Eibelshäuser Hut

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The Eibelshäuser Hut was located in the Dietzhölze valley north of Dillenburg near the village of Eibelshausen, immediately west of the mouth of the Mandelbach in the Dietzhölze. The rich ore deposits in the Lahn-Dill region led to their mining and smelting early on. The Celts, Chatti and Romans were already mining and processing iron, copper and other metals. The charcoal from the wooded region served as fuel in the smelting process. Numerous kilns , ironworks and hammer mills were built on the waterways . In 1444 the Dillenburg area had five ironworks in Dillenburg, Haiger, Wissenbach, on the Scheldt and in Eisemrod. The ironworks in Ebersbach and Steinbrücken were added later. The first written sources on the later Eibelshausen hut in the Dietzhölztal date back to October 1585, when a legal dispute between the villages of Eibelshausen and Steinbrücken over grazing rights for shepherds from stone bridges near a hut near Eibelshausen.

The establishment of the Eibelshäuser Hütte

On January 20, 1613, the Counts of Nassau awarded Daniel Heiderich from Eibelshausen a concession to operate a blower and iron works next to his grinding mill on the Gänsebach in front of the Schelderwald . Heiderich changed his original plans, however, as the selected place seemed unsuitable after further tests, and applied to the sovereign to be allowed to build the new hut above Eibelshausen "on the Hesselhecke", which certainly meant the old hut place near Eibelshausen. It is known from other mining districts that such locations were used for decades due to their favorable location on a watercourse. Heiderich started the first charcoal furnace in the second half of 1613. The Eibelshausen hut was in operation until the Thirty Years' War (1618–1648), but it came to a standstill during a wave of plague around 1635. The ironworks fell into disrepair and the Heiderich heirs left their concession to a consortium that also operated the ironworks near Ewersbach. This rebuilt the Eibelshausen hut after the end of the Thirty Years War and according to the few available written sources it can be assumed that the hut was in production.

The Eibelshäuser Hut under sovereign rule

It was not until the second half of the 18th century that there were increased written sources for the Eibelshäuser Hütte, which are mainly in the Hessian Main State Archives in Wiesbaden in the holdings 174, 178, 190 and 370 and which provide detailed conclusions about production quantities and manufactured products as well on their technical equipment. Further information on the operation can be found at Johann Philipp Becher (1752–1831) 1789 and Friedrich August Alexander Eversmann (1759–1837) 1806.

The main reason for the fact that the written tradition is now increasing again is to be seen in the transition of the hut to rulership. As part of its cameralistic economic policy, the Nassau Mining and Huts Commission in Dillenburg demanded precise information about the operational sequence in order to have a constant overview of the state of the hut and its profitability. The supervision of the hut was carried out by a Princely Orange-Nassau hut manager. Since 1758 this has been Johann Jost Wickel, who, in addition to the Eibelshausen hut, was responsible for all the hammers and hammers in the Steinbrücker Revier. Under his management, the Eibelshäuser Hütte received a new blast furnace made of stone and other production facilities such as a foundry and smelting house. The smelter obtained the ores it needed from the manorial mines located in the districts of the villages of Nanzenbach, Eibach, Oberscheld and Sechshelden. The Eibelshäuser Hütte supplied the pig iron it produced to the local iron hammers under sovereign rule, such as the Steinbrücker Hammer and the Teichhammer, but the greater part went to neighboring countries in Westphalia and here in particular to the sheet metal hammers in the region around Olpe.

As a successor to Wickel, the hut was under the supervision of the experienced metallurgical specialist Johann Heinrich Jung (1761-1832) from Müsen in Siegerland since September 1786 , who in the following years made numerous technical innovations, such as a new blast furnace, a slag poke in the Siegen style or introduced a cylinder blower based on Baader's principle. The new blast furnace was the highest and most efficient in the Dillenburg district. The younger brother of Johann Heinrich Jung Johann Jakob (1779–1847) was his successor in 1808 as a hut inspector for the Steinbrücker Revier.

The leasing of the Eibelshausen hut

After the Napoleonic Wars , the Nassau government pursued a liberal economic policy and gave up the autonomy of the sovereign smelters and mines. In 1816 the Eibelshäuser Hütte was leased to a consortium under the leadership of Johannes Nassauer and the hut manager Johann Jakob Jung, which after the departure of the other partners in 1822/23 was now operated by Johann Jakob Jung alone. In the following years, Jung built the hut into the center of an extensive company with upstream and downstream production stages such as pit, transport and woodwork as well as the stone bridge and pond hammer, which employed up to 500 workers in the 1840s.

The Eibelshäuser Hütte is owned by the Jung family

After JJ Jung was able to extend the lease in 1833 and 1853, the Eibelshäuser Hütte and the Hämmer were transferred entirely to the Jung family in 1865 and operated together with the Amalienhütte near Bad Laasphe 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 March 1883, the Jung family merged the Eibelshäuser Hütte with their later acquired ironworks to form a closed company, the Hesse-Nassau Hüttenverein . As a result, the Eibelshäuser Hütte is considered to be the nucleus of the Hessen-Nassau Hüttenverein, which rose to become the largest company in the Lahn-Dill region after Buderus .

After taking over the Eibelshäuser Hütte, the Jung family invested in their technical equipment. In 1869, for example, it received a state-of-the-art steam engine blower and began in 1890 with the changeover to the more cost-effective cupola furnace operation with coke heating, when coke could be obtained cheaply from the Ruhr area after the Dietzhölztalbahn was completed. However, cupolas are no longer able to melt cast iron from ore. Cast goods are produced in them by remelting foundry iron. The conversion to a pure foundry with coke-powered cupolas ended a millennia-old charcoal era in the Lahn-Dill region with the blowing out of the last charcoal blast furnace on the Eibelshäuser Hütte in 1898.

