In 1890, a local girl named Minna fell in love with a young chocolate maker named Wilhelm. Minna’s father forbade her from seeing Wilhelm, so the two started secretly exchanging handwritten letters by leaving them in a knothole in the oak’s trunk. A year later, Minna’s father finally granted her permission to marry Wilhelm, and the two were wed on 2 June 1891 under the oak tree’s branches.

The story of the couple’s fairy-tale courtship spread, and soon, hopeful romantics throughout Germany who had no luck finding partners in biergartens or ballrooms began writing love letters to the Bridegroom’s Oak. The tree received so much mail that, in 1927, the German postal service, Deutsche Post, assigned the oak its own postcode and postman. It also placed a ladder up to the fist-sized postbox, so that anyone who wanted to open, read and respond to the letters could.

The only rule, Martens explained, is that if you open a letter you don’t want to answer, you should place it back in the tree for someone else to find.

A woman stops to read the mail sent to the oak tree, while her two dogs wait (Credit: Eliot Stein)

“The tree receives about 1,000 letters a year,” said Martin Grundler, spokesman for Deutsche Post. “Most come in the summertime. I suppose that’s when everyone wants to fall in love.”

For those sweet on someone specific, there’s a legend that says if a woman walks around the oak’s trunk three times under a full moon while thinking of her beloved, without speaking or laughing, she’ll marry within the year.

Today the Bridegroom’s Oak remains the only tree in the world with its own mailing address. Six days a week for the past 91 years, a postman has walked through the forest – rain, snow or shine – and climbed the ladder to stuff letters from starry-eyed singles into the tree. And no-one has ever delivered mail to the oak tree longer than Martens.

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