Franz Balthasar Schönberg von Brenkenhoff (1723-1780) was a Prussian secret financial adviser. He was the head of the Netze District and the builder of the Bromberger Kanal.
Life
The von Brenkenhoff family, originating from Westphalia, owned the Gorenzen estate near Mansfeld in the beginning of the 17th century. Franz's ancestor, Nikolaus von Brenkenhoff was the first of the ligneage to carry a title of nobility in the mid-17th century.
Franz Balthasar Schönberg was born on 15 June 1723 in Reideburg, near Halle. He was the eldest son of Christine Sabine von Barsewisch, who died at a young age, and Julius, a rittmeister in the Austrian army, who died in 1738 fighting the Turks in Hungary. Two of Balthasar's brothers died at war.
As a young boy, he was left without a family or a livelihood. He entered the service of Leopold I, Prince of Anhalt-Dessau as a page. He gained recognition and respect from Leopold I, who entrusted him with carrying out works related to drainage and wet land reclamations on the Elbe river. Hence, while working with Materne, a Prussian engineer and builder, he learned the science of land development, performing measurements and leveling the soil. Furthermore, Franz acquired knowledge about horse breeding: he became very rich with this business. Thanks for this expertise, in 1745, he was appointed to the position of Master of the Horse of the Grand Duchy of Anhalt-Dessau.
There, he took up agriculture farming in the principality and was nominated as the director of the Economic Chamber. With increasing cultivated surfaces and obtaining higher yields, the financial situation of the principality stabilized. The accumulated reserves helped supplying Frederick the Great's army in preparation of the Battle of Torgau (1760) during the Seven Years' War. It is highly likely that Balthasar's economic successes got him to enter civil service of the Kingdom of Prussia.
In June 1762, Franz von Brenkenhoff was appointed as a secret financial advisor and a member of the war and finance councils. He was de facto the president of the governmental districts of Pomerania and Neumark. During his assignment, he dealt mainly with the reconstruction of cities ravaged the by war and the land drainage on the Noteć river combined with its using for agricultural crops. His seat was then in Drezdenko, where he will have his estate built afterwards.
In particular he developed and intensified crops culture: along the Warta river from 1763; in the area around the Miedwie lake () in 1769; in the Thurbruch region (a bogland area in the east of Usedom island) in 1771; in Plön's lowlands in 1774.
Founder of the Netze District
Shortly before the First Partition of Poland on 6 February 1772, Frederick the Great assigned him the secret mission to determine the potential and the economic conditions of the future annexed Polish lands. To that end, Brenkenhoff contacted Countess Skórzewska, one of his acquaintances. He visited her at the Lubostroń Palace in spring 1772, while collecting demography data in the area.
Franz was also interested in the condition of waterways, especially the Noteć river, which annual floodings were regularly destroying the crops at the Skórzewski's Palace. It may have been the initial trigger for him to devise a link between the Noteć and the Brda rivers. He reported his observations to Frederick II in June 1772, during a meeting which took place in Bydgoszcz, where the monarch stopped on his way from Königsberg. Once the First Partition achieved, the territory boarding the Noteć River became part of the Kingdom of Prussia: Brenkenhoff was then responsible for establishing the borders and the administrative divisions of the annexed lands. In 1772, he led the seizure commission for the Netze District (-) as a representative of the king and received the homage of the estates in Inowroclaw.
The initial Prussian plan was to incorporate the new areas into the Neumark-East Brandenburg region, with Kostrzyn nad Odrą as the administrative main city. A different scheme was presented by von Brenkenhoff in February 1773: he suggested the creation of a new district with Bydgoszcz/Bromberg as its administrative seat. The rationale for this proposal was the expected economic boom of the entire area, thanks to the construction of the Bydgoszcz Canal.