33 The Miners‘ Colony Andreasberg

On the other side of the ridge is the village of Dörnberg and at the foot of the Stüppel Andreasberg. While there is evidence that three miners‘ families lived in Dörnberg as early as 1759, Andreasberg was not founded as a mining colony until 1854, when the Ramsbeck ore mining industry was booming.
A joint-stock company from Stolberg (near Aachen), whose general manager was the Marquis de Sassenay, wanted to build the largest industrial centre in Europe because of the ore deposits in Ramsbeck.

Thousands of miners and smelters were to be recruited for this utopian plan. To accommodate them, three colonies were built hurriedly and without enough care or thought: Andreasberg, Heinrichsdorf and Alexander. In October 1854, the first 300 mostly Protestant families from the Harz region moved into the mostly unfinished dwellings in Andreasberg, for whose name the society president Andreas Köchlin was responsible. But they did not find the happiness they had hoped for in the „Sauerland California“; most of them left the new village at the foot of the Stüppelberg just one year later, disappointed and poorer than before.

In the years after 1855, the Stolberger Zink AG provided a solid technical and economic basis for mining. Andreasberg became a new, permanent home for miners from the surrounding areas of Wittgenstein and Siegen. But the street village remained largely dependent on the mining company until the mine closed in 1974.

The conversion of the old long works houses, which had already been privatised in 1956/57, and the construction of many new homes gave the miners‘ village a new face. Today Andreasberg has become a smart „place to live for generations“ that preserves many traces of the mining past.