|
 
|
|
Stone Marbles | ||
Calcareous Stone Marbles
The very earliest marbles were made of stone. Stone was used for marbles
by the Roman and Greek civilizations as well as even earlier cultures.
Alabaster and marble spheres were used in England from around the
fifteenth century. Small stone spheres were first produced in large
quantity in Germany with the aid of water mills as early as the
seventeenth century. Most of the mills were located in the mountain
streams of the Alps, particularly near Berchtesgaden, using marble from
local quarries to produce a moderatequantity. It wasn't until the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, that great quantities of marbles
were produced by larger mills. The largest concentration of these mills
was in Saxony, Germany. An important marble-producing town was the city
of Coburg.
The marble industry was practiced in the Sonneberg area probably since the Thirty Years' War, and reached its first heyday around 1740 when a small group of emigrants from Salzburg perfected the technique of marble production. A second time of peak production was the period after the mid-nineteenth century when German exporting rose appreciably. In the 1870's the toy industry burgeoned, most of the marble miners of Thuringen turned to this healthier industry, the mines falling into disrepair.
| ||
|
Song: "Aladdin"
| ||
The workers broke the calcareous stone into 1" suqare blocks
with small hammers, 100-200 of which were then placed in a mill to be
ground. A stationary flat stone slab with concentric grooves cut into
it was used to placed the stone blocks onto. Above the slab was a large
round sectioon of oak the same diameter as the slab, partially resting
upon it. Water ran between the two blocks, and the oak block rotated.
In about fifteen minutes, the marbles would be ground and ready for
public sale. About 60,000 marbles could be turned out by one mill in a
week.
Along the mountain streams in the south Thuringer woods, handmade glass
marbles were produced. Near the end of the nineteenth century, this
province became famous as the leading producer of handmade glass marbles
in the world. Prior to that, limestone marbles were produced in
Thuringer. The Deutchess Spiel zeugmuseum (German Toy Museum) at
Sonneberg, Thuringen,has information about the production of these
marbles in the Sonneberg area, and in it's collection it has an old
mill from Almbachklamm in the vicinity of Berchtesgaden.