Wallen slate quarry near Meschede
The old slate quarry of Wallen near Meschede is located in the south of Wallen, in the Remberg nature reserve in North Rhine-Westphalia .
The quarry takes up about 2/3 of the nature reserve on the Remberg and has an area of about 1 hectare .
history
In quarries not only the material for road construction is extracted, special quarries also supply the material for building construction (e.g. broken stone bases or slate roofs). Since the slate from the slate quarry in Wallen could not be split, the slate quarry in Wallen only supplied slate blocks that could be sawed using saw frames or saws. These plates were used as window sills, billiard tables or as dissection tables . The blocks were extracted in the open pit with compressed air tools and further processed with modern machines.
The slate quarry was founded in 1909 by five gentlemen from the Westfälische Schieferindustrie GmbH in Cologne.
In the heyday, 50 men from Calle (Meschede) , Wallen and Voßwinkel worked in the quarry.
The world economic crisis in 1932 brought the plant to a standstill, later work continued with just a few workers.
The plant in Wallen was shut down; only pipe slate from the slate quarry in Antfeld was processed.
In 1938 the slate mine in Wallen was finally shut down, and all machines were sold for armaments purposes during the Second World War . Ludwig Dreier was the last managing director in the slate mine, who entered as a partner in 1927 and took over the entire property in 1938 after the liquidation.
In March 1945 foreigners moved into the last covered buildings in the quarry, in May 1945 after the last foreigners left, the buildings were closed due to the risk of collapse.
In 1977/78 the buildings were buried with earth.
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 19 ′ 28.5 ″ N , 8 ° 11 ′ 44.5 ″ E
