Furnace making museum
The oven maker museum Backes is located in Gershasen, a district of Westerburg in the Westerwald . Here was one of four centers for baking oven construction with oven stones . Backes is the name for an oven in the Westerwald. In addition to bread , baking cake, which consists of grated potatoes, was also baked in stone ovens in the Westerwald when the oven temperature dropped.
Location and history
In Gershasen there was a historic furnace manufacturing center, next to Königswinter , Bell and Pelm . In the village itself, a Ofenbauerstrasse is a reminder of the past. The volcanic tuff deposits of the quarries (called Kauten) near Gershasen were a prerequisite for the development as a furnace manufacturing center . This rock was broken at Waltersberg and at Sainscheid . Volcanic tuffs have the property of storing heat and slowly releasing it. Furthermore, the tuffs are light and therefore suitable for the construction of the vaults in the ovens. The oven stones from Gershasen were mined in the open pit to a depth of 10 meters.
Brick oven construction
The masons used masonry tools such as mason's hammer, trowel, spirit level, plumb bob and angle to build the ovens. In addition, they used stone cutting tools such as the bicorn , stone hatchet (called Bill), hammers and chisels, bevels and crowbars when extracting stone in the quarry; as well as for shaping the oven stones.
During mining, squares with an edge length of 5 × 5 m were uncovered and rough blocks were cut from the rock with a bicorn. These were either transported by two stone masons or lifted with a pulley system and transported to the work place by means of a cable crane and a trolley. The size of the stone slabs was up to a length of 150 centimeters, a width of up to 75 centimeters and a thickness of 12 centimeters, and stove tops up to a size of 180 centimeters. The hotplates were of particular importance for the oven, because up to four to six hotplates were required for a community or bakery oven, depending on the size.
Agglomerate tuff
The agglomerate tuff that was broken up near Gershasen is tough and easy to work when it is still fresh from the mountain . When this natural stone has lost its moisture at break, it is hard and brittle because it essentially consists of foamy volcanic glass. This stone is particularly heat-resistant, stores the heat and releases it slowly, so it is particularly suitable for the construction of stone ovens. The oven manufacturers there can be traced back to the beginning of the 19th century. They initially received orders from the vicinity of the Westerwald, which expanded to Fulda, Gießen and Kassel. Around 1960 the last oven maker gave up his trade in the Westerwald.
museum
The oven maker and local history museum gives an insight into 160 years of baking oven history in Gershasen. The museum presents the stone oven, which is still in regular use today, the backes, an oven-maker room with an exhibition of tools and a village room with historical everyday objects; also pictures of the tufa mining and its processing into oven bricks from the 1940s.
Comparable museums or exhibitions
A comparable exhibition on stone oven construction can be found in the Siebengebirgsmuseum near Königswinter. There are also free-standing, fully functional historical ovens (around 1870) in an oven museum near Emstal in Brandenburg .
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Karl-Ludwig Diehl: Vaults for baking bread in the Biedermeier period: the oven builders of the Westerwald, 2007 ( memento of March 15, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on September 19, 2009
- ↑ Oven construction and oven barn in the Siebengebirge , accessed on September 19, 2009
Coordinates: 50 ° 33 '25.25 " N , 7 ° 57' 20.14" E