 in Amálino Valley below Kašperské Hory by H.J. Simlick and later taken over by Nathan Bloch from Hartmanice. Some materials necessary for production, such as matchboxes or the wooden sticks were made in Šumavian houses from where they were bought by the factories’ representatives.
In 1903, both factories in Sušice, just like many others in the Habsburg Monarchy, became part of the Austro-Hungarian group SOLO. Unfortunately, sales began to drop in some export areas at that time because of Japanese and Swedish competition. And due to overproduction, value started decreasing on the domestic market as well.
The factories in Sušice only begin to do well again during the post-war economic growth in Czechoslovakia, when the United Czechoslakian Match Companies became the owners of SOLO (January 1, 1921). However this did not last long, due to the global economic crisis the mainly foreign consumption of matches falls between 1929 and 1936, and the 1931 match tax does not help sales either. The smaller factory, founded by Scheinost after his departure from Fürth’s, has to be closed on March 11, 1932.
The building was renovated by the SOLO company and in August of the following year it started to produce paper cups, containers and wraps from cellulose acetate and many other single use wrapping materials. At first it employed only ten people, but demand grew quickly and in 1938 there were over 400 employees. During the war, the factory fell under the Society for Chemical and Metallurgical Manufacture and towards its end it was turned into an automobile repair shop for the Wehrmacht. After the war, paper wrapping manufacture was restored and runs to this day.
But back to match production. The Second World War had an even worse impact on production than the preceding crisis. The materials were of low quality, foreign markets closed off. Manufacture is even stopped before the end of the war but restarts by the end of May 1945 and the nationalised enterprise SOLO Sušice is founded. Matches from Sušice slowly and surely regained their former status on foreign markets. Apart from matches, the factory begins with production of wooden boards from unused material from making matches or from the surrounding sawmills in 1951.
The production line had to be modernised and made as automated as possible, which the management comes to terms with in 1969. In 1980, the machines for making wooden boxes are adjusted, but by 1984 paper boxes fully replace them. By the end of 2008, match production in Sušice was closed and relocated to India.
Following this slight detour to match production, which cannot be overlooked when discussing Šumava’s wood industry, let us return to the wilder parts of Šumava. Match factories, sawmills, and many other businesses working with wood gave work to local inhabitants, who would do it during the evenings or when there was not much work to be done in the forest or on the fields. It was usually nothing too difficult, they made wooden shingles, gutters, bowls, wooden spoons, rolling pins, clogs, … The long wooden sticks that would later be chopped into matches were also made at home. Another product of planing was a so-called wooden wool which was used to pack glass to prevent it from breaking during transport. Wood was the most universal material in the countryside when the people of Šumava had to be more or less dependent on self-provision. Wood was cheap, easily available and everybody was able to work with it to a degree. The majority of houses in Šumava were wooden, sometimes with stone underpinnings. The roof was covered by wooden shingles. The furniture was all wooden, as was the majority of agricultural tools such as ploughs, rakes, flails or shovels.
A very specific use of wood were the so-called dead man planks. They exemplify a ritual rooted in practice. Mountain winters used to be tough, which caused to ground to freeze and made it impossible to bury people. The cemetery was also often very far from some villages. So, what was to be done with the body should someone in the family die during these times? Near all settlements had a barn with stored planks. If a family was hit by such tragedy, one of the planks was picked out, marked with three crosses and the body would be laid on it in the barn. After the funeral the plank would be carved and marked with the name of the dead person. Richer settlements with their own chapel would store these planks in it, but in most cases, they were put up along roads, mainly by crossroads or wayside shrines.
But back to lumbering in general. From time immemorial, Šumava was practically wholly covered by deep woods, the so-called King’s Forest, which created a natural barrier between the Bohemian Kingdom and Bavaria. At first it served only as a place to hunt and trees were cut down very rarely, the wood was meant for local consumption only. But as more agricultural land was needed, more trees began to be cut down. With the development of cities and industry such as metallurgy and glass production, the demand for wood grew and logging became one of the strongest pillars of Šumavian economy.
