Amalienhütte near Bad Laasphe

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The former Amalienhütte near Bad Laasphe was one of the younger huts in Wittgensteiner Land when it was opened by the Jung family in 1850. However, iron smelting and processing at this location went back to the early 18th century. It was very common in the mining industry to observe that such locations were used over a longer period of time due to their natural advantages, such as abundance of water to drive the blowers and hammers, as well as abundance of wood for the production of charcoal for smelters and smithies.

The early use

Count Henrich Albrecht zu Sayn-Wittgenstein-Hohenstein (1658–1723) granted on April 6, 1707 the trades Johann Henrich, Wilhelm Heidersdorf, Antonius Bergmann and Hans-Georg Wittich, who came from Dillenburg, a concession to build an iron hammer on the Niederlaasphe pond. These trades had sufficient experience in the iron and steel industry and also had the necessary capital to set up and operate an ironworks. The sovereign supported the construction of the iron hammer with financial benefits. He demanded only 20 Reichstaler for the purchase of the necessary timber from the sovereign forests for the construction of the hammer, the coal shed and the houses. The trades also only needed to pay a low water interest rate for ongoing operations. The hammer went into operation on September 1, 1707 with two stoves and initially produced bar iron for further processing.

The iron hammer changed hands several times before it was acquired by the Jung family in 1847. The last operators were the pharmacist Dören from Dillenburg from 1835 until his bankruptcy in 1845 and then Prince Alexander von Sayn-Wittgenstein, who had acquired it in a foreclosure sale for 4,951 thalers in the same year.

The Jung family and the Amalienhütte

After the failed lease of the Neuhütte in 1845, Johann Jakob Jung did not give up his plan to run another hut. He used his good contacts from his time as Wittgenstein mine director, and negotiated with the Sayn-Wittgensteiner princely family to acquire the iron hammer. JJ Jung acted very far-sightedly, as the available wood resources in Nassau for the production of charcoal for the blast furnace operation continued to decline and severely restricted continuous smelting operations. The Principality of Wittgenstein, on the other hand, still had sufficient wood reserves for the production of charcoal.

After the death of Johann Jakob Jung in January 1847, his wife Amalie (1782–1850), a daughter of the Nassau procurator Carl Christian Becker (1742–1802), was the sole heir to the JJ Jung company with the support of her sons and sons-in-law continued to acquire the iron hammer. Her son-in-law August Herwig (1798–1859), who was married to her eldest daughter Louise (1806–1877), was able to successfully conclude the negotiations. The purchase agreement came about on October 1, 1847. The Princely House sold the Niederlaaspher Hammer to the wife, widowed hut inspector Jung, for the amount of 4,695 thalers. The contract included the house, hammer and courtyard and all of the buildings on top of it, in particular the house, iron chamber, the hammer itself, coal bottle with attached wooden bottle, barn with adjoining pigsty and bakery . In addition, the contract stipulated that a steelworks had to be built on the site and that it would be kept in operation continuously.

The construction of the blast furnace plant was delayed, however, because the baron Karl Franz Adolf von Wittengestein (1809–1866), as the operator of the Friedrichshütte, feared competitive disadvantages and raised an objection to the responsible mining authority in Bonn . After this was rejected, the building permit for the ironworks was granted on December 30, 1848. The following year, the Jung family built the blast furnace and renewed the hammer mill. The first tapping took place on February 16, 1850 in the presence of Amalie Jung and the blast furnace was named "Amalienhütte" in her honor.

The Amalienhütte, like the Eibelshäuser Hütte, employed 20 workers. The iron ore came from the Scheldt Forest, where the Jung family owned numerous mines. In 1851, the Amalienhütte was already producing 26,000 quintals of pig iron valued at 39,000 thalers. The connected rod hammer produced 383 quintals of rod iron with a sales value of 1,595 thalers. In 1866, the hut consisted of a metalworking shop and a molding shop for the production of the casting molds, in addition to the blast furnace. The number of employees rose continuously and was 111 workers in 1875 and 269 workers and 10 salaried employees in 1897.

