For this reason, my grandfather sent him for a short while away from Uckerath to the Latin school of a very strict disciplinarian pastor in the village of Oberpleis. He is described as being, up to his fifteenth year, an exceptionally bright boy, always up to some pranks and giving much trouble by his high spirits to the pastor, the mayor, and other prominent citizens of Uckerath and its neighborhood. My father went to the public school in Uckerath, and later on for a short time to the high school in Cologne. The Dietzgen's were one of the oldest families in the valley of the Sieg, and the chronicle of the county seat Siegburg mentions some Dietzgen's in the capacity of civil councillors and master tradesmen as far back as 1674. My father was the eldest of three brothers and two sisters and resembled more than any of them his mother, a woman of high endowment, who at the age of 74 still attracted attention by her beautiful and stalwart appearance. It owed its relatively busy life to the fact that it was a relay station on the postal route between Francfort and Cologne, which was then much frequented. My grandfather, who was a well-to-do master tanner and a genuine little bourgeois, transferred his tannery, about the year 1835, to the nearby village of Uckerath, a place of about four hundred inhabitants. A part of the walls and four massive ruins of towers of the old stronghold still lend a picturesque character to the landscape, the effect being heightened by the location of Blankenberg high upon a mountain covered with woods and vineyards, at the foot of which the Sieg, a charming tributary of the Rhine, winds its way. The place is a former stronghold of a robber baron, romantically situated. My father, Joseph Dietzgen, was born in Blankenberg, near Cologne, Germany, on December 9, 1828.
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