Cloth factory Aachen

Stockheider mill

The cloth factory Aachen , formerly Textile Museum Aachen , is a public institution with museum character, which is located in the historical and listed Stockheider Mühle in the landscape park Soers of the Aachen district Laurensberg . In it, the history of the cloth industry in Aachen is historically processed and presented on the basis of numerous exhibits and display boards.

description

The facility is managed by the “Tuchwerk Aachen e. V. ”in cooperation with the“ Tuchwerk Soers gGmbH ”and the“ Margarete Lorenz Foundation ”. Already from 2006 to 2012 the association operated the "Textile Museum Aachen" in the Komerichen Mühle in the Aachen district of Brand , which had to be abandoned due to the insufficient exhibition space and poor transport links. Since 2014, the Aachen cloth works has been located in the historic and listed Stockheider Mühle on Strüver Weg no.116.

The aim of the institution's sponsors is to be able to further expand the depot with the support of public and private grants, to expand the collections, to establish the Stockheider Mühle as a place of culture and knowledge and to regain the status of an official museum. The Aachen cloth factory is a member of the “ International Wool Route Euregio Maas-Rhine ” working group.

With the exception of the regular days of the open monument, the Aachen cloth factory is currently open to the public once a week and also offers courses, seminars, film evenings and special tours on the subject of cloth production. By subletting part of the mill building for cultural and artistic purposes, for example to the Theater K or to the heirs of the artist Clemens Pasch , a bridge between art and history, for example through performances related to the history of textiles, is to be established and income to be earned.

Vision and implementation

Komericher Mill; former seat of the Textile Museum Aachen

In order not to let the glorious time of the Aachen cloth industry, as well as its equipment and systems, be forgotten, in 2003 former textile entrepreneurs, textile specialists, teachers, historians and museum specialists as well as the Zinkhütter Hof and the LVR industrial museum with the cloth factory Müller founded the "Verein for the maintenance of the Aachen Textile Industry History eV ". In order to improve networking, he also became a member of the “Association of Industrial Museums of the Euregio Maas-Rhein eV”, the “Network exploregio.net” and the “Network of extracurricular learning locations” in the Euregio, and worked closely with the Westphalian scientific service, among others Industriemuseum Bocholt and the Industrion in Kerkrade / NL. Initially, the association settled in the recently restored Komericher Mühle, in whose former grinder and shed roof hall they brought numerous textile machines, photo collections, company records and much more to the exhibition from company estates . In 2006 the association changed its name to “Tuchwerk Aachen e. V. ”and with the support of the NRW Foundation and the Sparkasse Aachen, the new“ Textile Museum Aachen ”was opened by the Lord Mayor of Aachen Jürgen Linden .

Due to the ever-increasing collection of historical machines and the limited space, the association soon reached the limits of capacity and looked for new locations and at the same time for new donors. For this purpose, on the initiative of the association, an architecture office was appointed to develop a new usage concept for the Becker &führung company wing in the Stockheider Mühle, which has not been used since 1983 . The planning concept envisaged a three-part solution consisting of gastronomy, textile museum and living. For cost reasons, at least for the time being, this complete plan could not be implemented. As an interim solution, the association therefore decided in 2008 to initially rent a hall in Rütscher Straße and was finally able to acquire the Stockheider Mühle from the holdings of the last Becker &führung cloth factory with funding from the “Margarete Lorenz Foundation” established in 2012. In return, the Komericher Mühle site was abandoned and the exhibits there and those in the transition hall were relocated to the Stockheider Mühle.

Stockheider mill

The Stockheider Mühle is one of several mills on the bank of the torrent and was first mentioned in a document in a book of the dead of the Aachen Marienstift in the 13th century . From 1788 it was first used as a fulling mill and expanded in 1891 by the new owner Thomas Rzehak for dyeing and in 1945 for finishing . In 1969 the company Becker &führung from Brand took over the mill complex and operated the plant until 1983. The company then stopped production and used parts of the building only as a depot, with other parts falling into disrepair. After the final closure of Becker &führung in 2003 and after further years of decline, in 2012 the entire mill complex with around 5,000 m² of space was transferred to Aachener Tuchwerk e. V., who since then has been using around 1,700 m² of the building complex for its statutory goals and sublet most of the remaining space.

Since 2008 the Stockheider Mühle has been a station on the so-called “white path” from Lousberg to Kerkrade, which was created as a tourist attraction on the occasion of the EuRegionale 2008 .

Years of construction

Algorithm

After the takeover by Tuchwerk Aachen e. V. began the actual work on setting up the exhibition areas, on the historical processing of the collections such as the textile machines and products, on the archiving of company bequests such as files, correspondence, sample books and photo material as well as the numerous company portraits and personal biographies. Finally, on September 13, 2014, the cloth depot was opened by the Lord Mayor Marcel Philipp and the exhibition halls were opened to the public as “Cloth Works Aachen”. On the occasion of the opening ceremony, the sculpture “Algorith” by the artist Arek Laskowski was unveiled in front of the Stockheider Mühle. With its numerous cogwheels, it is supposed to be symbolically linked to the wheelwork of the cloth machines. In addition, the non-profit "Tuchwerk Soers gGmbH", which is responsible for the administration of the industrial monument, was founded in 2016. The ongoing documentation of the collection is supported in terms of content and finances by the Rhineland Regional Council.

The declared aim of the Aachen cloth factory is to further expand the depot and archive collections, to cooperate with three research institutes of RWTH Aachen, the DWI - Leibniz Institute for Interactive Materials e. V. (previously: Deutsches Wollforschungsinstitut (DWI)), the Institute for Textile Technology (ITA) and the Collaborative Research Center 532 of the Faculty of Architecture, as well as establishing the facility as a “Stockheider Mühle cultural and knowledge location” and once again its status as recognized "Textile Museum Aachen" to receive.