Logging, which began to develop intensively after the house of Schwarzenberg bought the Prášily estate in 1799, was carried out mainly in autumn, from September until November. In the winter it was transported from the forest and in spring and summer the workers would take on lighter labour such as processing branches and planting new trees. The 1870s were an exception because due to calamities it was necessary to process the fallen and damaged trees as soon as possible – logging was thus carried out during the whole year.
To transport Šumavian wood to Vienna, the 1793 Schwarzenberg and the 1799-1801 Vchynice-Tetov canals were used. You will learn more about these canals on the following stops of this trail. The wood was transported to the canals by sleigh, very rarely was it dragged. One sleigh could transport up to 3 m3 of wood. It was about 3 meters long but very heavy and could reach a very high speed, which cost many a lumberjack who sat in the front their life.
The increase in logging caused new labour forces to come to the region. Lumberjacks came from other parts of the Schwarzenberg estate as well as from the German side of Šumava – Passau. They either stayed in existing villages or they founded new colonies, especially around the newly built canals. The gentry tried to make life easier for the new residents – they either got land and materials for temporary use or were given the option of a three-year instalment. Houses were mostly self-built, though there were exceptions (Dlouhá Ves). They were usually wooden, or wooden with stone underpinnings. The furnishing tended to not be very expensive.
Logging had increased significantly since the beginning of the Schwarzenberg rule at the beginning of the 19th century. This resulted in an early exhaustion of resources (the year of heightened tree fertility was once every 6 to 8 years, the seeds thus had to be gained elsewhere). Glass production, which needed large amounts of wood for potash production and to keep furnaces going, only exhausted the region further. When prince Jan Adolf II of Schwarzenberg visited his lands in 1844, he was horrified to see the exhausted landscape full of deforested areas. He called off the head forester responsible and tasked his replacement with forest renewal. That of course demanded that the amount of logging be decreased and more closely monitored.
All plans for sustainable forestry were foiled by a wave of calamities which hit the Šumava forests – first it was wind calamities between 1868 and 1870, followed by bark beetle calamities. Bark beetle spread very quickly and easily among the spruce monoculture. The first natural calamity began with a strong wind, which blew through Šumava on December 7, 1868 from 9am to 6pm. Apart from uprooting trees it also damaged many houses which were often wooden with shingle roofs. Another wave of strong winds came that same year around Christmas. Not even two years later, in the night from 26th to 27th October 1870 a similar calamity arrived. The amount of fallen timber was not processed in time, which led to the spread of the spruce bark beetle. The first great bark beetle infestation came in 1872. Even more destructive were the ones in 1874 and 1875. The only way to stop the spread of the beetle was removing and burning the bark from infected trees.
And this incredible prosperity, this life full of hard work but also pleasure, was brought to them by a small beetle, a blessed animal which uprooted the old Šumava and which the learned men gave the name bark beetle!”
“In the woods, the work was never ending. Their silent peace was long gone; wood in all shapes and sizes, blocks and logs, brought to the water and carried away by it, there was no end to them. Even the smallest streams had dams built on them to cause them to overflow; even large logs were then given to them, which tore into banks and dug out soil on the pitiful streams.
The result still the same; the enviable people of Šumava were drowning in money. Big and small, each by his circumstance, farmers, smallholders, lodgers, servants, all shared in this wonderful abundance and a tiny beetle, which swarmed twice that year, was ensuring that these blessed days continue.”
