Vegesack harbor
| Vegesack harbor | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Data | |||
| UN / LOCODE | DEBRE | ||
| operator | Vegesacker Havenkontor | ||
| start of building | 1618 | ||
| opening | 1622/23 | ||
| Port type | Inland port | ||
| Total area of the port | Harbor basin around 15,000 m², harbor area around 4–5 hectares | ||
| website | https://www.charterkontor-vegesack.de/ | ||
| Geographic information | |||
| place | Bremen | ||
| country | Free Hanseatic City of Bremen | ||
| Country | Germany | ||
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| Coordinates | 53 ° 10 '8 " N , 8 ° 37' 35" E | ||
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The Vegesacker port is 1622/23 of Bremen opened port in Vegesack .
geography
The port is centrally located in Vegesack, next to the Vegesacker Bahnhofsplatz and the Haven Höövt shopping center . Its entrance is at the confluence of the Lesum and the Weser . The Schönebecker Aue flows into the harbor basin, the last section of which flows under the Vegesacker Bahnhofsplatz through a pipe system. Shortly after the entrance to the port, a 42-meter-long, steel bascule bridge for pedestrians has been leading over the port basin since 1999 . The harbor basin is 285 meters long, 60 meters wide and the quay length is 465 meters.
history
The Vegesack Harbor was put into operation in 1622/23. This makes it the oldest man-made port in Germany . Decisive for the construction of this port were the increasing silting up of the Weser, which made the transport of goods upstream to Bremen difficult or impossible, as well as the demand for repair and safe berths for their ships for the winter time. As long as there was no such port, the ships had to survive the winter and the storms in river bays and branches of the Weser. Numerous ships were distributed over the entire course of the Weser from Bremen to the mouth of the Weser and offered easy targets for looters and thieves.
For a port preferably namely situated on the left bank of the Lesum offered three places on, Lesmerbrook (, Lesumbrok ') which is located on the right bank of the Weser Blome Thal (, Blumenthal ') with its appropriate for a port construction dyke (the so-called "Marschhörne" ) and the Oumunder Depe ('Aumunder Tief'), also called "Dat Ole Deep" ('Altes Tief'), near Fegesacke ('Vegesack') at the mouths of the Schönebecker Aue and the Leessem ('Lesum') in the Weser . Because of its sheltered location, this has long been a preferred berth for ships.
From 1588, several visits to the Aumunder Tief by Bremen councilors took place, but it was not until 1618 - i.e. at the beginning of the Thirty Years' War - after renewed massive demands by the Bremer Schiffergilde the decision to build the harbor at Fegesacke , which at that time consisted of only a few houses. Dutch experts were recruited for the construction management, as the Bremen people lacked experience in port construction.
The selected site proved to be favorable for the construction of the port: because the existing bed of the floodplain was deep, only a little additional earthworks were necessary; the clayey-loamy subsoil (created by marine deposits) turned out to be firm. The three rivers that flow into the Weser at Vegesack ( Lesum , the Schönebecker Aue and the Ochtum, which flows about seven kilometers upstream ) provided so much additional water that the Weser was sufficiently deep at this point - about four meters - and therefore no additional deepening measures were required. This enabled larger ships to enter the port (without the risk of being stranded on shallows).
The port construction began in the spring of 1619 with the widening and deepening of the floodplain. Already during the construction period it proved to be problematic that the Schönebecker Aue washed a lot of sand and silt into the harbor basin, so it was led in a new bed east around the harbor and allowed to flow upstream into the Lesum about 100 m from the mouth of the harbor.
In the summer of 1622, the work was largely completed, and in 1623 the port was officially opened. Goods delivered by the large ships were now reloaded in the new port onto smaller and flatter ships or horse-drawn vehicles and then transported to Bremen by water or land, which resulted in additional costs.
