Emsland Moor Museum
Coordinates: 52 ° 37 ′ 24.2 " N , 7 ° 11 ′ 8" E
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The Emsland Moor Museum near Groß Hesepe (municipality of Geeste ) in the Emsland district in Lower Saxony is considered the largest moor museum in Europe. The main sponsors of the museum are the district of Emsland and the municipality of Geeste via the Emsland Moormuseum e. V. The museum has between 25,000 and 30,000 visitors annually.
location
The Emsland Moor Museum is located in the south of the Bourtanger Moor , a former 1,200 km² contiguous moor area that separated Germany from the Netherlands, west of the village of Groß Hesepe, in the municipality of Geeste. The Bourtanger Moor is now part of the Bourtanger Moor-Bargerveen International Nature Park .
deals
The Emsland Moormuseum Geeste documents the path from moor colonization to industrial peat . In addition to two exhibition halls and a raised moor area of around 20 hectares, the museum has an open-air machine park, where the large machines used for potting and cultivation are exhibited. A special attraction is the " Mammut " steam plow from Ottomeyer , which is set up in the working position in the museum's permanent exhibition and weighs more than 30 t . This largest plow in the world was used for cultivation work in the bog for over two decades.
Hand peat cutting and mechanical peat removal are shown on the open-air site. A light railway runs on the site on an approx. 3.5 km long circuit.
The farm was recognized by the “ Society for the Preservation of Old and Endangered Domestic Animal Breeds ” as an Archehof. Old breeds of domestic animals that are threatened with extinction are kept here and their meaning is conveyed to the visitors. These include the Bentheimer Landschaf , the Bentheimer Schwein , the Niederungsrind , the Westphalian Totlegerhuhn and the Diepholzer Gans .
Exhibition hall 1
The design of the exhibition hall of the Emsland Moor Museum, which was completely modernized in 2006, takes up the architecture of the regional peat litter factories. Here visitors are given information on the topics of peat development, peat extraction and peat cultivation. In the center of the hall is a three-story peat litter factory. In the exhibition hall there is a cinema showing a film about the development of the Emsland in the 1950s, and since the end of 2003 it has integrated the museum's archive and library.
Exhibition hall 2
In the center of the exhibition hall is the Ottomeyer plow " Mammut " and the associated locomobiles "Thuringia" and "Magdeburg". The exhibition on the Emsland plan, which shows the history of the spatial reorganization of the Emsland, was arranged around this on two levels on the ground floor, on around 1,000 m². A permanent exhibition on the development of peat extraction and processing is housed on the upper floor. From 2014 the topic of moor protection will be on display there. On the upper floor there is also the temporary exhibition area, in which historical and current topics relating to the moor are exhibited several times a year.
A museum educational program has been developed for children and young people .
history
The museum was founded in 1976. The first machines were exhibited in the museum's outdoor area in 1979.
In 1999, on the site of the Emsland Moor Museum, in cooperation with the “Land unter eV” association, a 1930s-style moor farmers' settlement was established. The homestead includes a main house with a hall, a pigsty, a chicken coop, a bakery and a farm garden.
In 2006, the fundamental renovation of exhibition hall 1 was completed.
As part of the INTERREG project “ Sustainable development of nature and landscape in the Int. Bourtanger Moor Nature Park - Bargerveen (NPE) ”, a second exhibition hall with an exhibition area of approx. 2000 m² was built from June 2009 to July 2010. Since this expansion, the Emsland Moor Museum has been the largest moor museum in Europe.
Hand peat cut
Peat was in Emsland mid-20th century in Handtorfstich won. The first peat excavator was patented in 1894, but manual labor continued to dominate the extraction of farm house fire. Black peat was mainly used because, in contrast to the younger white peat, it has good fibrous cohesion and a high calorific value.
Before that, the area was drained to reduce the water content of the peat to around 85%. The peat cutters' approach was dependent on the climatic conditions. If the climate was humid, only small peat sods could be cut because of the delayed drying.
To prepare the bog for peat cutting, the heather and white peat were first removed with the bunker spade. The black peat was then cut from above into pieces approx. 10 cm wide and 40 cm long with a stikker . Then the peat digger cut these pieces loose from the side with the top sheet and threw them on the edge of the peat cut. From there, the peat sod was loaded onto a peat cart with a setting fork and brought to the dry field. The sods were finally stacked in pairs on top of each other.
