At the outset, I should point out that this is not about the current president, Clinton, but about John Quincy Adams, who in 1797 was the U.S. ambassador to Prussia. From 1809 to 1814 he was ambassador to Russia, and from 1815 to 1817 ambassador to Great Britain. His diplomatic career culminated in his election as president of the United States for the 1825–1829 term. While serving as ambassador in Berlin, on 17 July 1800 he began a seven-week tourist journey through Silesia, travelling via Frankfurt, Krosno Odrzańskie, Zielona Góra, Kożuchów, Szprotawa, Bolesławiec and Lwówek to Jelenia Góra and the Karkonosze Mountains. He visited many Silesian towns, recording his impressions in the form of letters to his brother Thomas.
These letters contain many interesting observations by Adams about life in the surrounding towns, including Bolesławiec.
Letter written on 27 July 1800: "...The main handicraft of Bolesławiec is pottery, chiefly the production of brown coffee pots, many of which you have seen in the inns of Berlin and the Electorate. There are nine potters in Bolesławiec, each employing six to eight workers. We saw them making large pots, in which they usually store butter. From a cube of clay approximately one foot thick, they make a pot in five minutes, shaping it solely by hand while it turns on a kind of wheel set before them. We could not watch for long, because they work in the same room where the kilns for firing the products are heated, and the heat was unbearable. In the workshop yard stands a huge pot, made about half a century ago, with a capacity of approximately fifty bushels. It is roughly twelve feet high, bulges like a barrel, and is kept in a special room..." This is therefore one of the few surviving accounts of the famous 1753 vessel made by Johan Gothlieb Joppe. (ŻB) "The greatest curiosity of Bolesławiec, however, is represented by two mechanical geniuses, Jakub and Huetting, a carpenter and a weaver—the closest of neighbours. The former built a machine in which, by means of a clockwork mechanism, six-inch-high puppets move, depicting scenes from the Passion of Christ. Christ is shown praying in the Garden of Gethsemane with three sleeping apostles. In the final scene, Christ lies in the tomb guarded by two Roman soldiers. The intervening scenes depict Judas’s betrayal, Jesus’s interrogation by Caiaphas, Pilate’s conversation with the Jews, Peter’s denial, the scourging and the crucifixion. All of this is accompanied by mournful music..." Adams mentions that this moving nativity display made a great impression on him.
Thus, like Wambierzyce and Bardo Śląskie, Bolesławiec had its own attraction in the form of a moving nativity display, but all trace of it has disappeared. Adams continues: "The weaver Huetting, with a similar or even greater talent for mechanics, used it differently. ...The walls of his house are covered with maps depicting the course of the Oder, with the towns and villages through which it flows. Here are the mountains of Switzerland, there the mountains of Silesia, through which he travelled. In one room stand two enormous tables, one above the other; on one he has arranged all the towns and more important localities of Germany, and on the other those of all Europe. They are placed according to their geographical positions..." In the second room, Huetting placed a huge machine demonstrating the Copernican system of the universe. It is constructed so that the entire firmament of fixed stars revolves around our solar system once every twenty-four hours, thereby always showing precisely the stars’ positions in relation to the Earth. Inside, he placed all the planets belonging to our system, with their several satellites, as well as all the comets observed during the last three centuries. In the third room he has another machine showing the various phases of the Moon, as well as the phases of Jupiter’s satellites, the apparent movement of the Sun around the Earth and the actual movement of the Earth around the Sun." We therefore learn from Adams that Bolesławiec had an original private astronomical observatory, which unfortunately has not survived to this day.
Adams does not give the name of the street or the building where it was located. Perhaps some traces of it might still have remained.
"Before leaving the town, it is worth informing you that this is the birthplace of Opitz. Although he lived less than a hundred years ago, he is regarded as the father of German poetry. They call him the Swan of the Bóbr, just as the English call Shakespeare the Swan of Avon..."
From these selected passages of Adams’s letters, we have learned many interesting things about the town and its people at the beginning of the nineteenth century. I took this information from the book "Letters on Silesia", published by the University of Wrocław in 1992, which I recommend to our readers as holiday reading.