Friedrich Wilhelm Wencke

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Friedrich Wilhelm Wencke

Friedrich Wilhelm Wencke (born October 30, 1806 in Bremen , † March 10, 1859 in Bremerhaven ) was a German shipbuilder and shipowner in Bremerhaven. In 1833 he built a shipyard on the Geeste .

biography

Friedrich Wilhelm Wencke was a son of the shipbuilder Friedrich Wencke (1779–1865) and his wife Maria Catharina, b. Wultzen (1780–1834), both of whom came from Bremen and married there in 1804. His younger brother Bernhard Wencke (1814–1881) was the owner of a shipyard in Bremen and later a dry dock in Hamburg.

Wencke became a ship carpenter like his father . In 1833, after his father's unsuccessful negotiations with the Bremerhaven Deputation of the Bremen Citizenship , Wencke succeeded in concluding a lease agreement for a property on the right bank of the Geeste in Bremerhaven, on which Wencke founded the first shipyard in Bremerhaven that same year. The first seagoing ship built in Bremerhaven was built there in 1835, the brig Wilhelm Ludwig , and in 1841 the first German sea ​​steamer Manchester . Around 1845/46 the Wencke Dock was put into operation as a double dock on the shipyard site . From 1835 to 1866 the shipyard built 27 sailing ships for fishing and freight transport.

Wencke was married to the captain's daughter Gesine Wencke (née Schilling; 1807–1866); both had seven children. The family lived in their town house on the harbor and, since 1854, also in Langen, north of Bremerhaven, in what is now the district of Cuxhaven, where they moved into the representative country estate of Friedrichs-Ruh . Allegedly, annoyance about the expansion plans rejected by the Bremen Senate should have been the reason for the move. In 1856 Wencke was able to buy the commercial property that had only been leased until then and expand it in the following period. In 1860 the redesign of the dry dock, now set in stone, was completed. Wencke also operated a shipping company , and Langen (Lehe district) appeared as the home port of his ships.

Wencke died in Bremerhaven in 1859 at the age of 52. He was buried in the cemetery in Lehe . His estate is in the Historisches Museum Bremerhaven , whose collection also contains portraits of Wencke and his wife (around 1840), and the Wencke Family Foundation in Hamburg.

After Wencke's death, the company was continued by his widow Gesine Wencke and son-in-law Friedrich Wilhelm Albert Rosenthal. For August Petermann's polar expedition, Rosenthal made the steamers Beehive and Albert available from 1866 . At the beginning of 1873 he handed the management over to the shipbuilder Johann Wilhelm Heinrich Baars until Wencke's son, Nicolaus Diedrich Wencke, took over the company in the summer of 1881.

The first fish steamer - the Sagitta  - was built at the shipyard in 1885 for Friedrich Busse's Geestemünder shipping company . In the later years, however, the shipyard failed to switch to steel shipbuilding and had to file for bankruptcy in 1900 and was taken over by the Seebeck shipyard . The dock of the former Wencke shipyard was used by other companies until 1945 and then filled with rubble; the walls are still visible today.

A granddaughter of Friedrich Wilhelm and Gesine Wencke was the Worpswede painter Sophie Wencke-Meinken (1874–1963).

literature

Wencke-Dock on the Geeste (2013)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Klaus Dede
  2. ↑ Source: worpswede.de Wencke, Sophie ( Memento of the original from June 17, 2010 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. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.worpswede24.de
personal data
SURNAME Wencke, Friedrich Wilhelm
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German shipbuilder and shipowner
DATE OF BIRTH October 30, 1806
PLACE OF BIRTH Bremen
DATE OF DEATH March 10, 1859
Place of death Bremerhaven