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The Upper Mill and the Neighbors at the Font

The Upper Mill

The upper mill stood at what is now Mühlenstraße 2, 46 meters from where the Spüligbach meets the Lenne. Steinacker lists it about 1580 and describes it in 1759 as a ducal fief paying rent to Bodenwerder. The registers call it the Knüll mill and the Mast mill as well as the upper mill; all three names belong to one mill. Hassel and Bege’s hereditary mill of 1803 was probably this one, and the Chamber’s file on the “hereditary mill at Linse” runs from 1691 to 1804.

Each entry is given as read; the chain is probable. Johan Knüll was a miller at Linse from 1673. His daughter Catharina married Johan Heinrich Sagebiel in 1715 or 1716, and Anna Ilse Knüll, probably another daughter, married in 1709. After Gerd Knüll, “the young miller,” died, the family let the mill. Master Joh. Cord Wirmer, “now leaseholder of Knüll’s mill at Linse,” married Anne Marie Kettners(?), a miller’s daughter from Kirchbrak, in the Linse chapel on 12 November 1739. “Master Johann Conrad [Wiesmer?],” miller in the Knüll mill, had a daughter baptized in October 1743. The two are probably one man whose surname was read two ways, and Joh. Hennig Wissmer, “the miller,” of March 1736 is possibly of the same family. Andreas Ludolph Linnenberg, the Mastmüller, was at Linse by July 1747 and married for the second time in 1759 and the third in 1761.

Two leaseholders of the 1760s left fuller records. Jo. Conr. Reincke, a discharged sergeant of the Brunswick rifle corps and formerly the miller at Golmbach, married Johanne Magdalene Giffhorn, a late miller’s daughter, at Bornum in July 1762, as “mill leaseholder at Linse.” His mill is not named. Johann Conrad (Christoph) Nagel was a miller at Linse from August 1768. His first wife, Anna Christina Hesse, a smith’s daughter of Negenborn near Amelungsborn, was baptized there in April 1743, probably married him there in August 1761, and died at Linse in April 1770, aged 27. In November 1770 he married a smallholder’s daughter from Hajen, in the district of Grohnde. By 29 May 1771 the old miller’s son, Johann Ludewig Knüll, held “his father’s former mill,” seven weeks after his father, Johann Gevert Knüll, was buried.

The mill then passed by marriage. Johann Simon Brünig, son of the late count’s miller Jo. Hennig Brünig of Münchehof, married Marie Louise Linnenberg, daughter of the late hereditary miller Ludolph Linnenberg, at Linse on 9 June 1774. He was the upper miller from May 1775 and died on 30 March 1778, aged 32, “a leaseholder of the upper mill for four years.” His youngest son, born on 8 November 1777, was buried in the same coffin on 5 April. At that son’s baptism the Halle Klippmühle miller Jo. Heinr. Brünig stood godfather; the two Brünigs were possibly related. On 29 October 1778 the widow married Master August Heinrich Düvel, “Mastmüller in the upper mill at Linse,” son of the late miller Jo. Heinr. Düvel of Stadtoldendorf. She was probably the one who brought him to the mill. The register writes her surname Linneberg in 1785, when Jo. Christian Heidentreich Linneberg, a miller at Dale(?) in the district of Stauffenburg, stood godfather and the child was named for him, and Lindenberg in 1788. Marie Louise died at the mill on 14 August 1795, aged 42, after a fall from the mill stairs. A miller’s lad named Düvel worked at the upper mill in October 1798, and Ilse Marie Amalia Düvel, probably a daughter, married at Esperde in 1789. August Heinrich Düvel, master miller and now retired on the holding (Leibzüchter), died of dropsy on 16 January 1800, aged 61 years, 4 months and 2 days. He had been born at Stadtoldendorf on 23 September 1738, and he is the earliest Linse miller whose birth is on record.

A Brünig household milled at Linse from 1777 to 1813, probably one family throughout. In 1777 the communes of Heyen, Kreipke and Wegensen asked leave for “the miller Brüning at Linse” to build a sawmill. A daughter of the miller Heinrich Brünig, twelve weeks old, died at Linse on 17 September 1803, and in 1811 Heinrich Brünig had a grinding run and an oil run. Johann Simon may have been the household’s first holder, but this is only possible. Another mill accident belongs to these years. On 10 February 1791 Master Friedrich Christoph Beese, “the miller in the local [Bleich-? Blitz-?] mill,” married Cathrine Louise Brünig by special dispensation. His first wife, Anne Catrine Kramer, had been killed in the mill wheel in July 1790, aged 37, and was buried on 23 July under the heading of Halle, not Linse. Which mill he worked cannot be said.

