Ropery building

Historical facts

Many centuries ago, the craft of rope-making (reepschleger or reepdreger) was already one of the many professions outside the town.
In the town's professional and trade statistics of the 19th century, the rope-making trade in Rüthen is documented with 6 businesses in 1848, 3 in 1885 and 2 in 1900. One of these long-established workshops was the Hartmann rope spinning mill, which was run by Franziskus Hartmann at the beginning of the 19th century. With the death of his grandson Josef Hartmann in 1937, the rope-making business in Rüthen finally died out.
The massive rope-making building, made of brick, with a roof and 25 windows, was erected in 1914 over a length of 60 m and today, in its original appearance, represents a very rare industrial monument, even beyond the region.
This rope factory mainly manufactured products according to agricultural needs and orders, such as sheaf ropes, cattle halters, horse and plow ropes, ropes for hay and grain carts, hauling ropes of various lengths and thicknesses, etc., but also occasionally ship ropes, fishing nets, bell ropes and always a large number of twine and washing lines for general household use. All rope-making products were made from hemp, most of which was supplied in bale form from Russia.
However, before the ropes, cords and lines were given their desired shape in length and diameter, long threads first had to be spun from the raw hemp after the hackling and combing stages. In the subsequent production process, the individual threads were then twisted into cords (twisting), which were then shaped into the desired end product as required in multiple thread paths by further precisely coordinated twisting processes using rope harnesses and carriages. In this way, the hemp threads were turned into a cord, the cords into a rope and the ropes into a correspondingly strong rope: work processes that required a great deal of physical strength and special skill in the time before electrification.

Text: Association for the preservation of local history and traditional customs Rüthen e.V.