Special Feature

Grümmer – A Coachbuilding Dynasty

Casey Annis

There is a saying, “an apple never falls far from its tree” and similarly a carrossier needs strong antecedents. The Grümmer family had been in the saddling and coachbuilding business long before the creation of the Grümmer company in Clichy, France, in 1924.

The oldest traceable origins of the family have been found in the region of Oldenburg, Lower Saxony. In about 1500, one of its members left for Hungary, and in 1541, fleeing the Turkish invasion, the family returned to settle in Aachen near the River Rhine in Germany. The French conquests of the region in the late 1700s made Aachen the capital of the department of the Roer (1797-1814) and therefore the Grümmer family became French. Around the same time, Michael-Wilhelm was appointed a maître de sellerie, or master saddler for Napoleon I, and one of his sons, born in 1811, was named Louis-Napoleon after the Emperor.

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