Cromford Textile Mill
The Cromford textile factory in Ratingen , Rhineland , was founded in 1783 by Johann Gottfried Brügelmann and was the first factory on the European mainland . Today a branch of the LVR industrial museum is located here .
history
prehistory
Brügelmann, who came from a wealthy Elberfeld merchant family, learned - probably at the beginning of the 1770s - during a long stay in Basel about the invention of the waterframe by the Englishman Richard Arkwright in the central English village of Cromford . After his return to Wuppertal , the yarn market was on the upswing and demand could hardly be satisfied. Brügelmann recognized the potential that lay in the mechanization of what was previously labor-intensive spinning - there were around ten spinners for every weaver .
Richard Arkwright protected his invention, which was patented in England, intensively. How it worked he tried to keep a secret. The British government also made sure that the secret could not be carried outside the country: It imposed the death penalty on the disclosure of information about the machine . The value of this invention can only be seen from the fact that until Samuel Slater successfully rebuilt the machine in 1793, cotton was transported from the USA to England and then back again for spinning.
Nevertheless, Brügelmann managed to get a model of the Waterframe in 1783. Before that, he had already been researching unsuccessfully for six years with an alleged expert from the Siegerland , then he had managed to get a Cromford scratching machine , which was of no use to him without the Waterframe. It is unclear how he got this machine and the model of the Waterframe. According to the family chronicle, he is said to have smuggled himself into the Arkwright factory as a crank and worked there and secretly stole smaller spare parts until he believed he could replicate them at home. In a letter to the Elector Karl Theodor , however, he wrote that he had a devoted friend in England who had got him the things. However, it is conceivable that he did not want to admit in the letter that he had engaged in industrial espionage.
Establishment and operation of the factory
Brügelmann had previously looked for a suitable location for his factory. In his homeland in Wuppertal, he was prevented from doing so by the diet of yarn , a cartel-like connection between merchant families, and social constraints. He finally found a decommissioned oil mill in the former Eckamp office, including the right to mill, on the Anger in front of the city walls of Ratingen, near the moated castle Haus zum Haus . In 1784, the elector granted him a privilege to operate mechanical spinning mills for twelve years (Brügelmann had asked for 40 years) as compensation for the investments to be made. In addition, labor was very cheap in Ratingen, which was impoverished at the time, and less inclined to cause unrest, such as the weavers' uprisings in Elberfeld and Barmen in the early 1780s .
He built two production halls on the Anger and hired other Englishmen to help him produce functional waterframes. In 1784 he finally succeeded in putting the factory into operation. All machines were driven by water wheels . He named the factory after the place where it was modeled in England: Cromford. The Ratinger area between Hauser Ring, Mülheimer Straße and Junkernbusch is still called “Cromford” today.
Business was excellent: an impressive five-storey factory building was erected, next to it in 1787 a luxurious mansion for 20,000 Reichstaler and a partly baroque and partly English garden , today's Poensgenpark, laid out by Maximilian Friedrich Weyhe . Ten years after it opened, the factory had 400 workers - an unimaginably large number at the time. Shortly after Brügelmann's death in 1802 there were 600 - to this day the high point of the company's history, not least because numerous other spinning mills were built in the area after the electoral privilege expired, many of them even larger and more modern than the Cromford textile factory.
In 1801 the left bank of the Rhine became French with the Rhine as a customs border, which meant that important sales areas were lost, but Brügelmann had already founded a company in 1799 in Rheydt on the left bank of the Rhine together with the manufacturer Johann Lenssen.
After the company's founder died, his two sons continued the business. In 1846 Moritz Brügelmann, a grandson of the founder, had a steam engine installed in the cotton spinning mill, and he expanded the business by setting up a mechanical weaving mill with 165 chairs. In the revolutionary year of 1848 , the workers of the Cromford factory had founded a scythe corps as a security association headed by Wilhelm Brügelmann. In 1849 134 workers were employed in the spinning mill and 216 workers in the weaving mill. The company, which in the meantime had expanded considerably, ran into economic difficulties in 1890 when it was no longer able to cope with the competition. It was sold repeatedly and converted into a cooperative in the 1920s, only to be finally dissolved in 1977.
The Cromford Textile Mill today
The more modern factory halls were built over by a residential area in the 1980s . What remains are the mansion of the factory owner and the "high factory" , the original core of the company.
In 1983, an industrial site was examined and documented there for the first time using archeology . Today, part of the LVR industrial museum is located in the buildings . In the old five-storey building, all the machines required for yarn production have been reconstructed true to the original and fully functional. The factory can be seen fully in operation, powered by the central drive wheel. An exhibition and optional tours explain the history of the factory, the process of yarn production and the working conditions (e.g. child labor that was common at the time ) and social conditions.
In addition, the garden hall of Villa Cromford is used today from spring to early autumn of each year for the organization of civil weddings in the city of Ratingen.
Museum operation
Permanent exhibition
A detailed catalog is available for the permanent exhibition Cromford Ratingen , which reports on life and work in the factory, the technology of cotton spinning as well as the Cromford manor. The mansion was the control center of the once important company and bourgeois home of the Brügelmanns as one of the leading manufacturer families of their time.
Exhibitions
From October 25, 2015 to October 30, 2016, the exhibition The Power of Fashion - Between Empire, World War and Republic took place in the house. The focus of the exhibition was, among other things, the topics of cultural and fashion history , consumer and economic history , functional, functional clothing as well as myths and role models. A detailed catalog was published for the exhibition.
Individual evidence
- ^ Eckhard Bolenz : From the end of the ancien régime to the end of the German Confederation (approx. 1780-1870) . In: Bolenz et al. (Ed.): Ratingen. History 1780 to 1975 . Klartext Verlag, Essen 2000, ISBN 3-88474-943-9 (435 pages).
- ↑ a b c Archived copy ( memento of the original dated September 23, 2017 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.
- ^ A b c d e Jakob Germes: Ratingen through the ages - history and cultural documents of a city . 4th improved and expanded edition, Verlag Norbert Ernst Henn, Ratingen 1979, p. 82ff.
- ↑ thomas-sommerfeld.de: Ratinger cotton spinning mill Cromford - History of the former spinning mill ( Memento of the original from March 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (accessed October 24, 2015)
- ↑ official name: " LVR -Industriemuseum, Schauplatz Ratingen, textile factory Cromford" (Norbert Kleeberg: Krach um Cromford . In: Rheinische Post . February 7, 2009. )
- ↑ Cromford Ratingen - Living Worlds between First Factory and Manor House around 1800 , Ed .: LVR-Industriemuseum, Cologne 2010, ISBN 978-3-9813700-0-3
- ↑ The power of fashion - between Empire, World War and Republic , publisher: LVR-Industriemuseum, project management: Claudia Gottfried, Druckverlag Kettler GmbH, Bönen / Westphalia 2015, ISBN 978-3-9813700-3-4
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 18 ′ 21 ″ N , 6 ° 51 ′ 11 ″ E