Transcript: #4 Art Nouveau House

Jeanne Devos

Arrived at location 4, we look back to the period from 1880 to 1930. In «Sägholz» below the village Konrad Schläpfer ran a so called «Ferggerei», an intermediate trade. This antique-sounding term is best explained by Walter Sonderegger. His son still runs a modern embroidery in the hamlet of Nasen, on the road to the neighbor village Wald. Walter, who exactly were these middlemen?

«The orders came from the manufacturers and the export houses in the city of St. Gallen. The ‘Fergger’, the middleman, went to the embroidery exchange in town every Wednesday, collected the orders, and then distributed them to the local embroiderers.»

The middleman usually worked on behalf of textile merchants as a link between trade and craft. He organized the transport of raw materials to the home workers, checked their work, paid their wages, collected the semi-finished or finished products again, and delivered them back to the merchants in the city. Unfortunately, the embroiderers often earned little at the end of this chain:

«The embroiderer himself was rarely in a good position, the better earnings were made by the middleman and entrepreneurs. In good times, when the embroiderers could build houses, they earned enough. But some of them exaggerated and became poor again.

It is said that in the Rhine Valley - where embroidery was practiced like mad - there were middlemen and factory-owners who lit their cigars with notes. But many of them ended up with nothing. My father told me that (as an embroiderer) you could work very hard from morning to night and still get a poor wage only.»

Besides working as an intermediary, Konrad Schläpfer also built up his own embroidery factory. Today it serves as a tractor museum. From 1902 to 1909 he was also mayor. In 1911 he built the «Villa Erika», in front of which you are standing now, for his own residential purposes in the Art Nouveau style. His granddaughter Heidy Rohner lived in the house herself until a few years ago. It is the only representative house from the textile era in Rehetobel. Since the village was almost exclusively a manufacturing area and there was hardly any long-distance trade, there are no palaces or villas of big industrialists. The «Villa Erika» has been preserved in its original condition and is now owned by the cooperative «Krone», a retirement and nursing home. Since the embroidery industry was heavily dependent on economic fluctuations, some factory owners and middlemen assumed social responsibility in the village. They financed smaller building projects such as road or canal construction to provide an income for the embroiderers who became unemployed again and again. Some infrastructure was built as so called «emergency works», for example the large gym. The factory owner Tobler even went one step further. His granddaughter Klara Streiff vividly remembers her grandfather's humanitarian attitude:

«In Grub (a neighbor village) he also owned a factory where work was done on knitting machines during a time when production went well. There was a flat above the factory which he rented to a family with five children. The husband was brought home dead one day. Tobler let the widow, a midwife, live there with the children free of charge as long as she wanted to stay. Without this help, the woman would not have known how to make ends meet with her many children. I learned this later by a daughter. At that time there was no widow's pension or other financial support. You couldn't ask for it at the municipality either.»

At the beginning of the 20th century embroidery dominated Rehetobel and triggered a building boom. Between 1900 and 1910 seventy new homes were built and many new quarters emerged. The village acquired its distinctive face as a textile village. The downside of the economic boom was the large amount of child labour that could be observed in many places. Erna Fischer, the daughter of an embroiderer, can tell of these dark times:

«My mother, who grew up in Kaien, attended the village school in the morning, and threaded with a hand embroiderer in the afternoon. When she came home in the evening, she had to mend socks and stockings for the whole family. She had little time to be a child or to play. That was different with us, we had time to play. Laws already existed in my mother's time. Child labour was forbidden. But the embroiderers were very clever about it, my mother told me. Was the inspector in the village, the news spread quickly among the embroiderers. That afternoon the children were taken to the wife upstairs. As soon as the inspector left, they had to go back down to the embroidery basement to work. This was how the law was circumvented.»

Only with later factory laws towards the middle of the 20th century child labour in Rehetobel was definitively banned. If you now continue along the Oberstrasse, you will reach position 5 at house no. 12.