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The Lower Lenne

The Lenne rises on the Holzberg near Wangelnstedt-Linnenkamp and runs past Oelkassen and Kirchbrak to Linse. There the Spüligbach, its largest tributary, joins it in the middle of the village. The river then cuts through the gap in the hills called the Brunswick Gate (Braunschweigische Pforte) and falls into the Weser at Thran. Karl Steinacker’s 1907 survey of the district notes that the lower Lenne was heavily used to drive sawmills and grinding mills, so three mills on its last kilometer were typical of the stretch, not unusual. The upper mill stood at what is now Mühlenstraße 2, the middle mill about 350 meters below it at Im Krümpel, and the Thran mill about 550 meters below that. At those distances each miller’s dam decided whether the wheel above him could turn, which is exactly what the lawsuits describe.

Linse was an old place. In the early Middle Ages it lay in the southern Tilithigau and appears in the records of the abbey of Corvey as Linisi. Through the later Middle Ages it belonged to the district of Hehlen of the lords of Homburg. When the Homburg line died out in 1409 its lands passed to Brunswick. In 1560 the dukes granted the estate and village of Hehlen to the von der Schulenburg family, and in 1576 the court district of Hehlen as well, which took in Hehlen with Daspe, Brökeln, Ovelgönne and Ernestinental. The Schulenburgs held both high and low justice there, but the district office of Wickensen contested their right to the high court. That old rivalry runs under the lawsuits of the 1820s. Linse also had a salt court (Salzhof), which Vollrad von Mansfeld burned in 1552 or 1553. In 1590 Konrad Wedemeyer, chief bailiff on the Kaienberg, held a ducal farm at Linse, and in 1699 a rent-paying cottage farm at Linse was entered in the district register, a file now in the Wedemeyer family archive.

The village was small. The head-tax list of 1678 counts 14 households and 59 people at Linse, against 38 households and 124 people at Halle, and the village descriptions of 1759 count 18 house plots at Linse and 46 at Halle. In 1753 the Halle church inventory gives Linse fifteen hearths. The plague of 1613 killed 149 people in Halle parish, four of them at Linse.

The fullest early picture comes from Johann Hassel and Karl Bege’s printed description of the Duchy in 1803. Linse was a daughter village of Halle, two and a half hours’ walk from Wickensen, with one chapel, a school whose teacher was chosen by the preacher and the community, 4 half-farms (Halbspännerhöfe), 8 cottage farms, 6 smallholders and settlers, 21 hearths and 137 people. Building stone was quarried at the Eckberge. “The Lenne drives two grinding mills, each with one grinding and one oil run, of which one is let on hereditary rent by the Chamber, while the other is a hereditary mill”. Halle’s own mill that year was the Klippmühle, a private mill with one run. The walking times in the printed text are doubtful readings.

The earliest district registers also count the Linse mills. A register of the Lower Börde of the district of Wickensen, cataloged as about 1545, is the oldest document that could name a holder of either mill, though its catalog entry mentions neither Linse nor a mill. A register of about 1580 to 1625, compiled by the district officer Johannes Henningius and copied by Dürre, is the source behind Robert Rustenbach’s 1903 count of two hereditary mills at Linse held under Häger law (hägerische Erbmühlen). Under the French in 1811 and 1812, the valuation and land-tax rolls of Linse describe all three mills: Ludwig Wesemann’s water mill with two runs; Heinrich Brünig’s mill with a grinding run and an oil run; and the widow Lüders at Thran with a mill of three runs.

What Survives Today

Both Linse mill sites are protected monuments, listed on 1 April 1979. The upper site is a mill farmstead with two listed buildings, both at Mühlenstraße 2: the water mill itself and a barn. The lower site, the Wesemann mill, is listed as a mill complex whose only protected building is a barn at Im Krümpel 5; the group is named for Im Krümpel 20, an address with no surviving listed structure. A house at Im Krümpel 1, about fifty meters north, is a separate monument and not part of the mill. The register gives neither site a building date or description, and holds no photograph of either mill. Of the Thran mill nothing is listed at all.