Weißenstein (Lennestadt)

Weissenstein City of Lennestadt Coordinates: 51 ° 8 ′ 19 ″  N , 8 ° 5 ′ 49 ″  E
Residents :	13  (Jun 30, 2020)
Postal code :	57368
Location of Weißenstein in Lennestadt
Former mining area with information board on the mining hiking trail

Weißenstein is a district of Lennestadt in the Olpe district in North Rhine-Westphalia .

The place with 13 inhabitants at the end of June 2020 is located northwest of the core area of ​​Lennestadt between the districts of Halberbracht and Ernestus .

history

Sign pointing to the former mining area Weißenstein near Halberbracht

Weißenstein was built in the second half of the 19th century on the road from Halberbracht to Ernestus. The place is marked with Weissenstein on measuring table sheets from the early 20th century . It belonged in the 19th century to the municipality Elspe in office Bilstein of Olpe .

The economic background for the settlement was the ore mining in the areas of Halberbracht and Meggen , which began in the middle of the 19th century and ended in the 1990s (see also Halberbracht # Mining ).

At the beginning of the 1950s there were 8 residential buildings in Weißenstein, in which a total of 60 people lived. The decline in the population to currently 17 people is significantly influenced by the discontinuation of mining . Some houses were demolished; the houses that still exist are scattered over the former mining area.

The mining of barite

The mining trail Halberbracht reminiscent of two stops (no. 7 and 8) that, near Weissenstein barite mined was and there the Meggen ore arose.

The first attempts at dismantling were made from 1875 onwards. However, they have not yet been successful due to a lack of sufficient uses for barite. The situation changed in the 1890s when the chemist Rudolf Sachtleben built a lithopone factory on the Lower Rhine . Since the required raw materials barite and zinc sulfide were available in the Meggen and Halberbracht mining areas, Dr. Rudolf Sachtleben held the majority in the mining law unions of Siegena and Sicilia in 1906 and 1913 . In 1910, the Sicilia union had acquired important barite land (including at Weißenstein, Hastenberg and Schmelzers Tannen) from the farmer and haulier Johann Josef Schmelzer.

In a profile diagram at stop 7 of the mining trail, the storage conditions in the vicinity of Weißenstein are shown; it is the area from the north wing of the "old camp" to the "new camp". The barite reached a thickness of 5 meters at the "old camp" . There was a cross connection from the upper adit between the two camps . The mouth holes of all the tunnels were on the road from Meggen to Halberbracht. The mouth of the Bermkestolln is a listed building.

In the course of the 1970s, the stocks of barite were largely reduced; In the early 1990s, all ore deposits were exhausted. The half-way mining came to a standstill.

swell

• Written information from December 1, 2014 from the Bergbaumuseum-Siciliaschacht eV on the population of Weißenstein and explanations on the Halberbracht mining trail.

Individual evidence

1. ^ Population statistics for the city ​​of Lennestadt
2. ↑ Royal Statistical Bureau (Prussia) (ed.): Community encyclopedia for the province of Westphalia, based on the materials of the census of December 1, 1885 and other official sources, (community encyclopedia for the Kingdom of Prussia, Volume X), Berlin 1887.
3. ↑ Flyer Halberbracht Mining Trail PDF ( Memento from December 17, 2014 in the Internet Archive )

Web links

Commons : Weißenstein  - Collection of images, videos and audio files