History of the Building & the Pharmacy @museum.de

The light box features a display detailing the history of the building and the pharmacy. On the left, there’s a land registry map from 1832. The area marked in red shows that, as a former monastic property, the pharmacy stood on a plot owned by the Benedictine monastery in Neustadt am Main. In terms of passing traffic, the location (in a side street) was not very convenient. But the large apothecary garden made up for that disadvantage, since it could be used to grow medicinal herbs.

The pharmacy is the oldest locally and the third oldest in the modern district of Main-Spessart. It was rare for a small village like Marktheidenfeld, with around a thousand residents at the time, to have a pharmacy at all. For comparison: the much larger city of Würzburg only had two chemists during that period. One possible explanation is that in the first half of the 18th century, Marktheidenfeld was thriving. Wealthy wine merchants had settled here and created a demand for a pharmacy. The impressive town houses in Marktheidenfeld still bear witness to that period – for example, the Franck Haus in Untertorstraße.

In the light box on the right, we’ve detailed history of the pharmacy. The time line shows when it was bought, along with the change in ownership. Pharmacists based here are highlighted in green, while any who worked temporarily at another location are highlighted in yellow. We’ve linked the dates to major local occurrences or general historical events. That’s the information on a white background.

We know the names of all 18 owners of the pharmacy from 1750 onwards. The following circumstances helped us to track them down. Until the end of feudalism, that is, until the Revolution of 1848, all tradespeople, including the owners of the local pharmacy, had to pay a tithe – a ten percent tax – to the feudal lord, who was at the top of the ownership pyramid. Those payments were meticulously recorded. These tithe registers proved a mine of useful information, enabling us to assemble this timeline.

Your search for clues continues at the next stop, which is right opposite.