Provincial Facility for the Blind Düren

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Former hospital building in Meckerstrasse

The Provinzial-Blindenanstalt Düren was an institution for the blind in the district town of Düren in North Rhine-Westphalia . Even today, the city is called the city ​​of the blind because of the many facilities for the blind and visually impaired .

The initiative for the facilities for the blind came from the Düren industrialist family Schenkel. At a meeting of the Rhenish Provincial Parliament in 1842, a proposal was made to found a Rhenish institution for the blind from voluntary contributions. Düren became the seat of the institution because the married couple Rudolf Schenkel and his wife Catharina Schenkel , nee. Schoeller, made their former college building available to the Jesuits for this purpose.

On November 13, 1845, the Elisabeth Foundation opened there for teaching the blind in the Rhine Province with seven people. It was named after the wife of King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, Elisabeth Ludovika of Bavaria .

In 1876 the facility moved to the newly built building on Meckerstraße in Düren-Nord . The opening took place in July. The asylum for the blind was now looked after by the Cellint women who worked there until 1968. The Rhenish Blind Welfare Association , which was founded in 1886, still exists today. In 1904 the newly founded association built a workshop for the blind with an adjoining dormitory in the immediate vicinity of the institution for the blind . It was inaugurated on April 18, 1904. Before that, the workshop was housed in rented rooms on Karlstrasse, which, however, had become too small. Today, the House of workshops for the blind, a kindergarten of workers' welfare .

Wilhelm Mecker was the first director of the institution. The Meckerstrasse was named after him. Mathilde Schoeller b. Carslanger died in 1908 and left the city of Düren, the poor association and the institution for the blind the very high sum of 45,000 marks.

The professional development agency

Due to the advancing industrialization and the associated new professions, the traditional blind professions died out more and more, so that the institution for the blind was made smaller and smaller. Today the Louis Braille School in Düren with boarding school is still there. There is also a home for blind people with multiple disabilities in Düren's Eberhard-Hoesch-Straße , the Anna-Schoeller-Haus, a home for the blind in Roonstraße and the Düren vocational training center , a retraining center for the later blind and visually impaired in the south of Düren.

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  • Nord-Düren, contributions to the history of the district , published by the St. Joachim Schützenbruderschaft Düren-Nord 1909 eV on the occasion of the 100th anniversary in 2009, total production: Schloemer und Partner GmbH, Düren

Coordinates: 50 ° 49 ′ 1.4 "  N , 6 ° 28 ′ 41.4"  E