park dr. Mellin

Auguste Melin is an Andennais born on May 14, 1868. He died in his hometown on December 4, 1933.

It was thanks to the financial well-being of his parents, who had a butcher's shop on the Grand-Rue, that Auguste received his higher education. After his classical humanities (which he first attended at the secondary school of Andenne and which he completed in Namur), he started his medical studies at the University of Leuven. It was mainly the social aspect of the profession that attracted him. He was described as being close to his patients, always listening to them, at their service and not interested in money at all. He practiced medicine for 40 years.

A very cultivated man, he had a deep interest in other areas: folklore, history, toponymy and the dialect of his birthplace and region.

Doctor Melin also devoted his spare time to writing down the gossip of his region in detail (he made more than 2000 maps with 9000 words and full of "spots", sentences and folkloric descriptions). These cards were presented in 1926 to J. Haust, professor at the University of Liège. His profession as a doctor made him travel extensively throughout the region and gave him the opportunity to converse in Walloon with people of all social categories. He studied and wrote down everything he heard. He lamented the gradual disappearance of Wallonia because of the looming supremacy of an often erroneous French. In 1925 he wrote, entirely in Walloon, "Marie-Agnès Defrene, history of an Andenne family in the eighteenth century". This work, written in his precious patois, was never published, but was typed by J. Dernoncourt and is kept in the municipal ceramics museum of Andenne. This work describes the first happy and miserable life of the heroine, but especially the life of the city of Andenne in the 18th century. Another version of this novel was written, the translation of the first into French, and entitled "Adrien le Bedel".

It was in 1928, when he was 60 years old, that his most important work "History of the city and the ban d'Andenne" (a 350-page book in which he traced the history and folklore of this city) was published.

The year of his death, his "Toponymie d'Andenne" was published in "Le guecteur wallon".

There was also a historical work that was never published. Entitled "Andennais Scenes of the 18th Century", it is kept in the Municipal Ceramics Museum of Andenne.

Extract from Adrien le Bedel:

" How beautiful was the town of Andenne, with its green decoration of meadows and fields, in its wide belt of hills and forests, when no high chimney obscured the sky with clouds of smoke, when no quarry its ancient rocks! […]

How beautiful it was, especially in June, in that splendid season when the foliage of its forests had reached their full bloom without losing the youth of their color, where in the meadows the mown hay piled up in fragrant "meuliaux" " where hundreds of swifts, dwellers of its bell towers, in the direction of the Vespre, chased in all directions in the azure sky, sounding their joyful whistles! "

Extract from Andennaise scenes from the 18th century:

" Thus, in the 18th century, the village of Andenne was so small, but so beautiful, so famous, so visited that for centuries it had been given the title "Municipium primae famae": city with a first-class reputation . "

Word:

“ The love of the fatherland is only the extension of the special affection for the native soil with which it began in the child's heart: it is a deep attachment to his small town, the old town. Sainte Begge, […] ”

Willem Vandenameele