Historic Mining Industry
The mining industry in the Harz has its origins about 3,000 years ago during the Bronze Age. The seven Upper Harz mining towns - Clausthal, Zellerfeld, Bad Grund, Sankt Andreasberg, Lautenthal, Altenau and Wildemann - and around 30 other villages within and on the edge of the Harz can thank the Upper Harz mining and smelting industries for their boom. The former imperial town of Goslar, too, whose splendour depended on the ore treasures of the Rammelsberg, mined argentiferous lead ore for centuries. Mining heavily dominated the economic life of the Harz as well as its scenery. Miners created the famous engineering system for the management of water in the Upper Harz, the Upper Harz Water Regale, of which 70 kilometres of ditch and 68 'ponds' (with a volume of 8 million cubic metres) are still used today. Without using their considerable hydropower output, silver mining in the Harz would never have been able to attain its major economic significance.
In the eastern Harz Foreland (Mansfeld Land and Sangerhäuser Mulde) copper schist was mined until 1990. The early beginnings of this industry were first mentioned in 1199, and it was considered in its heyday, at the end of the 15th century, as the most important in Europe. In addition, at Ilfeld is the only stone coal mine in the Harz, the former Rabenstein Gallery Mine (Bergwerk Rabensteiner Stollen). In the North Thuringian mining area, there were numerous potash mines and, in the vicinity of Röblingen, geological waxes were extracted by a mining concern.
The last mine in the Upper Harz – the Wolkenhügel Pit in Bad Lauterberg – closed its operations in June 2007 for economic reasons. Having formerly had 1,000 workers, the mine employed just 14 people towards the end, using the most modern technology to extract barite. With the closure of this facility, mining operations that had begun in the Middle Ages and had continued unbroken since the 16th century, extracting silver, lead and zinc, came to an end. Bearing witness to the industry are cultural monuments as well as the negative consequences of mining for the environment such as e. g. pollution of the ecosystem with heavy metals.
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“Never is a historic deed already completed when it is done but always only when it is handed down to posterity. What we call “history” by no means represents the sum total of all significant deeds.... World history ... only comprises that tiny lighted sector which chanced to be placed in the spotlight by poetic or scholarly depictions.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
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