Saline Luisenhall

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The Saline Luisenhall in Grone , a district of Göttingen , is by its own admission the last commercial pan boiler in Europe to be in operation. The saltworks in the Leine valley, built by Philipp Rohns, began salt production in 1854. After the company's founder died early in 1860, after several changes of ownership in 1881, the business was transferred to the Levin family from Göttingen, who ran the company until the beginning of the 1990s. To this day, the natural brine extracted from an underground salt store is brought to crystallize in open pans according to a principle that has been used since the Middle Ages.

Saline Luisenhall with the old winding tower

history

Foundation by Philipp Rohns

The old weir exhibited on the factory premises

Around 1850, Philipp Rohns (1818–1860), the son of the Royal Building Commissioner Christian Friedrich Andreas Rohns , discovered the salt deposits in the Feldmark between Göttingen and Grone based on the indicator plants that are characteristic of salty soils . In addition to the proximity to the city of Göttingen, the hydropower available from the Grone brook was a decisive prerequisite for the construction of the salt works. On May 14, 1850, he founded the Philipp Rohns & Co. company, which set itself the goal of building a saltworks in Grone. The first drilling began on January 6, 1851, and two years later, on May 18, 1853, a layer of rock salt was encountered at a depth of 462.1 meters. Since the brine found under the salt layer had a comparatively high salt content of around 27%, the grading step could be dispensed with and the salt could be obtained in pans by evaporation.

In the autumn of 1854, brine production began. After Rohns had received permission to market the salt obtained in Grone as medicinal bath salt for use in the bath house at the Göttingen Albanitor built by his father in 1820, he advertised on August 19 of the same year in the Göttinger Wochenblatt:

From now on I am in a position to dispense saturated (100 lbs. Approx. 26 4/10 lbs. Of solid salt containing salt brine) for bathing in the bath house in front of the St. Albanithore, the usual bucket full of 2 ggr.

Although the high quality of the salt produced in Grone in 1856 and 1857 - among others by the Göttingen chemist Friedrich Wöhler - was certified, Rohns had to give up operations five years after the start of brine extraction. His creditors, who apparently had little confidence in the company, urged him to repay his loans quickly, so that he ultimately saw no alternative to bankruptcy proceedings. However, he did not live to see the judicial determination of his insolvency on May 20, 1860, as he died of pneumonia the day before.

Eventful years

The brothers Louis and Theodor Laporte bought the salt works from the bankruptcy estate in 1863 and named it “Luisenhall” in memory of their mother, who died at an early age. But they too had problems to contend with. In 1865 the brine pump crashed into the only borehole and operations had to be stopped. Since the recovery proved initially to be impossible, was between 16 January 1867 and the 4 August 1868, a second drill hole down to 335.6 meters drilled . The rescue measures that were carried out at the same time on the first borehole were finally crowned with success, so that the salt production could be increased even after the work was completed. However, since the proceeds from the sale of the salt did not outweigh the costs of drilling and repairs, the Laporte brothers were finally forced to sell the salt works in 1872.

The ownership structure in the following nine years is confusing. The five-time change of ownership mentioned in a speech on the company's fiftieth anniversary in 1900 cannot be proven, according to Steinert, but what is certain is that the saltworks changed hands several times after the Laportes went bankrupt, before Hermann Bartold Levin, the son of the Göttingen cloth manufacturer Hermann Albert Levin, took it over in October 1881 at a price of 180,000 gold marks .

Owned by the Levins

The facade of the villa of the Levin family, which is now used as an administration building, is an eye-catcher on the site of the Luisenhall Saline

Under its new owner Hermann Bartold Levin (I.), the saltworks was rebuilt and expanded as planned. Shortly after their takeover, he had the second borehole begun by the Laporte brothers completed by E. Julius Winter, one of the most renowned deep drilling contractors in the German Reich . In 1892 Levin replaced the haulage service to the Göttingen freight yard, which had previously been carried out with 24 horses, by a siding, which significantly simplified the transport of fuel to the salt works and the delivery of the salt produced there. In addition, Luis Hall was one of the first salt mines in Germany, where the 1887 patented type of the lower boiler pan was used, the formation of the depositing the crystallization process and later in handwork to be eliminated pan stone markedly reduced. In this way, 5,000 tons of salt could be sold for the first time in 1890, although this value is clearly relativized in the perspective of a total production of more than 500,000 tons of salt in the German Empire in 1893. A plan handed down from 1920 to expand the ten boiling pans in operation by two more was never implemented.

Hermann Bartold Levin (I.) died in 1926 and his son Bartold (II.), Who had already entered the business as a partner in 1911, took over Luisenhall. When he died almost four years later, the saltworks became the property of a community of heirs. Under the management of Bartold (II.) Widow Marliese, the company was kept going during the Second World War , mainly through the use of forced labor , before Marliese handed the company over to her stepson, the chemist Bartold (III.), In 1945.

In the 1950s, so-called Räker systems were installed to automatically push the salt mash together in the boiling pans.

After the end of the war, Bartold Levin (III.) Switched the firing systems to an alternative way of burning wood waste due to the shortage of fuel. With the purchase of their own trucks, the salt delivery was shifted to the road. The economic situation of the salt works was extremely difficult in the first post-war years. Large quantities of salt produced in the GDR flooded the market in the Federal Republic and caused salt prices to fall. Nevertheless, Bartold (III.) Initiated extensive modernization measures in the 1950s. By installing so-called Räker systems and using a mobile snorkel pump, the work on the boiling pans could be made noticeably easier and more rational. In addition, the drying process was significantly improved with the purchase of a gas-heated fluidized bed dryer .

