Friedrich Puschke

Puschkes were already numerous in and around Steinort in the 18th century. Almost all of them, like most people in the area, worked as ownerless farm workers for the Lehndorffs.^[1] A Friedrich and a Johann Puschke were among the men from the Lehndorff estates, who were drafted to the 1st East Prussian Infantry Regiment and fought in the Napoleonic Wars. A Puschke was also registered in 1811 as a coachman of the Lehndorffs. However, he earned little more than most of the servants.^[2]

A few, however, achieved social advancement through education. One of them was Friedrich Puschke, who was born in 1811. From 1835 at the latest, he was the only teacher who educated students at the school in Groß Steinort. Of course, being a teacher was not too easy either. Of the few he earned from teaching, Friedrich Puschke could not feed himself and his family of many. Like other teachers in the region, he had therefore been allocated farmland by the landlord in order to grow crops on it. Because the plots allocated to him were far apart and were also too little fertile, Friedrich Puschke turned to the “most gracious” and “high-born count” in 1854 “with a submissive request”: The land assigned to the school was “distributed in three fields within such distance from the estate that the other teachers can probably have done half their field work before I can get there. If I want to look at my fields in one day, which is often necessary, I have to face a path of almost a mile. But this is not the only, not even the biggest disadvantage. It is mainly the unfavourable location of the land that very often causes me significant losses. This applies in particular to the plots at the small Eichwald and at the Orgelberg.