The Amalienhütte traded together with the Eibelshäuser Hütte as JJ Jung . An advertisement by the company in the manual of the efficiency of the entire industry in Germany, Austria, Alsace-Lorraine and Switzerland from 1873 provides the following information on production and the products manufactured:

Blast furnace operations, cast iron factory, hammer mill operations, machines = factory deliver:

1. Pig iron from the best ores from Nassau and blown purely from charcoal.

2. Ovens, stoves, machine parts, garden furniture and various cast goods - elegant shape and thin cast with excellent durability, cast directly from the blast furnace.

In 1883, the Jung family incorporated the Amalienhütte into the newly founded Hesse-Nassau Hüttenverein (HNHV). In 1883 it put the first cupola furnaces for the production of cast iron into operation. Crucial for the further development of cottage opening was railway line from Cölbe near Marburg to Laasphe in 1883. The Amalie hut finally received the required rail connection from the family young and was therefore with the important railway in the Main-Weser Railway connected. In 1889, the section to Kreuztal also went into operation, which finally gave a direct connection to the Ruhr area, so that the coke needed to heat the cupola furnaces could be obtained cheaply by rail from there.

The Amalienhütte was one of the last smelters in the Lahn-Dill region to shut down its charcoal blast furnace at the end of the 1880s and transformed into a pure foundry with two cupola furnaces that produced 13 tons of cast iron a day for machine, furnace and hearth construction . Like the other HNHV smelters, it now had to obtain its cast iron from outside suppliers and was therefore heavily dependent on the economic fluctuations in the pig iron market. Only with the commissioning of the Oberscheld blast furnace by the HNHV in 1905 could it fall back on the Group's own pig iron production.

The transfer of the Amalienhütte to the Buderus Group

The Amalienhütte remained an important location within the Hesse-Nassau Hüttenverein until the transition to the Buderus Group in 1932. The HNHV invested in the modernization of all of its locations in the 1920s, but ran into considerable financial difficulties during the global economic crisis . As a result of his excessive indebtedness, he had to enter into an interest group with Buderus'sche Eisenwerke in 1932 and was finally taken over by Buderus in 1935 with the Amalienhütte.

Buderus expanded production at the Amalienhütte, which in 1938 produced 40 ovens and 20 stoves a day. In addition, she produced commercial castings such as frames, front panels, cornices for tiled stoves, machine parts and stands. The products were mainly supplied to the Netherlands and Switzerland. During the Second World War, the Amalienhütte was increasingly involved in the production of armaments.

The Amalienhütte was able to significantly expand its stove and oven production during the reconstruction in the 1950s, but as early as 1958, with the increasing importance of central heating and oil and gas stoves, traditional oven production was discontinued. Buderus gradually relocated and concentrated production on other more cost-effective locations within the group and the Amalienhütte came under increasing cost pressure. The last cupola furnace was shut down in 1968. The Amalienhütte only took on commissioned work from the other locations. However, its operation became more and more unprofitable and it was finally shut down in 1975 as a result of an internal restructuring process.

The current location of the Amalienhütte

Today only a few buildings of the former Amalienhütte still exist. The works apartment of the hut director, a production building, a transformer station and the weighing house are still in front of the works entrance. In addition, parts of the siding and the former ironworks station are still present.

The transformer station from 1924 is a successor from 1923 and was initially part of the ring line of the Hessen-Nassau overland control center operated by the Jung family. It supplied the Amalienhütte with electrical energy. Later this station was the end point of three network networks, namely from the Nassauische Energiegesellschaft mbH in Oberscheld, the Zweckverband Überlandwerk Ederstalsperre and the electricity association Büren-Brilon-Wittgenstein, which jointly supplied the hut with electricity. The transformer house is now home to a technical steelwork museum. It is the only museum on the site of the formerly numerous huts in the Lahn-Dill region and recalls the important times of iron mining and processing there.