However, the work in the saltworks turned out to be extremely hard and sweaty at all times, as the report of a worker from his first day at Luisenhall impressively shows:

And in '65, on January 4th, I started here as a boiler. When I had the first day around, at four in the evening […], I would have loved not to come back - the day was so hard. So I have to bludgeon the day - put on and kick out. Well, when I got home, I said to my wife: "If it weren't for the papers, I wouldn't have gone back ..."

While Philipp Rohns employed seven workers in the early years, the workforce in 1875 was 40 workers. Under the company welfare scheme initiated by Bartold Levin (I.), the saltworks workers were granted affordable apartments on the company premises and loans. In addition, the Levin family leased farmland from their property to the employees. In 1908 a kitchen was set up on the saltworks site, in which lunch was cooked for the staff until 1930. At the end of the 1920s, Balthold Levin (II.) Set up his own bowling alley; Harvest festivals were celebrated once a year. All of these measures should improve the working atmosphere and in this way ensure the retention of a permanent workforce for the hard physical exertion in the Gron salt works. After the death of Bartold Levin (III.), Jörg Bethmann, grandson of Bartold Levin (II.), Took over the business in 1995 and continues the family tradition.

Luisenhall today

View into the brine reservoir

After the vacuum boiling process was finally implemented in the second half of the 20th century, production at the Groner Saline is now geared towards the extraction of high-quality coarse salts. In contrast to vacuum evaporated salt obtained from pure brine, the pan salt produced in Luisenhall also contains mineral components of the soaked natural brine.

While the salt production in Luisenhall in the first two decades after the Second World War was between 6,000 and 7,000 tons of salt, this value declined continuously in the 1980s and has stabilized since 1989 with a total production of around 3,700 tons. Around 2,200 tons of this were sold as table salt in 1992, while another 1,200 tons were processed into bath salt by the Würzburg company Kneipp with the addition of essential oils. Smaller quantities, which mainly arise as processing residues, are used for fertilization or marketed as salt licks . In order to be able to offer its customers a wider range of products, Luisenhall GmbH has also been selling salts from other producers since the 1970s.

While Luisenhall has no architectural or operational features compared to comparable saltworks of the 19th century, its preservation as the last salt works in Germany to work according to the pan-boiling process (after the "Oberilm" saltworks, which was founded in 1903 in Oberilm in Thuringia ) is a significant industrial monument too, which is not sufficiently taken into account in the current form of use.

In addition to being used for salt production, the brine is now used in a bathhouse connected to the salt works. Visitors can bathe in an 18% thermal brine at 34 ° C or use a brine steam sauna.

A part of the extracted brine is also sent by tanker to other pools for their brine pools.

The current production process

Process scheme for salt production in Luisenhall.

The salt production process currently used in Luisenhall begins with the conveyance of the brine, which is the result of the natural dissolution of rock salt, from the two boreholes using a piston pump and a compressed air pump. The brine is cleaned of plaster of paris, iron, coarse pieces of flowing material and clay in several sedimentation tanks by adding a diluted milk of lime mixed with soda. The brine is then fed into a wooden reservoir with a capacity of around 350,000 liters.

During the boiling process in the lower kettle pans, which are now exclusively heated with hard coal, the brine is heated to 60 ° C (for coarser salt) or 80 ° C (for finer salt). As a result of this - in comparison to the process otherwise used in salt production today - the large salt crystals typical of evaporated salt are formed. When the salt crystals sink, pan stone is deposited on the bottom of the pans, which must be removed by the workers at regular intervals (so-called “pan knocking”). After 24 hours, around eight tons of salt have crystallized, which are drawn to the pan head in an automatic process with the Räker systems and sucked off there using a snorkel pump.

The extracted salt paste is first centrifuged for pre-drying until the residual moisture is around 8%. The residual moisture is then further reduced to 1% in a fluidized bed dryer. The salt dried in this way is transported to a salt mill, where smaller lumps of salt are crushed without destroying the characteristic coarse structure of the vacuum salt. Then the salt is sorted according to grain size in a vibrator equipped with different fine sieves and stored in the magazine. Before the final packaging at the individual packing stations, the portion of the salt that is not later to be sold as table salt is denatured for use as cattle, litter or industrial salt or processed further into curing salt by adding sodium nitrite .

literature

  • Arne Steinert: Concepts of the museumization of technology and work: Museum development - perspective for the industrial monument Saline Luisenhall. Frankfurt am Main 1997, ISBN 3-631-30761-6 .

Other media

Web links

Commons : Saline Luisenhall  - Album with pictures, videos and audio files

Remarks

  1. ↑ Göttinger Wochenblatt of August 19, 1854, here quoted from Steinert, Concepts der Musealisierung, p. 33.
  2. ↑ Steinert, Concepts of Musealization, p. 36f.
  3. ↑ Steinert, Concepts of Musealization, p. 46.
  4. ^ Edmund Ballhaus, With 5 HP into the present. A boiling pan saltworks as a living industrial monument, in: Duwe / Gottschalk / Koerner (ed.), Göttingen without Gänseliesel. Texts and images on city history, Gudensberg-Gleichen 1988, pp. 92–98, here quoted from Steinert, Concepts of Musealization, p. 54.
  5. ↑ Steinert, Concepts of Musealization, pp. 38 and 73.
  6. ↑ Quantities according to Steinert, Concepts of Musealization, p. 59f. and 72.

Coordinates: 51 ° 32 ′ 16.3 "  N , 9 ° 54 ′ 26.7"  E

This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on August 18, 2006 .