Digester mill

Digester mill Kressbronn municipality on Lake Constance Coordinates: 47 ° 36 ′ 25 ″  N , 9 ° 34 ′ 44 ″  E
Height :	415 m above sea level NHN
Residents :	10  (Jan 31, 2011)
Postal code :	88079
Area code :	0 75 43
Location of the Kochermühle district in the Kressbronn municipality

Kocher mill is part of the municipality Kressbronn am Bodensee in Baden-Württemberg Bodenseekreis in Germany .

location

The district of Kochermühle is located around two kilometers northwest of the center of Kressbronn between the other districts of Betznau and Gohren as well as the Argen and the Oberdorf belonging to Langenargen .

history

Millstone at the digester mill

The first records of ownership of the digester mill date from around 1590. At that time Jacob Straubhaar took over the mill from “the digester” . This is followed by the Stible families from Bodnegg and Junker from Scheidegg . The latter has lived at the Kochermühle for six generations.

Since the Kochermühle is sovereign property, it is owned by the Counts of Montfort until 1780, when it is taken over by the Habsburgs , in 1805 by the Kingdom of Bavaria and in 1810 by Württemberg .

In 1821 Anton Junker took over the Kochermühle, which he acquired ten years later as part of the peasants' liberation from the Württemberg state. In 1851 he replaces church tithes and basic interest; the mill becomes his unrestricted property. In 1858, Junker sold the Kochermühle and some of the lands belonging to it for around 22,000 guilders to his nephew Johannes Kramer from Oberdorf.

He was followed by Konrad Wielath (1869) and his stepbrother Josef Anton Kramer (1893). In 1906 the mill and its water power are sold to the Langenargener parquet manufacturer Ernst Franke ; he sold it in 1908 to Hermann Naeher , who came from Holdereggen near Lindau and who later sold his stake to Argental-Elektrizitätswerke GmbH. After the mill was orphaned, the Zweckverband Oberschwäbische Elektrizitätswerke (OEW), the predecessor of Energie -versorgung Schwaben (EVS) or shareholder of today's EnBW , took over the digester mill for 60,000 marks on June 3, 1926 . Only one year later, the property (the hydropower remains with OEW) for 38,000 marks in the ownership of the brothers Adolf and Josef Locher from Missenhardt . They were limited to farming. Since then, the only reminder of the former digester mill is its name.

Before Johannes Hornstein from Nonnenhorn took over the management of the business after the heiress married in 1961, part of the mill site served as a firing range for the French military authorities during the occupation after the Second World War . Today the Kochermühle is in the third generation in the possession of the Locher / Hornstein families.

Mill operation

Outlet lock of the digester mill trench

The actual digester mill used to get its water from the Argen. 800 meters below Gießenbrücke , the later Argen main weir ( 420  m above sea level ) was built in the 16th century , some of which can still be seen today by the playground and barbecue area. From here the water (1.3 to 4.2 cubic meters per second) flows through the approximately 2,500 meter long “Kochermüllenbach” to the mill ( 409  m above sea level ). The level of the 2.80 meter wide and 90 centimeter deep trench remains at the outlet level up to about 300 meters in front of the mill, so that the water puts considerable pressure on the maximum five mill wheels due to the height difference of nine meters . The digester mill is the most powerful of the four mills (upper, middle, lower and digester mill) in today's Kressbronn municipality. The power of the water drives four grinding stages , a tanning stage and a sawmill .

The main weir, long without function at the time, was destroyed in March 1963 by heavy ice drift in the Argen and the necessary blasting of the ice masses and the trench leveled.

Power station

At the beginning of the 20th century, in the course of electrification, there were extensive plans to found a special-purpose association "Electricity works cooperative Gattnau-Wasserburg eGmbH". The purpose of this association was the construction of a power station in the Kochermühle and the establishment of a distribution network in the municipalities of Wasserburg , Nonnenhorn , Nonnenbach, Hemigkofen, Hege , Gattnau and Bodolz, which belong to the association . In the records of the municipal archive has not further clarified issues regarding water rights and volume brought the project in 1905 again to failure.