“No pen can portray the eagerness with which they looked towards the moment when true winter comes, when the snow settles and mud solidifies under frost’s spell. Will that not be a prosperous time! – For it was those places, where the bark beetle hit the hardest and where most wood lied, that made it impossible to move them in summertime: it was there that the wood was threatened by rot and ruin. They knew well that there are unnumbered places they will not penetrate even in winter, where their animals would fall into bottomless chasms and cold depths covered by snow. Where the steep slopes, ravines and thickets make it impossible to move the large logs, smaller blocks will be chopped, slides will be made and the wood will be sent on them to valleys and waters, on which it will flow to lower regions as soon as the melting snows fill them; they will also flow towards sawmills, of which many shall be built. All this will require a number of hardworking hands and the work will be paid better and better. It will be hard work, full of horrors and danger, but that is what they were used to, that is what they were born to do; as long as it was rewarded! – They divided the work amongst themselves; who had nothing but their hands went to the forest to cut wood, who had a wagon would collect and deliver it cut to towns or rivers, where they would be tied into rafts. All were so preoccupied with these thoughts and hopes, that they almost forgot about agricultural work, paying it little mind and sparing little effort on it.”
Getting rid of the damages meant a lot of hard work and brought more workers into the region, often from as far as Salzburg, Tyrol, or even Italy. At the same time, more work meant more money and so, paradoxically, the calamities caused the increase in the local quality of life. But this did not last long. After the wood was processed, unemployment began to grow. It was made worse by the region now having many more inhabitants than before the calamities as well as by the fact that the ruined landscape took long to recover from its damages.
More complications were brought by the dramatic global political unfoldings in the first half of the 20th century. Both World Wars, the forced expulsion of German populations, who made up the majority of old residents in the region, the rise of the Iron Curtain and guarding of the border area changed the character of border Šumava dramatically.
In 1826, the entrepreneur Franz Bienert (1788–1866) from Varnsdorf bought a mill house from Jakub Gruber and rebuilt it into a sawmill. The sawmill’s specialised in processing resonant woods, which demand special selection and methods of processing. Evenly grown spruce trunks with high density were picked out and then cut along the fibres. After that the excess resin was extracted by putting the wood in water and letting it dry. The wood was cut down in winter and in spring it was soaked in water for a couple of weeks, then dried and chopped for material for string instruments or piano boards were cut. After that the material was soaked for four more weeks, then dried and bleached in the sun. The product was then shipped out across Europe as well as to America.
In 1832, Bienert received an imperial privilege for exclusive right to produce resonant wood for 10 years, another for an improve process of production and an individual privilege for the production of ribs. The initial consumption was 500 cords, later around 1000 cords annually. In 1855, Bienert opened a similar sawmill in Stožec. At that time, he was already employing 50–100 people both in the sawmill and in the forest. The privileges kept being extended by two years up until his death when his wife took over the running of both mills. Due to large competition however, the production went down, and the wood had to be imported from far away. The widow sold the sawmills to prince Schwarzenberg in 1871, and he proceeded to close the one in Modrava and move the company to Stožec in 1880. To this day only the part for storing and drying out material has still survived. Another Šumavian sawmill which specialised in resonant wood was in Kvilda. It was run by Bienert from 1820. Apart from this specific way of processing, the wood here more common ways of usage here too – Šumava had several paper mills and Šusice had a match factory.
The roots of match production in Sušice reach back to Vienna, where a pharmacist called Štěpán Römer started making relatively newly discovered type of matches – phosphorus matches. The flammable mixture was prepared by his wife and Marie Urbanová in his laboratory. The wooden sticks were prepared by Vojtěch Scheinost, a joiner apprentice from Sušice. He fell in love with Marie and decided to take her back to Sušice with him, where they both continue making matches. They started the business in a burned house on the square. The town council gave Scheinost permission to produce matches on October 31. 1839. The beginnings were hard, the couple sometimes worked even 20 hours a day and sold their products on the markets. The demand grew quickly and Scheinost found employees – he employed whole families, including children. According to contemporary sources, in 1842 (though it was very likely a year earlier), Scheinost began to cooperate with a local Jewish businessman Bernard Fürth. He bought the enterprise soon after that and Scheinost became the production manager. The town gave Fürth permission to make matches in 1843.
