Neuhaus-Bülkauer Canal
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The Neuhaus-Bülkauer Canal is a 12.4 kilometer long drainage canal between the Balksee and the Aue in Neuhaus in Lower Saxony . It drains an area of approximately 7,900 hectares . It was named after the Neuhaus-Bülkau lock association in charge, today the Neuhaus-Bülkau water and soil association.
prehistory
In the high Middle Ages, when the area of today's northeastern district of Cuxhaven , between Otterndorf , Neuhaus , Bülkau , Cadenberge , the Wingst , Odisheim , Steinau , Ihlienworth and Neuenkirchen was not yet protected with dykes, the inhabitants of the Geestinseln at that time brought Hohe Lieth , Wingst and Westerberg their animals in the summer to graze in the lower lying fertile marshland. Around the year 1000, the Wingst farmers also began to settle on the Auepriel, today's Aue in Bülkau. They built their houses on Wurten , small natural or artificial elevations, to protect them from flooding. Especially in autumn and winter there were repeated floods and people and cattle died.
Reclamation
Around 1106, Archbishop Friedrich I of Bremen called on experienced Dutch people to help them reclaim their homeland. They built the drainage system made up of trenches and gutters , which can be seen on today's plans and satellite photos, and built roads. The priel Aue , which originally drained the land only , has not been straightened. The trenches are aligned with the weather, the ditches or receiving waters. Each field between two trenches is still a good 30 paces. Some of the Dutch stayed in the country, as evidenced by the family names "Steen", "von Thaden" or "von Kampen".
In times of heavy rainfall, the roads were often not passable and the waterway was the only connection. Transports were carried out with boats, known in the area as "flutes". Especially in the moor and the deep marsh, the farms could often only be reached in this way. Therefore every weather, every sewer ditch, every receiving water had to be at least half a meter deep. Every bridge, every culvert, also called a step, had to be at least 3 feet and 3 inches wide, which is about a meter. The simple normal "flutes" could carry about ½ wispel of grain , which today corresponds to 750 liters. They were approx. 80 cm wide, approx. 5 m long and were pounded, that is, pushed off with a long rod at the bottom and driven forward. Depending on the task at hand, these flutes could be made very small, but they could also be twice as large to transport milk cans, for example. In very rainy years they were even needed to relieve themselves, as the toilet was often on its own little worm and could only be reached by "flute".
Today there are no more “flutes”. The last one was at the mill museum in Osterbruch. In Ihlienwort there are trips with boats again, but these boats are imported from the Spreewald ; they look very similar to the flutes, are rounded on the sides, not as steep as the old "flutes" and are driven by a motor, as it is too boggy in Ihlienworth, the rod often gets stuck and it would be too strenuous for the ferrymen.
In 1717, after the great Christmas flood , when large areas in the north were flooded and many people perished, the Balksee over the floodplain was so salinated with Elbe water that all fish and many animals in this area died. The water could not drain for weeks and only years later did the stocks recover.
The planning
The planning for a drainage canal began around 100 years before construction. The need finally united the peat farmers and made them raise the high costs. The cost was also the reason for this delay. The richer farmers, who should also give money, lived in the highlands, on the high march in the north of Bülkau and a good four to five feet above the beneficiaries of the canal, the poorer people in the Sietland of Bovenmoor, on the edge of the Wingst, in the Auemoor and of course all over Opole. During the rainy season, there were repeated floods and struggles with the water. The resulting disputes in turn cost a lot of money. So the people came together in an association. 'The more members this association had, the fewer costs there were for the individual. The Neuhaus-Bülkauer Schleusenverband was founded, 1/3 of which was in the highlands and 2/3 in the Sietland.
1764
Again and again the Sietlanders campaigned for drainage, and the high and dry living wealthy farmers always refused. In 1764 the engineer-captain Isenbart was commissioned to measure the Balksee and the inflows and outflows and to draw a map. This map later became the basis for planning the canal.
1774
In 1774, 123 residents from Opole, Bülkau-Süderende, the Bovenmoor and the Auemoor asked again in a petition that the government should initiate the construction of a canal from the Balksee through the Westermoor, the Westercadewisch, the Neuhäuser Feldmark to the Oste.
1851
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After almost 90 years, in October 1851, a five-person construction commission was elected at the Neuhaus-Bülkau Lock Association's meeting of interests. It consisted of the housemen Tönjes Kettelhodt and Jürgen Mangels from the Bülkauer Süderende, the houseman Matthias Böhmke from the Süderende of Opole, the Opole pastor Carl Friedrich Cooper, and a representative from Neuhaus, Peter Thumann. Pastor Cooper excelled in particular: he tried again and again in various ways to raise the money for the construction and thereby improve the lives of his parishioners.
