ABSTRACT
The ancient road that ran from Strasbourg westward over the Donon pass to Lorraine veered away from the Bruche Valley at Schirmeck some three miles north of Rothau, a circumstance that accounts in part for the isolation and the poverty of the Ban de la Roche. In 1778 John Frederic Oberlin organized the Agricultural Society of the Ban de la Roche. Oberlin was always acutely aware of the physical needs of his people and was intent on helping to alleviate them, but there were times when he was uncertain about the priority of ameliorative steps to be taken and impatient about the slowness of progress toward improvement. Near the end of the first year of his ministry, he seems to have laid before Stuber a plan of action to improve the physical conditions of life by putting the people to work at unaccustomed industrial projects.