The working conditions were not ideal. Low wages, long hours and the aforementioned child labour were nothing unusual in those days. But the demand continued to rise sharply and the original space stopped being enough, and so the various stages of production got scattered around town – the former inn ‘V Ráji’ (In Paradise) became the management office, the wooden sticks were made in the hall, and tied into bundles in the hallway and attic, the parlour became the laboratory, the shed stored wood. Elsewhere the matchboxes were made, elsewhere the materials were stored, elsewhere the phosphorus was made. The finished products were stored in Fürth’s house no. 130. It was thus necessarily to build a factory building, which happened in 1844. The new building initially had 244 employees, three years later it was already 350. To fit that many people, it had to be extended by another wing.
Matches from Sušice soon made good name for themselves and became the town’s pride, despite the fact that Bernard Fürth was not very popular because of his Jewish heritage. The district and town authorities supported him because he was an crucial employer.
Local materials were used for manufacture, mainly Šumavian wood, and the factory soon started making its own phosphorus and stopped being dependant on complicated and expensive transport from abroad. This led to a lower price of the product and even higher demand in Bohemia, Europe and overseas. Vojtěch Scheinost was very fond of innovations and himself designed several machines which sped up production and made it more effective; for example a machine for making round matchboxes or a machine for dipping the sticks into the flammable substance which up to then had to be done by hand. Eventually he added more complicated machines.
Bernard Fürth died in 1849 but his name remained as a brand even when the company was taken over by his son Daniel and later by his two grandsons, Ernst and Bernard. Vojtěch Scheinost left the company in 1865 and founded his own match producing business which, though not unsuccessful, never reached the same success as Fürth’s. After Scheinost’s death on March 10, 1894, his sons Ferdinand and František took over the production.
Scheinost’s and Fürth’s match producing companies were not the only ones in Šumava. There were others in Dlouhá Ves, Kvilda, Strašín, or in Nová Huť, but the most famous ones were the two in Kašperské Hory. One of them, open between 1872 and 1902 was also owned by Bernard Fürth and was somewhat of a subsidiary to the large factory in Sušice. Another was founded in 1873 in Amálino Valley below Kašperské Hory by H.J. Simlick and later taken over by Nathan Bloch from Hartmanice. Some materials necessary for production, such as matchboxes or the wooden sticks were made in Šumavian houses from where they were bought by the factories’ representatives.
In 1903, both factories in Sušice, just like many others in the Habsburg Monarchy, became part of the Austro-Hungarian group SOLO. Unfortunately, sales began to drop in some export areas at that time because of Japanese and Swedish competition. And due to overproduction, value started decreasing on the domestic market as well.
The factories in Sušice only begin to do well again during the post-war economic growth in Czechoslovakia, when the United Czechoslakian Match Companies became the owners of SOLO (January 1, 1921). However this did not last long, due to the global economic crisis the mainly foreign consumption of matches falls between 1929 and 1936, and the 1931 match tax does not help sales either. The smaller factory, founded by Scheinost after his departure from Fürth’s, has to be closed on March 11, 1932.
The building was renovated by the SOLO company and in August of the following year it started to produce paper cups, containers and wraps from cellulose acetate and many other single use wrapping materials. At first it employed only ten people, but demand grew quickly and in 1938 there were over 400 employees. During the war, the factory fell under the Society for Chemical and Metallurgical Manufacture and towards its end it was turned into an automobile repair shop for the Wehrmacht. After the war, paper wrapping manufacture was restored and runs to this day.
But back to match production. The Second World War had an even worse impact on production than the preceding crisis. The materials were of low quality, foreign markets closed off. Manufacture is even stopped before the end of the war but restarts by the end of May 1945 and the nationalised enterprise SOLO Sušice is founded. Matches from Sušice slowly and surely regained their former status on foreign markets. Apart from matches, the factory begins with production of wooden boards from unused material from making matches or from the surrounding sawmills in 1951.