Geology of the catchment area
In the catchment area of the canal is:
- Moor in Stinstedt, Bülkau-Bovenmoor, Bülkau-Auemoor, Wingst-Grift-Seemoor and large parts of Opole, the Weissenmoor and the Westersoder Moor.
- deep march in Bülkau – Süderende southern floodplain and in the north of Opole,
- high march in Bülkau-Dorf, the Norderende, the Sprenge and Auestade as well as the northern floodplain,
- Geestrücken, in the area of the Oppler Geest, around different places or districts of Cadenberge, Wingst, Westerberg, Bröckelbeck, Varrel, Nordahn, Mittelstenahe and Stinstedt Eichhofsberg.
Problem and solution
The Geestrücken Wingst, shaped by the Ice Age, with the 79 m high Silberberg consists, interrupted only by isolated surface layers, predominantly of coarser and more permeable soils such as sand and gravel, from which the rainwater escapes laterally at the edge. Due to the higher groundwater level of the Geest and the low gradient of the marshland, there is stagnant water in these transition areas. In addition, these areas are deeper than the marshland closer to the rivers because they had a higher sediment supply from the water side. Therefore, as a rule, marginal moors have emerged on the edge of the Geest, which are historically referred to as lowland spring moors. These so-called Sietländer, remote from the river, are bogs with high water levels and prolonged flooding. In the Balksee, a moor lake about one meter deep with a buffering function, the water from the southern Geest collects.
The Neuhaus-Bülkau Canal, which runs in a south-north direction, cuts through the western edge moor of the Wingst and intercepts the groundwater flowing from the Geestberg in an east-west direction, which used to be in the Bülkau-Auemoor, Wingst-Grift-Seemoor and large parts of Opole seeped very slowly with a very slight gradient to the floodplain. The area between Wingst and Aue was effectively drained. The floodplain as a natural meandering outflow of the Balkssee led the water on a longer path and therefore more slowly from the lake and its catchment area. The canal significantly shortened this route and thus also improved drainage in the low-lying catchment area of the Balksee. It also had an important function as a local traffic route, but it ended with motorization.
When the water level is low, the drainage takes place in a free gradient through a sluice and the old Neuhäuser Hafen into the floodplain, or if the gradient is inadequate via the floodplain and the floodplain and further into the Oste and Elbe .
The construction
Construction began on June 2, 1852. The Neuhausen bailiff Schmidtmann sent a message to the Royal Hanoverian Landdrostei Stade that construction had begun, with 80 men directly in his garden and in the courtyard in Neuhaus in the best weather.
The various works were distributed in so-called lots. In 1852 a large number of workers and work steps were required to complete the construction. Many workers had to be recruited. First, 460 carts were purchased and then the work was divided into digging, shoveling, pushing carts, scooping water, shoveling water, carting away silt, ramming, but guards also had to be provided.
For the canal, around 149 acres of land had to be ceded in three sections . The first section was in the village of Grift (Wingst) and took 50 acres. In Section II, 63 acres were needed from the villages of Kriegerkuhle, Westermoor, Altkehdingen and Westercadewisch in what was then the parish of Cadenberge. Section III with 36 acres was exclusively in the Neuhäuser Feldmark. There is a height difference of about 60 cm along the entire route and about 260,000 m³ of earth should be dug and carted away by hand. Seven bridges for the public roads were planned, but only six had to be built, as a farmer in the first section did not want or could not wait for it and built his own field bridge. This saved 574 Reichstaler.
More and more workers were needed. Men from all over the north heard about the work and wanted to earn their money here. The call was followed not only by respectable men like the Oltmanns from Friesland, who then made their home in Opole, but also by many a rabble who had already been turned away when the Hadelner Canal was being built. The Hadler Canal, as it is also called, was built at almost the same time, and drains the land further inland around Ihlienworth , Odisheim , Stinstedt , Steinau to Bad Bederkesa . In order to be able to keep the rabble away here too, the same approval formalities and experience in building the Hadelner Canal were also used here.
For fear of the wages that were administered in the administrative building in Neuhaus, in addition to the two state gendarme permanently stationed in Neuhaus, two more were requested for this time.
Completion
The canal was completed in just over a year and a half. In June 1853 the embankments and dikes were sown with grass seeds, by August all dams in the canal bed and the dam on the Balksee could be removed and the canal flooded. At the same time, the outflow of the floodplain and the Grift with the so-called Great Dam and the Hundestöpe could be closed.
On 14 December 1853, the Neuhaus bailiff Schmidtmann and water conservancy inspector wrote Bush in their monthly report to the Landdrostei that now all work had been completed, but already in the large duct bend to blowing sand deposits had come and asked whether this before the handover to the association representatives would have to be cleaned up. The handover to the lock association was delayed until April 1854.
