Hammer mill (Wiesbaden)

Entrance to the hammer mill

The hammer mill in Wiesbaden was previously used as an iron hammer and grain mill and is part of the Rhein-Main Wiesbaden route of industrial culture .

location

patio

The hammer mill is located at a height of 93 m in the Wiesbaden district of Biebrich in Hesse , Germany . The Salzbach flows east of the site and the railway line runs between Wiesbaden Central Station and Wiesbaden Ost Station . To the north is the main sewage treatment plant for the waste disposal companies of the state capital Wiesbaden and the Salzbachtal bridge on federal motorway 66, which opened in 1963 . The Aartalbahn line runs to the west between the Landesdenkmal station and Wiesbaden Ost. A settlement adjoins it to the south.

history

View from the southeast

Until 1688 an iron hammer was operated there with the water from the Salzbach . In the Nine Years' War that was hammermill destroyed and from 1690 as a flour mill rebuilt.

The miller and farmer Bernhard May, who immigrated from the Hunsrück in 1807, modernized the run-down mill and expanded it to include agricultural land. He used nitrogen fertilization and machines in agriculture and established himself as a large farmer. From 1819 May supplied the Wiesbaden garrison of the Duchy of Nassau with bread from its own bakery . The business was visited by numerous farmers, but also by Albert von Sachsen-Coburg and Gotha , the husband of the British Queen Victoria , and Leopold I , King of the Belgians from 1831 to 1865 . The free-spirited May took part in the Hambach Festival in 1832 , which is why Duke Wilhelm I of Nassau withdrew his delivery contract. In 1848 May took part in the German Revolution and was one of the members of the Frankfurt pre-parliament . In the Hammermühle “May maintained a kind of spiritual center” and received the revolutionary Robert Blum , the pianist Clara Schumann and the composer Johannes Brahms in his “hostel of justice” .

May died in 1856, and three years later the publisher Christian Scholz bought the mill after marrying May's daughter Katharina in 1829. Her son Bernhard Scholz met Wilhelm Dilthey as a child . In 1897 the mill was shut down and the brothers Gustav and Rudolf Dyckerhoff converted the buildings into company apartments for the cement manufacturer Dyckerhoff .

The buildings are privately owned and are inhabited by several families as well as used by artists and small businesses. Of the numerous mills in the Salzbachtal, the hammer mill was the only one that remained.