Oskar Erckens
Oskar Erckens (born February 17, 1824 in Burtscheid ; † October 29, 1901 in Aachen ) was a German entrepreneur and owner of the Johann Erckens Sons company in Burtscheid near Aachen and Erckens & Co. cotton spinning and weaving mill in Grevenbroich . Among other things, he supplied the Curia in Rome and the police in New York. Later he was appointed to the secret council of commerce . In addition, Oskar Erckens was President of the Aachen Chamber of Commerce from 1881 to 1896 .
Companies
Aachen
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Members of the Erckens family began producing cloth as early as the 18th century and Christoph Friedrich Erckens (* 1740) was the first of them to establish the cloth trade in Burtscheid. Later in 1806, the brothers Friedrich and Johann Melchior Erckens (1782–1852) built their cloth factory, which they initially ran together, on Burtscheider Hauptstrasse. In 1830 they parted ways and Johann Melchior Erckens took over the Burtscheider factories together with his new partner and managing director, Johann Friedrich Lochner , his son-in-law. In the following years they succeeded in developing the company to such an extent that larger areas above Dammstrasse in Burtscheid had to be purchased.
After the death of Johann Melchior Ercken in 1852 and the departure of the partner Johann Friedrich Lochner in 1857, the company was continued by his son Oskar Ercken under sole responsibility under the name Johann Ercken sons . Oskar Erckens was able to significantly increase the economic and social importance of the company. His specialty was the production of the finest men's and women's towels. Awards at exhibitions in Paris, London, Philadelphia and Melbourne attest to the quality of the fabrics produced. The office building of the company and the wool warehouse building , which served temporarily as servants House, still stand today as building monuments in the Malmedyerstraße no. 30 and 35-37 in Aachen.
After his death, he transferred the company to his son Johann Alfred Erckens (1856–1917), who converted it into a GmbH in 1907. The company continued to successfully assert itself on the market and employed around 600 people in the mid-twenties. In peacetime, 30% of sales went abroad, before the First World War mainly overseas, then mainly to European countries.
Due to the aftermath of the First World War, which left large gaps in the workforce, as well as the unrest in Aachen on the occasion of the separatist uprising in 1924 and the beginning of the global economic crisis, sales fell significantly. To counteract this, on July 3, 1928, the Erckens cloth factory joined forces with “Ernst Friedrich Weissflog AG”, the “Gebr. Aschaffenburg Cloth Factory in M. Gladbach ”, the“ Bautzner Cloth Factory ”, the“ Wm. Focke & Co. Kammgarnweberei ”in Gera and the“ Delius Cloth Factory ”in Aachen to form the“ Toga, United Weberei Aktien-Gesellschaft ”with a capital of 15 billion Reichsmarks. But already on February 8, 1932, the dissolution of TOGA was decided, all individual businesses - including the Erckens cloth factory - shut down, the creditors paid off and the loans repaid, which completely lost the share capital.
As a representative residential and company headquarters, Oskar Erckens had a mighty cube-like building built on Burtscheider Dammstrasse according to plans by Friedrich Klausener , which was also used for cultural purposes. The integrated large ballroom, equipped with two grand pianos, was later rented several times by the city's music directorate and the so-called Burtscheid white balls took place here. Erckens was chairman of the board of the Evangelical Hospital Association in Aachen from 1932 to 1937, responsible for the Luisenhospital Aachen and had been a member of the Aachener Casino Club since 1865 .
In honor of Oskar Erckens and his company, a street in Aachen-Burtscheid was named after him.
Grevenbroich
Oskar Erckens ran the company Erckens & Co. cotton spinning and weaving mill in Grevenbroich, which was housed in buildings on the Stadtparkinsel (also called "Erckens Insel"), some of which have been preserved today. The forerunner of the machine hall had seen different owners, including Friedrich Koch from Wevelinghoven, who took over the spinning mill from 1808. One of the employees at this time was Diedrich Uhlhorn , who left in 1812 and took over a mechanical workshop that later became the mint. From 1823 the owners changed several times before the hall was destroyed by a major fire in 1870.