Costs and benefits
costs
The cost of the canal up to December 1, 1853, including all administrative and land compensation costs and debt repayment, amounted to 66,491 Reichstaler. The costs for clearing the quicksand are just as neglected as the costs for deepening the floodplain, because the water level in the floodplain sank so low that the flutes were no longer constant due to the now no longer constant inflow of water from the Balksee ran aground. According to other sources, the cost should have even exceeded 80,000 Reichstaler; It is questionable whether the additional costs described were included.
Inadequacies
In the first few years there was no lock and no lock in Neuhaus; so the water ran off in an uncontrolled manner, with the result that the water balance was disturbed. Conversely, brackish water from the Elbe flowed back into the canal and into the floodplain, and therefore not only the fish perished, but also many other animals. This only improved sustainably with the construction of the pumping station in Neuhaus in 1936. Before that, the farmer Heinrich Reyelts from Bovenmoor had already built a pumping station on the Balksee in 1927, at first with mockery, in order to be able to sustainably drain his land. Even today with the lock and the pumps it happens that the lock keeper and the farmers in Bülkau do not agree on whether too much or too little water is being pumped out at the wrong time, so that the fish die because too little water is in The floodplain flows in, the water stands too long because it doesn't rain, too much water was previously pumped out and is now rotting, the farmers have just driven liquid manure in the fields, it collects in the ditches, cannot be diluted enough with water and so the meadow overturns, suffers from a lack of oxygen. It also happens again and again that the farmers do not take care of their trenches due to financial need, rarely out of forgetfulness, so that in spring some fields are under water because the small ditches are overgrown and the water does not flow into the floodplain Ditches or the weather can drain.
The new traffic flow
A brisk trade developed through the new channel. Peat could now be transported from Bovenmoor to Neuhaus quickly and regardless of the weather, and in return Neuhauser “Schiet” was brought into the Bovenmoor as a fertilizer. The fish of the Balksee, which is no longer as rich in fish as it was back then, grain and many other goods could now be handled quickly. The residents of the Grift could bring their milk by flute to the bridge on the Zollbaum, from here it was taken by horse cart on the country road to the dairy in Bülkau. This brisk boat traffic resulted in several inns, which in turn produced pure pleasure and leisure fishing trips: In the heyday of the canal, every public bridge, except the one on Splethweg, had inns. Claus Reyelts was the first to recognize the signs of the times and set up the “Claus Reyelts inn and relaxation” on his farm during the construction of the canal. In the 1940s, the Hamburg fishing club's boats were also moored here, and they went on fishing trips on the Balksee from there. The son-in-law Kurt Kottke continued the business until the 1960s as the “Gasthaus Kottke”. It followed in the direction of Neuhaus on the bridge to Bargkamp "Ehlers Gasthaus" with the owner Hinrich Ehlers. Before that, Johann Christian Brand set up the restaurant “Zum green Jäger” in his house on the bridge “on the unstretched point” of the Kriegerkuhle. On the other side opposite the Opole customs house, Georg Wilhelm Hillmann built his restaurant Butt "Am Zollbaum" in 1853, the only one that still exists today. As the last restaurant before Neuhaus, the "Gasthaus Wöhning" was built in 1857 by Jürgen Glintenkamp. It was in the Westercadewisch, roughly near today's sewage works. There in 1905 the “landowner” Wilhelm Fick had a public bath called “Dorotheenbad” built, which lasted around 30 years. The bath was popular with spa guests and residents in the summer months, was about 100 m² in size and had four cells for dressing and undressing.
The decline
The economic changes in the 1950s and especially in the 1960s shifted the transport routes to the new solid roads. Peat was no longer needed for heating and if so, more and more quickly could be delivered by horse-drawn carriage or later by car and truck. The canal was kept free of trees and bushes until 1960, and in 1964 the canal bank overflowed due to melting and rainwater. This was perceived as the reason for the last dredging and maintenance of the canal.
Today the canal has overgrown in many places and a boat can only rarely be seen on the water. For this purpose, places can be seen where the soil slips into the canal, which suggests muskrat structures . The Balksee is a nature reserve and is no longer used for tourism, as it was in the 1970s and early 1980s, with rowboats or pedal boats, as a mud bath with an excursion restaurant or in winter as a gigantic ice rink with many large stands. In contrast to the lake, the floodplain, the ditches or the weather, the canal only rarely froze over (February 1999) because the constant current is too strong to form a continuous ice surface.
literature
- Reports from the Niederelbe-Zeitung.
- Information boards on the canal that were drawn up by the residents with the help of the local home nurse.
- Homeland essay by an elementary school student from 1953.
- Willi Klenck, home book of the former Neuhaus an der Oste district 1957
Map with all coordinates: