Neuhütte (Ewersbach)

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The Neuhütte near Straßebersbach or Ewersbach , a district of the Dietzhölztal municipality in the Lahn-Dill district in central Hesse , was one of the oldest steelworks in the Lahn-Dill region . It goes back to a forest smithy built in 1449 and is one of the first ironworks in the Dietzhölztal that is mentioned in a document.

The beginnings of the Neuhütte

Like all medieval huts in the Lahn-Dill region, the Neuhütte worked using the racing fire process and had a water hammer to smuggle the iron dolls won . The hut was a very profitable business at the time, as can be seen from the estate of the last two owners from 1499. They left behind a sum of 200 guilders, which was quite high for the time. Since they had remained childless, their entire fortune including the hut fell to the Counts of Nassau-Dillenburg as sovereigns. In the period that followed, the Grafenhaus sold shares in the hut to local buyers, until the Neuhütte was finally owned by Erblehen in 1515. The hut produced iron cast goods, but also presumably stove plates.

The transition to blast furnace operation on the Neuhütte

In 1587 the Neuhütte was the first in the Dillenburg area to transition from racing fire smelting to blast furnace operation. To build it, a union of four trades had been formed shortly beforehand, which had the financial means to make this costly investment. A larger steelworks with a blast furnace and a fresh fire cost almost 4,000 guilders, i.e. H. almost five times as much as a forest smithy. The newly founded union consisted of the former forest smith at the Neuhütte Hans Wolff, two forest blacksmiths from the hut in Straßebersbach and the experienced smith Peter Sorge von Kraftsolms, who also worked at the huts of Geroldstein in Wispertale, von Ebersbach in the county of Nassau-Dillenburg, from Emmershausen im Weiltal and von Kraftsolms as well as was involved in mines. In 1586, the union won the foundry master Hans Caspar († 1634) from Laubach, a Walloon native from Liège, who later worked at the huts in Wetterfeld and Ruppertsburg in Upper Hesse, as technical manager.

The Neuhütte became a model for the other forest smiths in the Dill-Dietz area, as over the next twenty-five years all the huts switched their iron production from the direct racing fire to the indirect blast furnace method. The next fundamental technical innovation came in 1613, when the Neuhütte commissioned a fresh hammer for further processing of the iron extracted.

The Neuhütte gained special importance during the Thirty Years' War. In 1618, Count Johann the Elder of Nassau-Dillenburg commissioned the master and gun caster Johann Hüttenhenn (1590–1635), who had been transferred from the hut in Asslar, to cast gun barrels. In addition, well pipes were manufactured for further requirements.

The Neuhütte under sovereign rule

Neuhütte survived the turmoil of the Thirty Years War relatively unscathed. The Nassau-Orange state government finally bought it back from the private owners in 1700 for 5,666 Reichstaler and had it run by state officials for over a hundred years. The Neuhütte was out of date and dilapidated in the 1770s, so that it was completely renovated under the management of the first administrator, Johann Jost Wickel, who was responsible for all the dominal steelworks and hammer works in the Steinbrücker Revier. It received a new blast furnace made of brick, which was equipped with a powerful fan, a new coal shed and other necessary operational buildings.

As a successor to Wickel, the hut has been under the supervision of the experienced metallurgical specialist Johann Heinrich Jung (1761–1832) from Müsen in Siegerland since September 1786, who further improved the technical facilities of the hut. His younger brother Johann Jakob Jung succeeded him in 1808 as the hut inspector for the Steinbrücker Revier and continued the work on the Neuhütte. Under his management, Neuhütte received a new, technically improved blast furnace shaft in 1814, which was geared towards the special composition of the Lahn-Dill ore deposits.

The leasing of the Neuhütte

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 Neuhütte and the Eibelshäuser Hütte were leased to a consortium under the leadership of Johannes Nassauer and the sovereign hut manager Johann Jakob Jung. Johann Jakob Jung took over the management of the Eibelshäuser Hütte and developed it into the center of an extremely profitable company.

The Neuhütte, on the other hand, went to Johannes Nassauer and the other trades in the consortium, who, however, were not experienced ironworkers, so that they had to stop the ironworks in 1822 due to poor production results. The ducal government again put the hut out for lease. The new operators - Wilhelm Christian Speck and Carl Groos - also had to terminate the lease early in 1845, heavily in debt. The hut was again advertised for lease and, although Johann Jakob Jung was awarded the contract by the Dillenburg authorities at the auction, the superordinate ducal general domain management refused to award it to Jung for reasons unknown. The hut went to the tenant Daniel Stein senior. Son. When, after the Duchy of Nassau had taken possession of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1866, the new sovereign finally sold the dominal huts, the open trading company Wilhelm Hennes & Co. zu Bensberg acquired the Neuhütte in the same year.

The Neuhütte and the Jung family

Villa Jung in Neuhütte around 1914

However, after the failed takeover of Neuhütte in the 1840s, the Jung family did not give up their plan to acquire it. After she was able to buy the Eibelshäuser Hütte near the Neuhütte in 1876, under the management of Gustav August Jung she managed to acquire the Neuhütte from Wilhelm Hennes & Co. for the then quite considerable purchase price of 90,000 marks . The high purchase price resulted from the fact that Wilhelm Hennes & Co. had made considerable investments in Neuhütte. They had bought a stone breaking machine that was powered by a traction engine and the blast furnace had been fundamentally rebuilt and expanded in 1875.

