Page 193 - Upland Families, Elites and Communities

Innkeepers in Tyrol

(Lanzinger 2003, 69). Initially he worked as a butcher. At the beginning
of the 1740s, he leased the Papprian’s Inn. In 1744 he married for the sec-
ond time, to Helena Fuchs, the daughter of the wealthy baker Josef Fuchs
(stai,fb,k29,k49, 1700–1900). Shortly afterwards, in 1745, he bought
the Bär Inn for 3,900 gulden. He was also active as a carter. In the third
generation, his son Joseph Kopfsguter (1758–1805), the younger one, took
over the inn. He was also a butcher, like his father, and the owner of a
mine in Auronzo, in the neighbouring Venetian territory, which had be-
longed to his brother Josef Kopfsguter, the elder, who had died in the
meantime. In 1801, he owned three and a half houses and a few years lat-
er he bought the local spa. The inventory drawn up on his death in 1805
runs to 60 pages (stai, fb, k66 and k92, 1700–1900; tla, vbi 1783, 587;
1784,1086; 1792, 340;1797, 54;1804, 9).Itwas made as part of theprobate
proceedings. These show that the destinations of several other children
of this third generation and two grandchildren followed important tran-
sit and trade routes: the son Andrae was a master butcher in Trento, the
son Georg a master butcher in Pergine, the daughter Barbara was married
to an innkeeper in Blumau near Bolzano, and the daughter Helena to an
innkeeper ‘in Pettau in Lower Styria’ – that is, Ptuj in Slovenia. Grandson
Anton was a merchant’s apprentice in Krakow when his grandfather died,
and the grandson Josef was a barber in Venice.
Andrä Kopfsguter and his son Joseph always appear in the parish reg-
isters and in civil court sources as innkeepers and butchers. Invoices in
the municipal archives reveal their activities as freight forwarders. In 1796,
for example, the municipality of Innichen complained to the district of-
fice that Josef Kopfsguter was not willing to ‘provide his 11 leading horses’
(gai, fasc. 6/48, January 1796; Rogger 1986). This was probably a military
matter – Napoleon had occupied Lombardy and besieged Mantua in the
spring of 1796. This means that Kopfsguter had eleven horses in his stable.
In this respect, it can be assumed that the transport activity must have
been considerable. Among the customs registers in Klausen from the 1770s
onwards, there is a separate series on ‘overweights.’ These are registers that
record the fines imposed on those who passed through the customs station
with excessively heavy cargos. Most of these were probably wine consign-
ments. At first glance, one name stood out several times, and it was not a
very common one: Andrä Kopfsguter. It remains to be seen whether this
was in fact Andrä Kopfsguter from Innichen, as only the name is given.
Preliminary research of the court files suggests an area of activity and con-
tacts extending as far as Trento and Rovereto.

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