The cost of building the port in the amount of 11,600 thalers was mainly borne by Haus Seefahrt - a foundation of the Bremer Schiffergilde from 1545 to support needy seafarers. In return, they were allowed to take over the management of the port and also organize a collection every year. 1645-1648 was near the harbor entrance with today used as a restaurant and hotel Havenhaus a representative offices and residential buildings for the harbor master built.
The heyday of the Vegesack harbor lasted for about 180 years. During this time, the town of Vegesack changed hands several times, but this had little influence on the port operations. Vegesack was occupied by Sweden in 1653 and the Havenhaus was converted into a "fortress". From 1712 Vegesack belonged to Denmark, which it sold to Kur-Hannover in 1715. With the Second Stade Settlement , Bremen lost all rights to Vegesack in 1741, only the port and Havenhaus remained. During the Seven Years' War 1756–1763, Vegesack was occupied by France; At the end of 1804 it finally became Bremen again.
Numerous companies and more and more settlers, traders and boatmen settled in the vicinity of the port. Until the end of the 17th century, the port was used as an export port for raw materials such as wood and stone obtained in the surrounding area. In the second half of the 17th century, Vegesack and the port developed into a whaling base in the Arctic. For this purpose, a Greenland company from Bremen was founded in 1653 . In 1830 the shipyard owner Johann Lange built a new whaling fleet and in 1843 a stock corporation was founded in Vegesack "... for the purpose of Greenland fishing ..." . After a brief whaling in the South Seas, whaling in the Arctic continued until 1872 and then stopped, because with the advent of petroleum as a fuel, extracting whales from whales had become unprofitable. A number of monuments in the city still remind of Vegesack's tradition as a "whaling town", such as the whale in Vegesack in the pedestrian zone and whale jaw and whale tail fin on the Weser promenade at Utkiek near the port entrance.
The construction of new ships was initially reserved exclusively for Bremen, only repairs could be carried out outside. Because of the shallow water depth of the Weser, shipbuilding in Bremen remained rather insignificant and inevitably relocated to Vegesack. The first larger shipyard , founded by Cord Cöper, was built around 1639 between the new mouth of the river and the port entrance. While initially only repair work was carried out here in accordance with the Bremen regulations, new buildings were probably also built later. Johann Lange took over the location from Cöper's successors in 1805. The Lange Werft, which built the first German river steamer Die Weser in 1817 , became one of the two forerunners of the Bremer Vulkan, founded in 1893 . In 1897 Lürßen Bootsbau settled here , later the Lürssen shipyard and, after the closure of the Bremer Vulkan in 1997, the last Vegesack shipyard. The administration building of the Lürssen shipyard still stands in the same place today.
More shipyards were established in the vicinity of the port, for example the shipyard of Johann Jantzen with his successor Jürgen Sager and later his son Peter Sager about 200 meters from the port entrance . After the construction of a total of around 150 sailing ships, the shipyard was closed in 1870. A few hundred meters further downstream, HF Ulrichs founded his shipyard in 1838, which later became the second forerunner of Bremer Vulkan as the Bremer Schiffbaugesellschaft . With the three shipyards of Lange, Jantzen / Sager and Ulrichs, Vegesack had become the most important shipbuilding location on the Lower Weser.
The port lost its importance in the last quarter of the 18th century when the Weser silted up more and more downstream of Vegesack. The tidal range at Vegesack was only 0.91 meters and at high tide the fairway was only about two meters deep. At that time, the technical and financial possibilities for deepening the Weser were insufficient to solve this problem. The loading of goods therefore shifted from Vegesack to the Oldenburg towns of Brake and Elsfleth, which led to decades of conflict and customs disputes between Bremen and Oldenburg.
After the founding of Bremerhaven in 1827 and the expansion of its ports, Bremen again received an independent connection to maritime trade . With this, the Vegesack harbor was finally meaningless for the intermediate trade and had little local importance, which was accompanied by its gradual decline. Hope came up again after Ludwig Franzius had deepened and straightened the Weser around 1895. But instead of unloading their goods in Vegesack as before, the larger ships now went directly to Bremen again. Nonetheless, the port benefited as new industries settled in its area.
