Dr. Sebastian Haumann

May 8th
7:38 PM

0 notes

RWWA

Finally found good sources on companies that struggled to get access to lime deposits. The Rheinisch Westfälisches Wirtschaftsarchiv in Cologne holds the records of Gutehoffnungshütte, a major steel-company in the Ruhr, and the lesser known company Matthes und Weber that specialized in the production of basic chemicals. To my surprise they also had a high demand for lime and even operated their own quarry in the 1920s.

April 27th
7:52 PM

0 notes

ThyssenKrupp Konzenrarchiv

Compkete my research at the ThyssenKrupp Konzernarchiv today. Found lots of great an diverse material, especially on the Rheinische Kalksteinwerke from their founding year 1903 well into the 1920s. But there were also lots of smaller bits and pieces that were important to get a fuller picture of how steel companies operated in the regional lime market in the 19th century. I was especially happy to find out about an early operation by the Friedrich Wilhelms Hütte which shed some light on the 1850s. I also spent a day finding out about the actual consumption of lime by various steelworks and will be able to contrast this information with data about the extraction in several quarries.

April 20th
4:38 PM

0 notes

Landesarchiv NRW

Another week at the Landesarchiv NRW. Found some material on Landscape conservation in the 1920s that relates to the greening of top soil dumps. Besides these discoveries work has been somewhat tedious - a lot of reports on local economic development which might be useful in the end but is rather boring to collect.

March 4th
11:46 AM

0 notes

Turn of the Century Journals on Quarrying

I was surprised how many journals are available especially from the 1900s and 1910s that focus entirely on the quarrying business. I spent much of last Thursday and Friday browsing through “Der Steinbruch” and “Steinbruch und Sandgrube”. Complementary, journals such as the “Mitteilungen des Rheinischen Vereins für Denkmalpflege und Heimatschutz” document the perspectives and worldview of a very different set of actors, namely of those with an interest in nature preservation. All this is really exciting and readily available source material which I wish I had more time to analyze systematically.

February 26th
10:22 AM

0 notes

Geologischer Dienst NRW

The state Geological authority of North Rhine-Westfalia (Geologischer Dienst NRW) has a great collection of original material from geological surveys dating back to the early 20th century. Especially interesting are the reports commissioned by mining companies to counter claims that they were endangering the environment but also expertise about the expected exploitability of deposits. The archives of the Geological authority unfortunately are not well known among historians, but they are definitively worth exploring.

October 22nd
9:30 AM

0 notes

Landesarchiv NRW

Spent the latter part of the week in the Landesarchiv NRW working on some files of the county authorities that supervised quarries. A lot of repetitions: neighbors complaining about rock blasting and negotiations about proper workers’ safety. Finally I took a look at a record on the cleansing of local creeks, but interestingly found no reference to mining related pollution that I had expected.

October 17th
5:51 PM

15 notes

Bergbau Bibliothek

My first visit to the Bergbau Bibliothek (Mining Library) in Bochum. I am especially interested in the older periodicals on mining in general and those journals that were issued by specific interests groups of companies engaged in lime or lignite mining. I still have to look out for scientific journals on mining engineering and geology - I haven’t yet gotten a good overview over those.

July 15th
5:37 PM

5 notes

A Week in the Archives

Completed another week in the archives. Things are going ahead: It’s fascinating to see, how lime companies went about in acquiring land for their quarries. I am starting to see different patterns and strategies.

June 20th
7:19 AM

0 notes

Rheinkalk Archive

Completed four days of work in the archives. The lime mining company Rheinkalk has one of the most impressive collections of records on property evaluation and transactions dating back all the way to the 1850s. I am grateful to be allowed to use them.

June 1st
4:12 PM

4 notes

Landesarchiv NRW Pt. II

After three days in the Landesarchiv NRW I feel like I got a good first glimpse at the work to come. It is really possible to read documents on surface mining and quarries in order to find hints at practices in their relation to materiality. It is still a bit of a hodgepodge with a lot of arbitrary discoveries, but I am sure that over time I will be able to agglomerate so many bits and pieces that a well rounded picture will emerge. Still, a lot of work ahead…

May 30th
6:17 PM

2 notes

Landesarchiv NRW

I am again probing into archives for my new project for a couple of days. This time I spend the short week in the Landesarchiv NRW in Düsseldorf. After a long time, I have to read 19th century handwriting again. It takes a while to get used to it again but my ability to read it clearly improved over the 6 hours I tried deciphering correspondence about quarries. I am quite happy with what I found so far. It seems like materiality, the link I am interested in, was very much absent in the correspondence but very present in the logic of problems and solutions devised. There is always this blank you can literally feel when reading the documents around which the discourse is structured.

May 10th
3:09 PM

0 notes

Research on Lime Quarries in Wülfrath

After a long 6 months of getting my dissertation and several articles published, I had the time to really embark on some archival research for my next project. I like to start at the smaller more intimate archives where there’s a lot of local knowledge of the things I want to know. So today I spent the day in Wülfrath City Archives and found some news coverage of lime companies acquiring parcels of land to either excavate or build infrastructure. Two things that struck me - even though they are hardly surprising: The newspapers often praised the natural abundance of lime in the region, and the prices that the quarry companies were paying were considered to be “very high”. First pieces of a puzzle that I will hopefully be able to put together over the next years.