Mechanical peat removal
In the 19th century, the mechanization of peat mining began, which was initially aimed exclusively at black peat extraction. The first peat cutting machine was developed around 1840. Around 1850, numerous machines for kneading and tearing the peat followed, powered by horse pegs or locomotives. The natural structure of the peat was destroyed by these peat presses or Spitt excavators , the sod shrunk more and gained greater strength. The peat excavators, which finally connected the conveying bucket ladder , the mixer and the branch with cutting unit for the pressed peat strand, were steadily enlarged and perfected in the 20th century. In the 1920s there were also sod collectors and in the period after the Second World War black peat sod machines were added. With these two types of machines, the repositioning of the peat sod for drying was automated.
In 1958, the full mechanization of black peat extraction was largely complete. The mechanization of white peat extraction was delayed because this younger and structurally heterogeneous peat is much more sensitive than black peat. The white peat has been marketed as peat litter since around 1900 . In 1955, the first white peat cutting machine was used at the Heseper peat works, with whose hammer the peat was cut into sod. The machine replaced the work of ten peat cutters. In the 1960s, vibrators for the mechanization of drying and white peat sod collectors were developed. The preparatory drainage was carried out by lightweight caterpillars as universal devices. The replacement of manual labor in peat extraction was completed by these developments at the end of the 1960s. But hand peat was still used for the house fire.
Field railway
The use of field railways could not be dispensed with for peat extraction. Their light tracks could be laid and dismantled quickly even on moorland areas with a low load-bearing capacity and, unlike standard-gauge railways, do not have a complex substructure. Light railways were used to transport peat to the dry fields and processing facilities. White peat was transported in two-axle lattice wagons, while black peat was mostly transported in four-axle wagons with closed walls because of its higher weight. A copy of an old field railway can be seen in the Emsland Moor Museum. The Schöma brand locomotive was built in 1957. The Krupp-Dolberg wagons have a track width of 600 mm. The entire route of the field railway in the moor museum is approx. 2700 m. The light rail travels at a speed of 6 km / h.
Cable crane / peat track
For the peat works west of the Ems, the solution to the transport problem was decisive until the 1950s; the region was hardly developed in terms of transport. From the Heseper peat factory, the peat had to be laboriously brought to the port of Meppen by train and via canals. In 1921 three steam locomotives , four gasoline locomotives and 150 light rail cars operated. In 1922 an in-house small railway from the peat factory via Groß Hesepe, Klein Hesepe and Rühle to Meppen was completed. The peat could now be transported away directly without time-consuming reloading. The route was driven by 50 hp steam locomotives from the Jung company, which were fired with peat.
The steam locomotives were replaced by diesel locomotives in the 1950s. The factory line ended in Meppen on the west bank of the Ems. A cable crane built in 1923 by F. Pohlig AG in Cologne with a 155 m span and 20 m column height was used to transport the peat wagons across the Ems to the standard-gauge railways of the Reichsbahn and later the Bundesbahn. The burnt peat for the company's own power station in Rühle, built in 1924/1925, was also transported on the Heseper peat railway. Until the 1950s, the railway was also used for passenger transport. Travelers from Groß Hesepe to Meppen were allowed to use the train for free, as the municipality had once made the route available for the construction of the railway. The cable crane was shut down in 1968, the works railway in 1972 and the peat power station in 1974.
Mammoth and traction engines
Wilhelm Ottomeyer , founded in 1887, is considered the oldest rental plow company in Germany. The use of steam plows has proven itself in peatland cultivation in northern Germany. These replaced 500 working days with five hours of machine work. Between 1887 and 1937 the Ottomeyer company mostly plowed for large farms in Germany, Denmark, the Netherlands and New Greenwich. In the period between 1950 and 1970, the main area of work for the plow teams used by Ottomeyer was in the moor areas of the Emsland. As part of the so-called "Emsland Plan", large areas were cultivated and made arable with the help of the deep plow. A complete steam plow set for two or four-engine operation consisted of the plow locomotives, the plow and a crew and equipment car. In the short plowing season of only 75-100 days per year, people usually worked 18 hours a day. At the end of the 1960s there were still over 30 steam locomotives. The steam plow pairs "Magdeburg (II)" and "Thuringia" were built by the English machine factory Fowler in 1914 with a power of approx. 240 hp. These two locomobiles were rebuilt and upgraded in 1954 so that they were able to move a deep plow with a plowing depth of up to 2 m as part of the sand mixing culture . In addition to a new boiler and a new steam engine, they received reinforcements in the body area and the wheel system. In the end, each of the four locomotives produced an output of 480 hp. That was a doubling of the performance compared to comparable machines.
