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Kleindeutschland The Age of Gold and the Age of Bronze have given place to the Age of Iron. . . . Iron is a great power in the present age. It is revolutionizing the world . . . the uses of the metal are endless, and its supply almost inexhaustible. —Merchants’ Magazine and Commercial Review, 1854 T1Y K laipeda, the hometown of Julius Kroehl, is a small city of just over 187,000 people. It is a busy place, with ships loading and discharging cargoes 24 hours a day, year-round, in this ice-free eastern Baltic harbor. It is Lithuania’s only port. Until the end of World War II, Klaipeda was the German settlement of Memel. Memel once lay in the Kingdom of Prussia, occupied lands wrested from Poland and Lithuania following centuries of war and colonization. Ostpreußen, or East Prussia, where Memel is situated, came under Hohenzollern sovereignty in 1772 as a province of the kingdom, and largely remained under German control until the end of World War II. One of the oldest German enclaves in East Prussia was Memelland, a territory on the banks of the Memel River near the Baltic Sea. Memel prospered as a strategically located port on the Baltic, although it was not in the Hanseatic League or on a major trade route.1 Memel joined the province of East Prussia in 1773 and entered a period of economic growth as the northernmost German city in Europe, 91 miles north of the port of Königsberg. The key to Memel’s success was its role in the British timber trade. Britain’s large forests began to vanish in the eighteenth century in the face of increased city and town construction and an expanding fleet of merchant and naval vessels. To fulfill its needs, Britain turned to two ready sources—the Baltic and North America. Because of its relative proximity, the Baltic dominated 1 2 the trade through the early-nineteenth century.2 By the time the British began to dominate the timber trade, Memel, only 1,100 nautical miles from England’s eastern shores, had assumed a leading role as a timber trade port.3 High duties in Riga, the region’s greatest port, induced British merchants to bypass Riga in favor of Memel. As part of a strategy to control as much of the trade as they could, British merchants established branch offices in Memel, created strong partnerships with native Memellander merchants, in time even intermarrying, and built steam-powered sawmills in Memel to boost its output. The flow of timber was immense no matter how it was measured—in 1762, when British timber ships started calling in greater numbers, 133 vessels arrived at Memel. By 1788, 784 timber ships loaded at Memel, which remained the average for the remainder of the eighteenth century until disrupted by the Napoleonic Wars. In 1804, 831 ships arrived at Memel.4 The ships that called for timber arrived with a wide variety of British manufactures and “colonial wares”—woolens, sugar, coffee, tea, and tobacco, which along with corn, hemp, and flax filled the warehouses of Memel’s merchants. The town was described in 1854: “The quays and streets relay a lively scene and a motley throng in the trading season,—German and Russian merchants, English, French and Dutch captains and sailors,—Lithuanian boatmen, foresters and farmers,— Jew dealers and pedlars, and occasionally some country people.”5 Historian Robert Greenhalgh Albion, writing on the timber trade, describes Memel and other Baltic timber ports as dreary seaports crowded with warehouses filled with “timber and corn . . . whose inhabitants lived almost entirely in a world of contracts, discounts and demurrages.”6 One of Memel’s merchants was Jacob Kröhl (also spelled Kroehl or Krehl), born in Memel in 1751 and married in 1776 to Anna Susanna Rosenbergerin. The family’s origins may be Scottish Jacobite, or Scots introduced to the area through the lumber trade and Scotland’s maritime ties to the Baltic. They may have been the descendants of John Crail, who emigrated from Scotland around 1660. Crail was living in Königsberg in 1676 under the name Johann Krehl. A petition for citizenship noted that although he was a foreigner, he had settled in Prussia as a boy and had carried on his business for nearly 16 years. He had a son who, as of 1682, was considered a citizen.7 The destruction and loss of many of Prussia’s and specifically Memel’s early records through war leaves gaps that...

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