Rumford House: The American Count Who Made a Park
Why is it significant?
Walk up to the small, pale building with the classical front, standing among the trees not far from the wooden pagoda of the Chinese Tower. Today it is a nature and culture centre where children come to learn about plants and animals.
Key Facts
| Place | Rumford House: The American Count Who Made a Park |
|---|---|
| Address | Englischer Garten, 80538 München, Germany |
| Geo Coordinates | 48.15420, 11.59150 |
| Part of Walk | River and Meadow: Munich's Isar, the Angel of Peace & the English Garden |
| Generated | Generated |
Walk up to the small, pale building with the classical front, standing among the trees not far from the wooden pagoda of the Chinese Tower. Today it is a nature and culture centre where children come to learn about plants and animals. But its name belongs to one of the strangest careers in European history.
The Rumfordschlössl was built in 1791 as an officers' mess for the garden in its earliest form. It is named after Benjamin Thompson, born in 1753 in Massachusetts, who sided with the British in the American Revolution and had to leave his homeland. He ended up in Munich, in the service of Elector Karl Theodor, reorganising the Bavarian army... and then, it seems, reorganising everything else.
Thompson was a physicist, an inventor and a social reformer all at once. He designed more efficient stoves and fireplaces, pushed Bavarians to eat the potato, which many still regarded with suspicion, and invented a cheap, nourishing soup for the poor that is still known as Rumford soup. On New Year's Day 1790 he had Munich's beggars gathered up and sent to a workhouse, where they were fed and made to work: humane for its time, ruthless by ours.
He also believed that soldiers should have gardens to grow vegetables, and that the people needed fresh air. That idea, proposed in 1789, became the English Garden. In 1792 he was made a count of the Holy Roman Empire and took the name Rumford, after the town in New Hampshire where he had married. Later he left Munich, helped found the Royal Institution in London, and died near Paris in 1814.
So the most Bavarian of parks, with its beer and brass bands, was dreamed up by an American loyalist with a passion for soup. Now leave the house and follow the paths north through the meadows and over the stream, towards the open water of the park's lake.