Two years later, Oskar Erckens and his brother-in-law Julius Schnitzler acquired the company and had a new machine house built in 1891, which is still preserved today and is used jointly by the city library and the city archive. The company's other buildings also include the shipping hall and the weighing house, which were listed as a historical monument in 1984 . In this context, the club and assembly building was rebuilt from old material and renamed the “Auerbach House” in May 2001 on the occasion of the partnership anniversaries. A mill building that originally belonged to the building ensemble was destroyed in World War II.
The Kommerzienrat Johann Emil Erckens (1863-1927), son of Oskar Erckens, was chairman of the supervisory board until his death in 1927 . His sons Oskar (* 1892) and Emil (* 1895) continued the company. The company flourished, but then suffered severely from the consequences of the Second World War, which ultimately led to the closure of the company in 1956.
Oskar Erckens found his final resting place in the family crypt on the Heissberg Cemetery in Burtscheid. His house built in the classicist style in 1887 in the immediate vicinity of the factory on today's Stadtparkinsel in Grevenbroich is now used as the Villa Erckens Museum .
Ercken's chapel
The chapel, which is idyllically located in the city park directly on the Erft, is closely linked to the history of the Protestant church in Grevenbroich, as parish life began here.
After the few Protestants in Grevenbroich had not received the right of religious freedom until 1801, the number of Protestant Christians increased sharply, also as a result of industrialization through immigration. However, there was no Protestant church in the district town. A new Protestant congregation was only founded in 1888 when the Aachen Protestant and businessman Oskar Erckens made a chapel available to the Protestant church. The following incident was the reason: Erckens had sent his son to Grevenbroich to expand his textile industry there too. The curia in Rome and the police in New York were supplied with materials. A short time later, the father visited his son in Grevenbroich to inspect the business and asked him where he was going to church. “Nowhere” was the answer, because there was no Protestant church. In 1880 a hall was set up in a factory room for worship purposes, and the father promised to build a Protestant church in Grevenbroich. On the occasion of a vacation trip to the Ticino Alps, he discovered a chapel in Thun (Switzerland) that he liked very much, and he gave the order to build the chapel in Grevenbroich exactly based on this model. This is how the “Erckens Chapel” was created in today's city park, it was furnished and given to the Protestant community for church purposes.
It was inaugurated in 1888, and the builder wanted this church to remain a place of worship forever.
After the Second World War, the community grew so much due to the influx of refugees and immigrants that the small chapel no longer offered enough space for everyone. That is why the great Christ Church was built in the city center in 1958 and church life increasingly shifted there. School services or weddings were only sporadically held in the Erckens Chapel. When costly repair and maintenance work on the roof and organ finally became necessary, these events did not materialize either and the chapel stood abandoned in the city park and threatened to deteriorate. Negotiations for the sale of the chapel with the Evangelical Church, other religious communities and the city, which wanted to turn the chapel into a museum, failed. Finally, the Free Christian Community of Grevenbroich eV was able to purchase the chapel from the Erckens community of heirs in 1972 , following the wish of its founder that this site should always remain a place of worship.
literature
- Eduard Arens, Wilhelm Leopold Janssen : Club Aachener Casino , new ed. by Elisabeth Janssen and Felix Kuetgens , Druck Metz, Aachen 2nd edition 1964, p. 174
- Marlene Zedelius-Sanders: Green Islands on the Erft. Historic gardens in the Grevenbroich urban area. In: Yearbook for the Rhein-Kreis Neuss 2006, pp. 210–225, especially pp. 219–221.
Web links
Individual evidence
| personal data | |
|---|---|
| SURNAME | Erckens, Oskar |
| BRIEF DESCRIPTION | German entrepreneur |
| DATE OF BIRTH | February 17, 1824 |
| PLACE OF BIRTH | Burtscheid |
| DATE OF DEATH | October 29, 1901 |
| Place of death | Aachen |