Location: Waagmühle

We heard of the Waagmühle in a document from 1413. According to this source, Johann von Meroitgen and his fellow miners concluded a contract with Werner von Palant, according to which they were obliged to pay a rent of 15 good Rhenish guilders per year for as long as they ‘wierken up dem Berg’. In addition, they had to help clean a millrace once a year. This millrace supplied the mill with water from the Wehebach. The reservoir of the mill race is still preserved today opposite the mill.
On the Tranchot map of 1806/07, embankments and traces of older works can be recognised in the area of today’s Talstraße settlement. The contract of 1413 can therefore be regarded as reliable and very early evidence of the utilisation of mining (peat/lignite) and the operation of the Waagmühle.
Of the presumably 20 different mills along the Wehebach over the last 1000 years, the Waagmühle is the last one before it flows into the Inde. The name ‘Waagmühle’ probably has nothing to do with a mill scale, it probably comes from ‘Wehe-(Wah-)bachmühle’. In documents from the 17th century, the respective miller at the Waagmühle is called Wahmüller or Wagmüller.
The Waagmühle was the ducal compulsory mill for the villages of Lucherberg and Luchem within the Dingstuhl Pier-Merken. This ‘mill compulsion’ meant that all inhabitants within the mill’s radius were obliged to have their grain ground there exclusively.
The Judden family had been tenants of the mill since the middle of the 17th century. This widely ramified family had lived in the Langerwehe, Luchem, Lucherberg and Pier area since 1480. Through marriage, the lease of the mill passed to the Wilkens family. They in turn bought the mill in 1803 from the French government, which had confiscated it as former ducal property after the occupation of the Rhineland.
In 1820, the Waagmühle was a grist mill with one wheel, two grinding gears, an oil press and one worker. After 1830, the mill changed hands several times, as did its use: it was used for spinning, fulling and dyeing, after 1840 for grinding tanner’s hay, and finally after 1850 for hulling pearl barley.

In 1914, the property was transfered of the Goltstein mine company, which meant it was closed down as a mill. Workers‘ flats were now set up in the buildings. Via the legal successor BIAG Zukunft, the property came to Rheinbraun AG and finally into private ownership.
Since the demolition of the farm buildings destroyed in the Second World War, only the modernised former miller’s residence remains today.