The production line had to be modernised and made as automated as possible, which the management comes to terms with in 1969. In 1980, the machines for making wooden boxes are adjusted, but by 1984 paper boxes fully replace them. By the end of 2008, match production in Sušice was closed and relocated to India.
Following this slight detour to match production, which cannot be overlooked when discussing Šumava’s wood industry, let us return to the wilder parts of Šumava. Match factories, sawmills, and many other businesses working with wood gave work to local inhabitants, who would do it during the evenings or when there was not much work to be done in the forest or on the fields. It was usually nothing too difficult, they made wooden shingles, gutters, bowls, wooden spoons, rolling pins, clogs, … The long wooden sticks that would later be chopped into matches were also made at home. Another product of planing was a so-called wooden wool which was used to pack glass to prevent it from breaking during transport. Wood was the most universal material in the countryside when the people of Šumava had to be more or less dependent on self-provision. Wood was cheap, easily available and everybody was able to work with it to a degree. The majority of houses in Šumava were wooden, sometimes with stone underpinnings. The roof was covered by wooden shingles. The furniture was all wooden, as was the majority of agricultural tools such as ploughs, rakes, flails or shovels.
A very specific use of wood were the so-called dead man planks. They exemplify a ritual rooted in practice. Mountain winters used to be tough, which caused to ground to freeze and made it impossible to bury people. The cemetery was also often very far from some villages. So, what was to be done with the body should someone in the family die during these times? Near all settlements had a barn with stored planks. If a family was hit by such tragedy, one of the planks was picked out, marked with three crosses and the body would be laid on it in the barn. After the funeral the plank would be carved and marked with the name of the dead person. Richer settlements with their own chapel would store these planks in it, but in most cases, they were put up along roads, mainly by crossroads or wayside shrines.
But back to lumbering in general. From time immemorial, Šumava was practically wholly covered by deep woods, the so-called King’s Forest, which created a natural barrier between the Bohemian Kingdom and Bavaria. At first it served only as a place to hunt and trees were cut down very rarely, the wood was meant for local consumption only. But as more agricultural land was needed, more trees began to be cut down. With the development of cities and industry such as metallurgy and glass production, the demand for wood grew and logging became one of the strongest pillars of Šumavian economy.
Logging, which began to develop intensively after the house of Schwarzenberg bought the Prášily estate in 1799, was carried out mainly in autumn, from September until November. In the winter it was transported from the forest and in spring and summer the workers would take on lighter labour such as processing branches and planting new trees. The 1870s were an exception because due to calamities it was necessary to process the fallen and damaged trees as soon as possible – logging was thus carried out during the whole year.
To transport Šumavian wood to Vienna, the 1793 Schwarzenberg and the 1799-1801 Vchynice-Tetov canals were used. You will learn more about these canals on the following stops of this trail. The wood was transported to the canals by sleigh, very rarely was it dragged. One sleigh could transport up to 3 m3 of wood. It was about 3 meters long but very heavy and could reach a very high speed, which cost many a lumberjack who sat in the front their life.
The increase in logging caused new labour forces to come to the region. Lumberjacks came from other parts of the Schwarzenberg estate as well as from the German side of Šumava – Passau. They either stayed in existing villages or they founded new colonies, especially around the newly built canals. The gentry tried to make life easier for the new residents – they either got land and materials for temporary use or were given the option of a three-year instalment. Houses were mostly self-built, though there were exceptions (Dlouhá Ves). They were usually wooden, or wooden with stone underpinnings. The furnishing tended to not be very expensive.