The exhibition in the former transformer house shows a historical overview of the cultural and technological history of electricity generation and supply in the Lahn-Dill region using numerous original exhibits. Numerous contemporary switch devices, distribution systems as well as protection and measuring devices are presented on the two floors. In the basement there are 15 marble panels on three walls with operating elements and measuring devices from a low-voltage distribution from 1913, which originally came from a facility of the former Buderus'schen Eisenwerke in Hirzenhain and could be saved from demolition.

Next to the transformer station is a small mill pond, the water of which is used to drive numerous water wheels and turbines. This exhibition ensemble is intended to refer to the history of the Amalienhütte, which emerged from a water-wheel-driven hammer mill and whose electricity was partly generated by water turbines until 1965.

literature

  • Michael Ferger: Blast furnaces on Lahn, Dill and in Upper Hesse. From forest forge to global player , Petersberg 2018.
  • Michael Fessner: The Young and Green Families , Kiel (2016).
  • Handbook of the efficiency of the entire industry in Germany, Austria, Alsace-Lorraine and Switzerland . Vol. 1. Manual of the efficiency of the entire industry of the Prussian state , Leipzig 1873.
  • Georg Schache: The Hessen-Nassauische Hüttenverein, GmbH, Steinbrücken, later Biedenkopf-Ludwigshütte , in: Hans Schubert, Joseph Ferfer, Georg Schache (eds.): From the origin and development of the Buderus'schen Eisenwerke Wetzlar, vol. 2, Munich 1938 , Pp. 183-338.

References and comments

  1. ↑ Schache 1938, pp. 230-231.
  2. ↑ Fessner 2016, p. 53.
  3. ↑ Schache 1938, pp. 228-229.
  4. ↑ Schache 1938, p. 229.
  5. ↑ Ferger 2018, p. 85.
  6. ↑ Handbuch 1873, p. 824.
  7. ↑ Schache 1938, p. 309.
  8. ↑ Ferger 2018, p. 85.
  9. ↑ Ferger 2018, p. 85.
  10. ↑ Ferger 2018, p. 86.
  11. ↑ Ferger 2018, p. 87.
  12. ↑ The relevant Internet pages for the Niederlaasphe industrial museum state that the transformer station and thus the Amalienhütte were supplied with electrical energy via a ring line from the Buderus'schen Eisenwerke. The Amalienhütte had been connected to the ring line of the Hesse-Nassau overland center Oberscheld since 1911 and obtained its electrical energy from there. In 1925, the Jung family sold the Hessen-Nassauische Überlandzentrale to the Wiesbaden district association, which in 1929 brought it into the Nassauische Energiegesellschaft mbH. The Buderus Group took a parallel path in 1929 and sold its overland headquarters in Wetzlar to PreussenElektraPreussische Elektrizitäts-Aktiengesellschaft , which, together with several municipal electricity suppliers from districts in Hesse, southern Lower Saxony, East Westphalia and Thuringia, founded the Elektrizitäts-Aktiengesellschaft Mitteldeutschland (EAM) in September of the same year founded a new national joint venture. In 1931 Buderus also leased the overland network, with the exception of the power generation systems, to Prussia Elektra for a period of 18 years. In 1955, the Hessen-Nassauische Überlandzentrale and the “Wetzlar Department” of the Preussen Elektra founded the “Power Supply Lahn-Dill GmbH”, with the majority of the capital with 86% held by the Prussian Elektra. The power supply Lahn-Dill GmbH was finally transferred to EAM in 1957. However, there is currently no dedicated study on the efforts to concentrate in the energy sector or on the complex corporate structures and interdependencies of the energy supply in the Lahn-Dill region.
  13. ↑ Heimatverein Niederlaasphe
  14. ↑ Amalienhütte Industrial Museum at www.stadt-badlaasphe.de
  15. ↑ Amalienhütte Industrial Museum at www.stadt-badlaasphe.de
  16. ↑ Heimatverein Niederlaasphe