After the end of the cultivation work on the “Emsland Plan”, in 1971 two of the large Thuringia steam locomotives, the deep plow “Mammut”, and other equipment from the Ottomeyer company were left in the Emsland. The machines left by Ottomeyer form the basis of the collection of the moor museum.
In 2010 the plow and the associated locomobile were relocated from the outdoor area to Hall 2, which was specially built for this purpose.
Archehof
In 1999, on the site of the Emsland Moor Museum, in cooperation with the “Land unter eV” association, a 1930s-style moor farmers' settlement was established. The homestead includes a main house with a hall, a pigsty, a chicken coop, a bakery and a farm garden. Endangered domestic breeds of domestic animals are given a new home here. The Siedlerhof was recognized by the "Society of Threatened Domesticated Breeds" as an Archehof. It is home to the Black Holstein lowland cattle, the Bentheimer Landschaf, the Bunte Bentheimer pig, Westphalian dead chickens and the Diepholz geese.
Collections
The Emsland Moor Museum preserves, researches and exhibits. The collection items are cataloged, stored professionally and appropriately and, if necessary, restored. The collection of the Emsland Moor Museum shows the cultivation of the moor and heathland, scientifically documented. The collection now includes around 18,500 objects that have been brought together since the establishment of the house in the 1970s, but have not been fully cataloged. Due to this growth, the Emsland Moor Museum now has an extensive, interdisciplinary collection on the subjects of moor, peat extraction and settlement history.
Cultivation of peatlands and industrial peat extraction
With the end of the moor cultivation work carried out as part of the so-called “Emsland Plan”, steam locomotives , deep plows and bulldozers from Ottomeyer remained in the Emsland in the 1970s . With the completion of the development work in the Emsland, the machines had become obsolete and formed the basis of the constantly growing technical collection of the Emsland Moor Museum. Over the years, more peat cutting and processing machines were added, which, due to technical progress, were no longer used in the dwindling peat factories in the region. In addition, the Emsland Moor Museum was able to take over collections from private holdings.
Library and archive
Since 2003 the library, the picture archive and the graphic collection have been brought together on the upper floor of the exhibition hall. The scientific library collects and houses documents on the range of topics moor, peat and settlement history. In the process, both historical and geographical, natural history and technical documents are collected across disciplines and across regions. One example is the "Richard Collection" with more than 16 meters of shelves, one of the most important collections on the subject of "peat construction technology" from several centuries.
literature
- Haverkamp, Michael, Das Emsland Moormuseum, in: Yearbook of the Emsländischen Heimatbund, Vol. 51/2005, Sögel 2004, pp. 287-310.
- Haverkamp, Michael, The Emsland Moor Museum on a good way !, in: Study Society for Emsländische Regionalgeschichte (Ed.), Emsländische Geschichte, Vol. 24, Haselünne 2017, pp. 354–376.
- Scholz, Oswald / Hugenberg, Gerd, The Emsland Moor Museum in Groß Hesepe, in: Telma. Reports of the German Society for Moor and Peat Studies, Vol. 25, Hanover 1995, pp. 317-324.
- Scholz, Oswald, A new museum house in the Emsland-Moormuseum Groß Hesepe, in: Mitteilungsblatt des Museumsverband Niedersachsen / Bremen, No. 43, Hanover 1992, pp. 47-48.
- Stein, Heinz-Bernd, Das Emsland-Moormuseum Groß Hesepe, in: Study Society for Emsländische Regionalgeschichte (Ed.), Emsländische Geschichte, Vol. 1, Papenburg 1991, pp. 27-30.
Web link
Individual evidence
- ^ Emsland Moor Museum: Homepage
- ↑ Tobias Böckermann : Annual balance sheet - Europe's largest moor museum in the Emsland . Meppen daily mail . February 15, 2011
- ^ Society for the preservation of old and endangered domestic animal breeds: Catalog of criteria for recognition as a GEH Arche-Hof ( Memento of the original from January 25, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Society for the Preservation of Old and Endangered Pet Races eV (GEH): Arche-Hof Emsland-Moormuseum ( Memento of the original from July 31, 2010 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ International Nature Park Bourtanger Moor-Bargerveen: Moor Museum - Extension of the Emsland Moor Museum by an exhibition center with a focus on the development of the moor, nature and landscape protection as well as a communication platform and starting point for nature experience offers ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ↑ Susanna Austrup: Cultivated poor house . In: taz . August 3, 2010 ( full text in the taz online archive ).
