Page 6 of 65 min readPrint this page

Mills Beyond Linse

The Gripsmühle at Hehlen

The Gripsmühle was a hereditary mill of the Schulenburg estate at Hehlen. The estate’s file calls the mill of the 1820s dispute the Gripsmühle, and the appeal file calls it “the hereditary-rent mill near Hehlen”. Whether the two names mean one mill or a second mill near the Hehlen boundary is not known. Elsewhere in the estate papers the spelling “Gipsmühle,” a gypsum mill, appears in three files, so the Gripsmühle may also be one mill spelled two ways, or a gypsum mill standing apart from a grain mill. Rustenbach confirms that Hehlen had its own hereditary Häger mill, the only Häger holding left in the former Homburg part of the district of Ottenstein by 1580. Either way the parties are clear: the Schulenburg estate at Hehlen and a Wesemann of Linse. The estate’s own tenants at the mill in those years were Ficker (1824), the same surname as the Bodenwerder town mill’s holder from 1826; then Faber, with his subtenant Schmidtmann (1824 to 1834); and a further lease from 1840 to 1870.

The quarrel between Hehlen and Wickensen behind the Wesemann suits was old. A Schulenburg file of 1648 records a suit with the districts of Ottenstein and Wickensen over compulsory milling, and a file of 1685 records more complaints about mills being obstructed. Older still is a case before the imperial court of 1593 to 1596. Ilse von Saldern, who built Schloss Hehlen, sued the district officer of Wickensen, who as presiding judge of the high court at Hehlen had fined her tenants at Brökeln and confined them to their houses for tearing down a fence, willows and a dam. It was the same fault line on the same ground, more than two centuries before the Wesemann suits. The estate had mills of its own from early on. Its building campaign of the 1560s included two mills; Ilse von Saldern founded one of the oldest paper mills on the upper Weser at Hehlen in 1596; and a paper mill worked there from 1617.

Upstream at Kirchbrak

Kirchbrak lies eleven kilometers up the Lenne from Linse and had two water mills of its own, both on record from the early 1300s. The lower mill (Untere Mühle) appears in the Wickensen register of 1550 as a Häger mill, built as hereditary Häger property. It still stands, last rebuilt in 1924, and was listed as a monument in 2015. The upper mill (Obere Mühle) went from grain mill to sawmill to the timber works August Müller & Co. (AMCO), founded in 1878. Walter Gropius designed its factory extension of 1925, the Bauhaus’s first commission after the school moved from Weimar to Dessau. The earliest Kirchbrak miller named in the records is the late “Cons. Rennemöller, former miller at Hehlen and Kirchbrak,” father of a groom at Harderode in 1777, a generation before the Wichmanns. “Cons.” is probably Conrad.

Heinrich Christian Ludewig Wesemann leased a Kirchbrak mill from 1840 to at least 1842 (see Wesemann Family). Two other families were at Kirchbrak’s mills then. The von Grone family, lords of the manor, owned the upper mill, and their estate papers show it under a disputed sale from 1835 to 1857. The Wichmann milling family lost its head, Georg Wichmann, shortly before 1835, leaving an inheritance suit and a quarrel with the von Grones over a weir. The first documented tenant of the upper mill is August Müller of nearby Breitenkamp, a village of Kirchbrak parish, who leased it in 1849. The word for Müller’s lease is the same one the Kirchbrak baptisms use for Wesemann’s tenure nine years earlier.

Which mill Wesemann held is a theory. Two things point to the upper mill. He is called a leaseholder, which matches the upper mill’s record of leases rather than the lower mill’s hereditary Häger status, and he was gone from Kirchbrak before Müller took the upper mill’s lease in 1849. A mill under a disputed sale, let to one short-term tenant after another, is also the kind that takes an outside tenant, and a vacancy at a neighboring mill after a death in 1835 is one way an outsider could have come to Kirchbrak by 1840. But both mills changed hands often enough that lease and ownership do not cleanly separate them, no record names any tenant of the upper mill before 1849, and if the upper mill had already turned to sawing before 1840 the reasoning fails. He held one of the two Kirchbrak mills, most likely the upper one, but no record says which.

Bodenwerder and Its Town Mill

Two kilometers from Linse, across the border in the Kingdom of Hannover, the town of Bodenwerder had its own mill, and for a time a Wesemann held it. On 6 October 1807 the master miller Johann Ernst Wesemann, Johann Heinrich’s son, bought the town mill at public auction for 2,000 Thaler in coin, taking it on hereditary rent from 1 January 1808. He signed the closing page himself at Bodenwerder on 23 December 1807, in the spelling Wäsemann, the family’s own form, with the town treasurer (Cämmerarius) Heinrich Christian Grave signing opposite. The outgoing tenant was a miller Dempewolf, the first letters of his name clear.

The holding went badly. By the mid-1820s Johann Ernst lived at Hameln and sublet the mill, from 1824 to a tenant “Sebohm,” probably his brother-in-law Johann Ernst Friedrich Seebaum. The mill left Wesemann hands in a distressed transfer around 1826, and by 1828 the 2,000 Thaler purchase price stood as an unpaid debt, with a forced sale discussed. Ficker held it from 1826, it was bought out to the farmer Bedecker in 1838, and it was leased to A. Bunge in 1839. Heinrich Christian Grave, who signed the contract of 1807, was probably of the Grave family whose minor children’s guardian lent Georg Ludewig 700 Reichsthaler in 1822. Johann Ernst’s life, and that of his sister Caroline Louise, who was born at Linse on 6 January 1789 and lived at Bodenwerder by 1818, are told in the Wesemann Family section.

The town mill explains why Ludewig Wesemann of Linse was petitioning the Hannover ministry in 1838 about land in the Bodenwerder fields: his family already held, or had held, a Hanoverian mill. It also changes the picture of the family before the 1840s. Holding two hereditary mills on either side of a state border was not the position of a family running out of choices, at least not in 1807. By 1828 it was a debt.