From 1895 to 1969, the Vegesack Harbor was home to the Bremen-Vegesack Fishing Company - at times the largest herring fishery in Europe. In the port itself was the floating dock built by the company at Bremer Vulkan to carry out repairs on its own ships. In the 1930s there were plans to expand the Vegesack port to include a logger port.
Todays use
In the 1970s, when the city center of Vegesack was being redeveloped, the port was also renewed and rebuilt. Since 2006 the port has been mainly used as a museum harbor with historical ships such as the sailing logger BV2 Vegesack , built in 1893 near Bremer Vulkan , the Atlantic , the Franzius and the rescue cruiser Bremen . Over 20 ships are permanently at anchor, some of which can be viewed. The former sailing training ship Deutschland is located next to the port entrance in the Lesum .
The Schönebecker Aue flows directly back into the harbor as it did originally. A cable bascule bridge connects the east bank and west bank with the Haven Höövt shopping center near the point where an iron swing bridge connected both banks from Utkiek to Hafenhöft with its signal station from 1872 to 1953. At the north quay of the port, "Reckers Familie" , a bronze group of figures by the Bremen artist Thomas Recker , observes the hustle and bustle in the port and on the station square with binoculars.
The port is part of the Vegesack Maritime Mile , which extends to the former volcano site.
literature
- Hanspeter Stabenau (Hrsg.): Habitat Bremen-Nord: Past and present . Döll, Bremen 1989, ISBN 3-88808-132-7 .
- Robert Lamken: History from Grohn and Bremen-Nord: from a boatman's village to an industrial location . Hauschild , Bremen 1989, ISBN 3-926598-14-X .
- Nils Aschenbeck: Bremen-North . Atelier in the farmhouse, Fischerhude 1993, ISBN 3-88132-192-6 .
- Ulf Fiedler: Bremen-Nord: Portrait of an urban landscape . Hauschild , Bremen 1977, ISBN 3-920699-12-2 .
- Herbert Black Forest : The Great Bremen Lexicon . Volume 2: L-Z. 2nd, updated, revised and expanded edition. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X , p. 916 f.
- Ulrich Weidinger: The Vegesack Harbor - Part of the early modern Bremen harbor system . In: Historical Society Bremen from the Bremen State Archives (ed.): Bremisches Jahrbuch , Volume 82 . State Archives, 2003, ISSN 0341-9622 , p. 43-67 .
- W. Seebacher u. a .: Our oldest port, a chronicle of the Vegesack port from 1619 until today . STAVE urban development Vegesack, 2002, ISBN 3-00-009791-0 .
- W. Seebacher: 350 years of the Vegesack Havenhaus . STAVE urban development Vegesack.
- Sophie Hollanders: Vegesack - Old pictures of a port city . Johann Heinrich Döll Verlag Bremen, 1984, ISBN 3-88808-016-9 .
- Wendelin Seebacher: Vegesack . Ed .: Bremen Society for Urban Renewal and Housing mbH. Norddeutsche Verlagsgesellschaft mbH, 1990.
- D. Steilen, History of the Bremen port city of Vegesack , printed and published by JF Rohr, Vegesack 1926.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Website of the engineering office ( Memento of July 14, 2004 in the Internet Archive ), accessed on March 25, 2011
- ^ Herbert Black Forest: The Great Bremen Lexicon. Volume 2: L-Z. 2nd, updated, revised and expanded edition. Edition Temmen, Bremen 2003, ISBN 3-86108-693-X , p. 917.
- ↑ The opening year varies depending on the historical source
- ↑ Ulf Buschmann: What to do with the herring loggers? (No longer available online.) In: Bremen History. December 11, 2016, archived from the original on February 5, 2017 ; accessed on April 15, 2020 .