Logging had increased significantly since the beginning of the Schwarzenberg rule at the beginning of the 19th century. This resulted in an early exhaustion of resources (the year of heightened tree fertility was once every 6 to 8 years, the seeds thus had to be gained elsewhere). Glass production, which needed large amounts of wood for potash production and to keep furnaces going, only exhausted the region further. When prince Jan Adolf II of Schwarzenberg visited his lands in 1844, he was horrified to see the exhausted landscape full of deforested areas. He called off the head forester responsible and tasked his replacement with forest renewal. That of course demanded that the amount of logging be decreased and more closely monitored.
All plans for sustainable forestry were foiled by a wave of calamities which hit the Šumava forests – first it was wind calamities between 1868 and 1870, followed by bark beetle calamities. Bark beetle spread very quickly and easily among the spruce monoculture. The first natural calamity began with a strong wind, which blew through Šumava on December 7, 1868 from 9am to 6pm. Apart from uprooting trees it also damaged many houses which were often wooden with shingle roofs. Another wave of strong winds came that same year around Christmas. Not even two years later, in the night from 26th to 27th October 1870 a similar calamity arrived. The amount of fallen timber was not processed in time, which led to the spread of the spruce bark beetle. The first great bark beetle infestation came in 1872. Even more destructive were the ones in 1874 and 1875. The only way to stop the spread of the beetle was removing and burning the bark from infected trees.
This era of repeating calamities is often described by Karel Klostermann in his works, for example in the short story Bark Beetle or the novel In the Paradise of Šumava, describing the everyday life full of hard work, but also the prosperity brought to the region by the removal of the damage caused:
And this incredible prosperity, this life full of hard work but also pleasure, was brought to them by a small beetle, a blessed animal which uprooted the old Šumava and which the learned men gave the name bark beetle!”
“In the woods, the work was never ending. Their silent peace was long gone; wood in all shapes and sizes, blocks and logs, brought to the water and carried away by it, there was no end to them. Even the smallest streams had dams built on them to cause them to overflow; even large logs were then given to them, which tore into banks and dug out soil on the pitiful streams.
The result still the same; the enviable people of Šumava were drowning in money. Big and small, each by his circumstance, farmers, smallholders, lodgers, servants, all shared in this wonderful abundance and a tiny beetle, which swarmed twice that year, was ensuring that these blessed days continue.”
“No pen can portray the eagerness with which they looked towards the moment when true winter comes, when the snow settles and mud solidifies under frost’s spell. Will that not be a prosperous time! – For it was those places, where the bark beetle hit the hardest and where most wood lied, that made it impossible to move them in summertime: it was there that the wood was threatened by rot and ruin. They knew well that there are unnumbered places they will not penetrate even in winter, where their animals would fall into bottomless chasms and cold depths covered by snow. Where the steep slopes, ravines and thickets make it impossible to move the large logs, smaller blocks will be chopped, slides will be made and the wood will be sent on them to valleys and waters, on which it will flow to lower regions as soon as the melting snows fill them; they will also flow towards sawmills, of which many shall be built. All this will require a number of hardworking hands and the work will be paid better and better. It will be hard work, full of horrors and danger, but that is what they were used to, that is what they were born to do; as long as it was rewarded! – They divided the work amongst themselves; who had nothing but their hands went to the forest to cut wood, who had a wagon would collect and deliver it cut to towns or rivers, where they would be tied into rafts. All were so preoccupied with these thoughts and hopes, that they almost forgot about agricultural work, paying it little mind and sparing little effort on it.”
Getting rid of the damages meant a lot of hard work and brought more workers into the region, often from as far as Salzburg, Tyrol, or even Italy. At the same time, more work meant more money and so, paradoxically, the calamities caused the increase in the local quality of life. But this did not last long. After the wood was processed, unemployment began to grow. It was made worse by the region now having many more inhabitants than before the calamities as well as by the fact that the ruined landscape took long to recover from its damages.
More complications were brought by the dramatic global political unfoldings in the first half of the 20th century. Both World Wars, the forced expulsion of German populations, who made up the majority of old residents in the region, the rise of the Iron Curtain and guarding of the border area changed the character of border Šumava dramatically.