Other Projects

To finance these goals and to make the Stockheider mill both a cultural attraction for the population and as a source of information about the Aachen cloth factory, in order to draw attention to the history of local cloth production, unneeded space was sublet. The first thing to do was to move the Theater K from Aachen into its new quarters in the cloth factory in Aachen, and the Pasch family of artists set up a studio. Since October 2018, the Kleine Theaterfabrik has also moved into the Tuchwerk, a puppet and puppet theater project by the Russian artist Tatjana Jurakowa specially designed for children.

In addition, the Aachen Christian Social Welfare Association, together with the Kolping Society and Picco Bella gGmbH , operates a production school for young people in the Aachen Cloth Works, in which, among other things, new marketable products are made from machine parts and materials from the former cloth production and offered for sale. Supported by the Federal Employment Agency , the aforementioned social welfare organization is organizing a refugee integration project in the Tuchwerk, in which people with a refugee or migration background can learn and deepen a variety of activities and improve their language skills. Furthermore, the Tuchwerk Aachen provides further free rooms for regular film evenings with a thematic reference to the history of cloth and has already been included as a performance location in the catalog of “Docfest on Tour” and “Filmschauplätze NRW” as well as for the culture festival across the borders . In 2018, for example, the award-winning film The Silky Thread by Paul Thomas Anderson was shown

Exhibits (selection)

The collection of the Aachen cloth factory now includes several 1000 exhibits from small accessories to large machines from various company bequests and donations, of which around 2000 individual parts have been recorded in a database and properly stored and serviced with the financial support of the regional associations in North Rhine-Westphalia . A large part of it has already been prepared for the exhibition and some can still be used for demonstration purposes. Didactically, the exhibition is currently structured in such a way that the visitor can clearly understand the individual work steps from the flake to the cloth using the exhibits. The "machinery" is supplemented by numerous information boards about the individual operations ( card , scissors , spinning , weaving , dyeing , refining , etc.) as well as selected corporate portraits of Aachen cloth factories and foreign specialized companies such as worsted Werke AG from Eupen or the baize factory Simonis from Verviers. The most striking exhibits include:

Ancient card system Cockerill, built around 1830

Ancient clutter system Cockerill; a carding machine from the Guillaume carded yarn spinning mill in St. Cecile / Florenville / Belgium. It is the oldest exhibit in the exhibition and was developed around 1830 by an unknown manufacturer based on the model of the Anglo-Belgian family Cockerill.

Sample clutter; produced around 1960 in the machine factory Memmingen KG ; last used in the Meyersohn-Woll company in Hochgreuth in Betzigau

Card set from the 1950s; a donation from the Fritz Hermann KG cloth factory in Aachen

Three-card set from Duesberg-Bossom in Verviers from 1960; an exhibit from the AstonJohnson company in Kettenis

Scratching machine from Aachener Maschinenbau GmbH , built in 1950, last used in the Eduard Schwartz scratching factory , Aachen

Shredding machine originally supplied as a card grinder ; a machine from the textile machine construction company Duesberg-Bosson in Verviers, built in 1961, an exhibit from the AstonJohnson company in Kettenis.

Melting device from 1950, manufactured by Joeres & Pferdmenges in Rheydt . It is used with its "Schmälzemulsion" to wet the wool in the shredder to avoid unnecessary tearing of the wool fibers.

Duesberg-Bosson mixing tower in Verviers from 1962; Exhibit by AstenJohnson Kettenis. It takes over the loosened fibers from the shredder and feeds them in layers to the card set.

Self-actor

Self-actuator from 1913 by the FJ Grün company in Guebwiller in Alsace; an acquisition from the Guillaume carded yarn spinning mill in St. Cecile / Belgium

Ring spinning machine from the Spinnbau Bremen workshop , built in 1950: last used in the Institute for Textile and Clothing Technology at the Niederrhein University of Applied Sciences in Mönchengladbach

Autoconer; a winding machine , built in 1969, from the company Schlafhorst , Mönchengladbach; last location of the industrial school in Aachen

Twisting machine from the Carl Hamel company from Chemnitz , a gift from the Association of Entrepreneurs' Associations as the successor to the Aachen Textile Engineering School

Two-for-one twisting machine; an exhibit from the H. Weller machine factory , formerly Pfenningsberg & Co .; the exhibit comes from the dissolution of the Aachen textile school

Mechanical loom from Lenz, Mönchengladbach, built in 1920

Jacquard weaving machine from TEXO, Norrköping / Sweden, built in 1953; Exhibit from the bankruptcy estate of Becker &führung

Washing and fulling machine; an exhibit of textile mill Thomas Josef Heimbach of Duren and Calamine , created around 1883 in the Maschinenfabrik Leopold Philipp inhibitors

Raising machine from the Montforts machine factory in Mönchengladbach from 1959; last location at the Kindermann weaving mill , Ibbenbüren

Clipper ; manufactured in the machine factory Neuman & Esser with cutting blades from Severin Heusch and J. Schlenter & Cie
Decating machine ; a product from the Moritz Jahr machine factory in Gera for textile finishing

Historic sewing machines

Collections of small machines and accessories such as:
- historical spinning wheels
- historical sewing machines
- Testing devices for testing the quality of wool in terms of length, thickness and crimp of the fibers, or in the case of yarn or twine in terms of fineness, evenness, elongation and tear resistance. Quality testing is a feature of Aachen's textile history; As early as 1887, the “Public Inspection Office for the Textile Industry” was founded in Aachen as the first of its kind.