Neuhütte obtained the iron ore required for the blast furnace from its own ore mines. The supply of the charcoal required for smelting from the surrounding forests became increasingly difficult, as the wood resources continued to decline due to the decades of use of the forests and the charcoal prices rose steadily as a result. The Jung family therefore began their first attempts at coke-powered coke-powered cupola furnaces at Neuhütte in 1879 . Neuhütte finally gave up the charcoal-based blast furnace operation in 1886 and switched operations entirely to cupola furnaces. The iron smelting on the Neuhütte, which had been going on since the end of the Middle Ages, came to an end with the shutdown of the blast furnace.

Neuhütte was an important location within the Hesse-Nassau Hüttenverein of the Jung family founded in 1883 . In 1898 she built an enamelling plant. In addition to ovens and stoves, the HNHV also had construction and customer castings manufactured at the Neuhütte. After the cupola ovens were put into operation, boiler stoves and bathtubs were added, and since 1908 Neuhütte has also manufactured boilers for central heating systems. The range of products was the most extensive besides Ludwigshütte, which is also part of the HNHV . In the 1920s, in addition to the manufacture of bathtubs, it finally included contract and machine casting, cast-iron skylights and stable windows, cast boiler ovens, butcher's troughs and horse troughs, tin stoves and sheet steel boiler ovens, as well as central heating boilers.

When the HNHV got increasingly into financial difficulties at the end of the 1920s and the Jung family had to enter into an interest group with the Buderus Group in 1933 , Neuhütte was also affected. In September 1935 it was completely transferred to the Buderus Group along with the other HNHV locations. The HNHV ceased to exist on December 1, 1935 when it was deleted from the commercial register and Neuhütte was now an integral part of the Buderus Group.

The Neuhütte today

Neuhütte remained an important production site within the Buderus Group until the early 1950s. With the establishment of the company Omnical GmbH in 1953 as a subsidiary of the Buderus company, Neuhütte concentrated on the development and manufacture of innovative and high-quality industrial boiler systems. In 1986 Buderus sold Neuhütte and its subsidiary Omnical to Babcock-Borsig AG , which filed for bankruptcy in 2002. The company Omnical was finally transferred to the Danish boiler construction company Danstoker A / S in 2003, which in November 2010 was acquired by the Indian-British Thermax Ltd. was acquired. At the beginning of 2015, the Omnical and Neuhütte, which last had 95 employees, were finally shut down.

In 2016 the Friedhelm Loh Group took over the area in order to build a new plant for the subsidiary Rittal, which was founded in neighboring Rittershausen in 1961 . Rittal is a leading global system provider for control cabinets, power distribution, air conditioning, IT infrastructure and software and service. Among other things, IT containers for modular data centers and control cabinet systems made of stainless steel are manufactured in the new plant. With the new production, around 140 new jobs came to Ewersbach.

The former buildings of the Omnical company were either renovated or partially demolished to make room for a new hall. In March 2019, the construction work was completed and the gradual build-up of production could begin.

The tracks of the former Dietzhölztalbahn leading to the hut are still partially visible. The old train station and a small old locomotive shed are located next to today's factory premises and are the last testimony to this important production site for iron extraction and processing in the Lahn-Dill region.

The former home of the director of the Neuhütte, the so-called Jung'sche Villa, is slightly elevated on the other side of the main street opposite the former company premises. This late classicist villa, surrounded by a park, is now a cultural monument due to its historical and architectural importance.

literature

  • Ferger, Michael: Blast furnaces on the Lahn, Dill and in Upper Hesse. From forest forge to global player , Petersberg 2018.
  • Johannsen, Otto: From the origin and development of the Buderus'schen Eisenwerke, Wetzlar , in: Stahl und Eisen , 58, 1938, pp. 1057-1060.
  • Schache, Georg: The Hessen-Nassauische Hüttenverein, GmbH, Steinbrücken, later Biedenkopf-Ludwigshütte , in: Schubert, Hans, Ferfer, Joseph, Schache, Georg (ed.): From the origin and development of the Buderus'schen Eisenwerke Wetzlar , vol. 2, Munich 1938, pp. 183-338.

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Schache 1938, pp. 280–281.
  2. ↑ Ferger 2018, p. 24. Johannsen 1938, p. 1058.
  3. ↑ Ferger 2018, p. 24.
  4. ↑ Schache 1938, pp. 285-286. Ferger 2018, p. 24.
  5. ↑ Schache 1938, pp. 286–289. Ferger 2018, pp. 24-25.
  6. ↑ Schache 1938, p. 289.
  7. ↑ Schache 1938, pp. 290-291.
  8. ↑ Schache 1938, pp. 291-293.
  9. ↑ Schache 1938, p. 337.
  10. ↑ Ferger 2018, pp. 26-27.
  11. ↑ http://www.industriegeschichte-mittelhessen.de/neuhtte (as of November 2019).
  12. ↑ https://www.industriekultur-mittelhessen.de/orte-und-objekte/dietzhölztal/ewersbach-jung-sche-villa/ (as of November 2019).
  13. ↑ https://denkxweb.denkmalpflege-hessen.de/132500/ (as of November 2019).