However, with the abandonment of the smelting of the raw ore, a gap arose in the production chain from ore extraction through the blast furnace operation to further processing of the pig iron in the foundries. The Jung family had to sell the iron ores extracted from their pits to other blast furnace plants and obtain the pig iron required for their foundries from external companies. As a result, the Eibelshäuser Hütte, like the other operations of the Hessen-Nassau Hüttenverein, was heavily dependent on the economic fluctuations in the market. The Jung family closed this gap again in 1905 with the establishment of the coke-based blast furnace plant in Oberscheld , where the ores extracted from their pits were smelted and the pig iron produced was further processed in their foundries.

The production program of the Eibelshäuser Hütte ranged from small, transportable breakfast stoves to elaborate oven and stove combinations, which could be designed variably by attaching different cast iron and later enamelled plates, whereby the purchase price was calculated according to the weight. Customers at hardware dealers chose their ovens and stoves from sample books. The models were offered for a long time in order to satisfy the tastes of different generations. In 1908 the hut got an enamelling plant in order to be able to keep up with the other suppliers in the Lahn-Dill region, who in turn also invested in enamelling plants. Enamelled products were considered hygienic and very modern and were very popular with potential buyers.

The transfer of the Eibelshäuser Hütte to the Buderus Group

The Eibelshäuser Hütte was integrated into armaments production during the First World War . The Hessen-Nassauische Hüttenverein invested in the modernization of all of its locations in the 1920s, but ran into considerable financial difficulties during the global economic crisis . In 1932 he had to enter into an interest group with the Buderus'sche Eisenwerke due to his excessive indebtedness and in 1935 it was completely transferred to the Buderus Group with the Eibelshäuser Hütte. The Eibelshäuser Hütte remained an important location for the Buderus Group until it was transferred to Robert Bosch GmbH in 2004 .

The current location of the Eibelshäuser Hut

Starting in 2007, the Eibelshausen location was designated for the production of hot water and heat pump storage tanks for other brands of the Bosch Thermotechnology division and gradually expanded as the lead plant for their production. Since the beginning of the 17th century, the Eibelshäuser Hütte went through numerous technical changes in order to adapt to the respective market conditions. Today's Eibelshausen plant from Bosch Thermotechnik is a successful example of a transformation process from an originally domestic pig iron producer to a technologically leading supplier in the energy technology sector. However, only a three-story building from the modernization process at the beginning of the 1930s has been preserved from the old structure.

literature

  • Johann Philipp Becher: Mineralogical description of the Orange-Nassau region together with a history of the Siegen smelting and hammering industry , Marburg 1789.
  • Friedrich August Alexander Eversmann: The iron and steel = production on waterworks between Lahn and Lippe and in the present French departments , Dortmund 1804.
  • 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.
  • Rudolf Reinhardt: Structural change in the iron industry of the Lahn-Dill area 1840-1914. From iron production to pure iron processing in foundries , Diss. Frankfurt 1999 ( https://d-nb.info/958701946/34 ).
  • Georg Schache: The Hessen-Nassauische Hüttenverein, GmbH, Steinbrücken, later Biedenkopf-Ludwigshütte , in: Hans Schubert, Joseph Ferfer, Georg Schache (ed.): From the origin and development of the Buderus'schen Eisenwerke Wetzlar , vol. 2, Munich 1938 , Pp. 183-338.
  • Christian Daniel Vogel: Description of the Duchy of Nassau , Wiesbaden 1843.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Vogel 1843, p. 406. [1] (as of July 2019).
  2. ↑ HHStAW, 171, No. E 468, p. 5. (“against the huts, near the wheel”). Schache 1938, pp. 210-211.
  3. ↑ HHStAW, 171, No. B 741, Bl. 48 (January 20, 1613).
  4. ↑ HHStAW, 171, No. B 741, Bl. 55 (March 18, 1613).
  5. ↑ HHStAW, 171, No. B 741. Schache 1938, pp. 201-211. Ferger 2018, p. 12.
  6. ↑ Becher 1789, pp. 368–378.
  7. ↑ Eversmann 1804, pp. 56-66.
  8. ↑ Schache 1938, pp. 213-214.
  9. ↑ Eversmann 1806, pp. 62–63.
  10. ↑ Schache 1938, p. 226.
  11. ↑ Handbuch 1873, p. 824.
  12. ↑ Schache 1938, p. 293. Ferger 2018, p. 13.
  13. ↑ Eibelshäuser Hütte (as of July 2019) at www.industriekultur-mittelhessen.de.
  14. ↑ Schache 1938, pp. 309-310 and P. 321.
  15. ↑ Ferger 2018, p. 13. Unfortunately, only a few sample books and other written documents have survived from this time. As can be seen from a short note in the Berg- und Hüttenmännische Zeitung from 1867, old hut books and other written documents were placed on the gout in the blast furnace for destruction. Notes. Peculiar paper charring in the iron blast furnace, in: Berg- und Hüttenmännische Zeitung, 26th year, 1867, p. 207.
  16. ↑ Eibelshäuser Hütte (as of July 2019) at www.industriekultur-mittelhessen.de.
  17. ↑ Reinhardt 1999, p. 218.
  18. ↑ Eibelshäuser Hütte (as of July 2019) at www.industriekultur-mittelhessen.de.
  19. ↑ 400 years of the Eibelshausen plant (as of July 2019) www.bosch-presse.de.