Only after the Brünigs do the Halbrodts appear. They held the upper mill from sometime between 1814 and 1817 and are recorded there to 1841. A Halbrock, cottager and miller at Linse Nr. ass. 11, owed rent to the state estates office of Wickensen in 1838; he was probably of the Halbrodt family. Before about 1817, then, the two milling households of Linse were the Wesemanns and the Brünigs, not the Wesemanns and the Halbrodts. Who held the upper mill between Düvel and the Halbrodts rests on separate sightings; no record of any transfer survives, so the order of holders is a reconstruction.

The upper mill still stands. It and its barn were listed as protected monuments on 1 April 1979, and two households of the Albrecht family, Martin and Wilfried, live at the farmstead today, still farming and selling firewood.

Neighbors at the Font

In the 1800s the two Linse milling families stood godparents for each other’s children. Anton Friedrich Halbrodt, master miller at Linse, was a godfather at the 1817 baptism of Georg Ludewig’s daughter Dorothea Luise Friederike Wesemann (see Wesemann Family). A second miller stood at the same font, Christian Hasenjäger(?), master miller at Bergfelden(?). Twenty-one years later their grown children stood together. A single 1838 entry names “Wilhelmine Halbrodt, machine-miller’s daughter; Luise Waßmann, machine-miller’s daughter, both of Linse,” and August Halbrodt, machine-miller’s son, stood at a third baptism. The Halbrodts run through the Linse book as machine-millers: August in 1838, Friedrich in 1840, Adolf in 1841, and an “Anton Gerbrodt[?], master machine-miller,” almost certainly the same surname poorly read, who stood godfather beside Ludewig Wesemann in 1834.

Other millers appear once each, and their places and titles cannot be confirmed without the original page: Georg Ludewig Süders(?), godfather at Halle in 1814; Friedemann Baumeister, master miller at Linse, whose daughter Marie was a godmother at Bodenwerder in 1824; Georg Lüders, machine-miller at [Linse/Klippe?], 1834, probably the same man as Süders; Wilhelm Goldbeck, machine-miller, 1835; and Heinrich Lüdtke(?), mill owner(?), 1855. Wilhelm Fischer, who appears in 1841, is styled plain master miller (Mühlenmeister), not machine-miller, which may mean another mill, other machinery, or only a different clerk. The 1838 entry shows two machine-milling households at Linse; it does not show that there were only two.

Mill hands came and went around both mills. Hans Eicken(?), possibly a miller’s lad, did church penance in 1653. Curd Flöter(?), a mill hand, married in 1664 and was probably the Cord Flötau who was a small miller at Linse from 1674 to 1683, “at the middle mill” in 1677: a hand who became a miller. A maid served in the upper mill in 1675; Hanß Friedrich, a miller’s hand, was a godfather in 1678 and 1682; and Hanß Fricke, a mill hand at Linse, stood in May 1680 beside the wife of the middle miller Barthel Vith. “Hans Fleto(?), mill hand in the middle mill,” was a godfather in 1710, and in 1711 Anna Sophia Meyers served at the middle mill. In October 1770 Friedrich Conrad M[ai/ei]nke of Behrensen, in the district of Springe, a mill hand at Linse, married at Halle. Nearby, Curd Sievers, “miller and large cottager at Tuchtfeld,” married in 1707 or 1708, and Arend Deiters was “innkeeper and miller” at Dohnsen in 1736. In the 1800s Anton Ackbrecht(?), a mill hand at Linse, stood godparent in 1817 in an entry that also names a Sagebiel living at the mill and Louise Wesemann of Linse; Heinrich Halbrodt was a miller’s lad in 1818; and Friedrich Grupe, a farmhand at the Thran mill, was a godparent in 1832, the year the Wesemanns took its lease. In 1814 Heinrich Christoph Krasner(?) held a mill inn (Mühlenkrug) at Linse; the name may be a misreading of Kramer.