Ask Wednesday: What of great interest didn't you report from Bavaria?

The millstone quarry above Neubeuern

By Morris Dean

After reading last week's column ("What did you do on your summer vacation?"), my friend Rolf Dumke, whom we visited our first full day in Bavaria (he's pictured here pointing), emailed me that he was "a bit disappointed that [I] ignored the millstone quarry above Altenbeuern [Old Beuern], an unusual and symbolic world event." Altenbeuern seems forgotten; now it's Neubeuern (which we visited – but more about that another time perhaps).
    I thought of including the quarry last week, but the travelogue was pretty long already. Now, however...let me tell you about the millstone quarry. What you see in the photograph below is the state of the quarry at the time I took the photograph (on September 2). The quarry is not large; what you see in the photo is about a third or a half of what is visible today.

    Those circular indentions are the spots where round chunks of sandstone were popped out by hand for finishing into millstones (or grinding stones – used in grist mills, for grinding wheat or other grains). In Rolf's words, here's

one gentle and powerful method for extracting the stones:
    Using iron tools, deep holes were made in a circular pattern in the face of the quarry wall. Then dry oak poles were driven into the holes by hammers. Finally the oak was watered. Swelled by osmosis, the wet oak "dynamited" the rough millstones out of the rock.

    The type of stone most suitable for making millstones is, according to Wikipedia, "a siliceous rock called burrstone (or buhrstone), an open-textured, porous but tough, fine-grained sandstone, or a silicified, fossiliferous limestone."

How did the stone get there?  The stone was formed during the geological ages known as Cretaceous and Tertiary. From "Millstone quarry Hinterhör," for which Rolf sent me a link to a translation into English by Google, with a bit of editing by me:

...The Alps emerged during Cretaceous and Tertiary times in consequence of the collision of the European and Adriatic plates, which led to a strong narrowing of the rock layers. It shattered rocks and pushed them over one another. In Upper Bavaria, tectonic ceilings of the Alpine limestone zone form the morphologically striking Bavarian Alps. The deposits at Neubeuren belong to the Helvetic zone, which occurs in Upper Bavaria only in a very narrow strip. [Helvetic comes from a name for Switzerland: Helvetia.]
    As the main rocks of the Helvetic you find limestone and marl stones, interspersed with sand and siltstones. The series originated on the southern edge of the European continent in a shallow shelf sea. In open-mined Neubeuren, rocks were deposited in the Cretaceous and Paleogene top....
    ... In the fresh state, the stone was found to be extremely tough and hard and was therefore in great demand for millstones.

    The quarry was mined for about three centuries (until the 19th century), and the enterprise represents a period of mankind's technology (as did the use of steam engines, for example, beginning at about the time the quarrying of millstones seems to have ended at this quarry)...Millions of years in the formation, a few hundred years in its exploitation....

What Rolf finds symbolic about the quarry is that a millstone hanging around one's neck is a symbol of a heavy, if not deathly burden, and the millstone as a grinder of grains, producing flour for bread, is a symbol of civilization since ancient times. Rolf points out that both examples can be found in the Bible.
    But more than that, says Rolf:

Whenever I visit the quarry and see the remnants of many hundreds of millstones cut and "exploded" from its walls for a third of a millennium, I feel puny in view of an immense amount of work for human welfare.

    I well recall the reverential tone that Rolf seemed to adopt as we walked down the trail to the quarry. He could have been leading us into a church.

Copyright © 2014 by Morris Dean