Discovering Sausheim

Start in front of the Saint Laurent church in Sausheim, dating from 1865 and rebuilt in 1951 following the destruction caused by the Liberation battles in 1944-45 (see explanatory panels under the arcades on the right of the church).

Poets' footbridge over the Quatelbach. This river, which was probably built in the Middle Ages to supply the villages and mills of Modenheim, Sausheim, Baldersheim, Battenheim and Adolsheim (no longer in existence), branches off from the Ill just outside Mulhouse, at the Nouveau Bassin. It joins the Ill again at Ensisheim. Its name comes from Catherine de Bourgogne (Katel in German), wife of the Duke of Austria. It was she who improved the river in 1401, at the time when Ensisheim was the capital of the former Austria (Habsburg possession in Upper Alsace and Baden).

It manufactured felts for industry and employed up to 1200 people in 1960. It is now occupied by the municipal technical services, an after-school facility and a cultural complex, Eden.

Hansi roundabout, in honour of Jean-Jacques Waltz (1873-1951), Alsatian cartoonist, caricaturist and poet known as Hansi. A 200m round trip allows you to see the old turbine of the Dollfus-Noack factory on the Quatelbach (n°5).

This river, the backbone of Alsace, is 217 km long between its source at Winkel (Alsatian Jura) and its confluence with the Rhine a little downstream from Strasbourg. At this ford, in 1917, the Germans had a 300 m long wooden bridge built by Romanian prisoners, which the inhabitants of Sausheim ironically called Abseckelbrucka (bridge of the debacle, see explanatory marker).

In 1889, the turbine of the Dollfus-Noack company replaced the old Sausheim mill on the Quatelbach, which was already present in the Middle Ages (explanatory plaque). Return to the Hansi roundabout.

The pumping station is located on the edge of the departmental road 55, known as the Peugeot road. This installation pumps wastewater from Sausheim and Illzach to the Mulhouse SIVOM treatment plant located near the Peugeot factories, in the Hardt forest.

Site of a military captive balloon in 1939, which allowed the Rhine border to be observed (see explanatory marker 50 m to the right of the footbridge over the Quatelbach).

After walking along the Quatelbach and through a housing estate, you can see the geodesic stele called Gupfel in Alsatian. This obelisk was built in 1804 by Napoleon I to "serve as a map of Helvetia and to determine the size of the Earth". The obelisk, located at the southern end of a 19 km measuring line ending in Oberhergheim, was also used as the zero point for the Alsace-Lorraine hiking route coordinate system for the German land register of 1884.

See explanatory marker near the bridge over the Quatelbach.

It used to be called s'Sardinless because at the end of the 19th century it was possible to taste sardines coming directly from Le Havre (see explanatory marker).

This building, which dates from 1842 and was the former school, is situated on the main street of the village (Grand'Rue), which was once surrounded on both sides by a water drainage channel, and where a tramway called Glettisa (iron) ran between 1885 and 1957, because of the shape of the first locomotives that linked Mulhouse to Ensisheim.