Court chapel

Anthony Chapel

In 1985 the chapel dedicated to St. Anthony the Hermit in the courtyard of the Kocher Mill was renovated by students from the Kressbronn Park Realschule. The approximately 275-year-old building (the chapel appears for the first time in the building directory of the Kochermühle in 1878) with a three by five meter room, apse , altars from the late 17th century and a small niche probably served as a path chapel on the old Fuhrstrasse from Lindau to Buchhorn , in which the travelers prayed for help and protection. It is the only surviving structure of the old mill yard and is a listed building .

• See also → List of cultural monuments in Kressbronn on Lake Constance

traffic

The road leads past the Kochermühle area - here the bus stop on the bodo line 7587 (Kressbronn-Langenargen-Friedrichshafen) - from Kressbronn to Oberdorf. It crosses the Argen about two hundred meters west.

Until 1870 the bridge was maintained by Kochermüller Anton Junker at his own expense. In 1851 - not entirely unselfishly - he applied to the Tettnang District Office to replace the dilapidated footbridge with a solid, drivable bridge at his own expense. Just one year later, the official journal for Tettnang and the surrounding area reported on the opening of the new Argenbrücke near the Kochermühle. Junker may raise the following bridge fees:

• 1 cruiser for one person back and forth on the same day
• 2 cruisers for a horse with person
• 2 cruisers for a head of cattle, ox or cow with a guide
• 1 cruiser for a head of cattle, pigs, goats
• 3 cruisers for a horse, ox or cow with cart and man
• 6 cruisers for two dto.
• 1 cruiser for each additional head of draft cattle

Argenbrücke between Kochermühle and Oberdorf

Until 1874, only residents of the three neighboring communities of Oberdorf, Nonnenbach and Hemigkofen are allowed to pass toll-free .

In 1870, the new bridge was badly damaged by a spring flood and then closed. Since Müller Konrad Wieladt cannot raise the necessary money to repair the damage on his own, a bridge building community is founded under the chairmanship of the Tettnang District Office. The municipalities of Hemigkofen (15 percent), Nonnenbach (42.5 percent), Oberdorf (32.5 percent) and Kochermüller (10 percent) bring in the money for the construction (2,150 guilders 26 Kreuzer) and the future maintenance of the bridge. Another spring flood, caused by the straightening of the Argen, caused another total loss in 1876. The makeshift repaired wooden bridge was replaced by an iron bridge by a resolution of October 4, 1876 - the cost was 45,642 marks. Due to the growing volume of road traffic, the Württemberg administration decided in 1930 to build a new Argen bridge with a load capacity of 30 tons at its own expense . On October 4, 1934 this ( building number 8323506) was opened to traffic. With a span of 54 meters, it served traffic for 45 years before it was relieved 300 meters downstream of the river by a new prestressed concrete bridge in 1979 in the course of the re-routing of federal highway 31 .

Protected area

In the range of cooker mill which is 13 hectares large protected landscape steep edge and gravel field of Argentals south of the boiler mill reported. The main protection purpose is the preservation of the late glacial Arg terrace created during the last Ice Age .

Individual evidence

1. ^ Community archive Kressbronn, log book of the bridge building commission Kochermühlebrücke, April 21, 1908
2. ^ The art monuments in Württemberg, Tettnang district, 1937; Page 100
3. ^ Volksblatt, Official Gazette for Tettnang and the surrounding area, Nro. 65, Monday June 7, 1852
4. ↑ Kressbronn municipal archive, AN 3840
5. ↑ Ordinance on the protection of parts of the landscape along the Argen in the communities of Kreßbronn, Langnau, Neukirch and Tannau (Schwäbische Zeitung, Tettnang and Friedrichshafen edition, from September 15, 1954)