Our Story

In 1882, the ancestors of today's owner, Anton Schüle, came into possession of the land and grounds of the estate. Farmhouses had already stood in the area around the present buildings long before that. The Martinsteinhiesli itself was built in 1620, according to the cornerstone above the cellar door. Remains of old walls were also found near what is now known as the Martinstein (Martin's Stone). This is the legend behind it:

Legend has it that high above the Reichenbach valley, at a place called the "Hohgrund," lived a farmer named Martin Späth, the finest plowman in the area. Every evening he said his prayers at a great stone not far from his farm, and in time the stone came to be called the Martinstein - Martin's Stone. Old tales say you can still make out the imprint of his knee, the tip of his walking stick, and his rosary, worn into the rock by years of daily prayer. Martin claimed to hear a bell tolling from the valley each evening, even though no church stood there yet - a bell, he believed, rung from heaven itself - and whenever he heard it he would set down his work and hurry to the stone to give thanks. Once, distracted by the harvest, he missed his usual prayer, and the bell fell silent for him for eight long days; when his neighbors mocked him as a man chasing an illusion, he declared that if his faith were true, a sickle thrown into the sky would stay there for as long as he could still hear the bell ring. He threw it upward - and, so the story goes, it hung there before everyone's eyes like a second moon. As a reward for his steadfast devotion, it was revealed to him at the stone that piety would never die out on his farm at the Hohgrund - and the Martinstein still stands above the valley today as a witness to that promise.

The stone is not the only trace Martin Späth left behind - there is also the church that still stands in Gengenbach's cemetery. Sensing his death approaching, Martin gathered his household and told them that the farm's finest cow would soon bear two black calves, born to grow up untouched by any yoke. Once he had died, these young bulls were to pull his funeral cart, and wherever they chose to stop and rest along the way, a marker was to be raised: first a small wayside shrine, then a forest chapel, and finally, at their third and last stop, his grave and a church built in honor of St. Martin. Everything happened just as he had foretold. When the townsfolk tried instead to build the church closer to Gengenbach, the building timber was mysteriously found back at the original spot every morning, until the attempt was abandoned for good. The church that stands today, surrounded by generations of graves, still bears witness to Martin's dying wish. The original 13-stanza German poem, "Der Martinstein," can be read in full on the German version of this page.