Qualla: Ewald Colliery

Ewald Colliery: Introduction

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. The Malakow tower at Shaft 1 was built to be advertising. A stone fortress dressed up to look like a Crimean War redoubt, it was the kind of structure a colliery used to announce itself - heavy, imperial, visible from the road. So they painted the word EWALD across one side of it in giant letters. Then the plans for the site changed. The road went the other way. Ewaldstrasse ended up running past the wrong face of the tower. The lettering still survives, nearly 140 years on, and it still faces the wrong direction. Travelers along the street see only blank Crimean stonework. The advertisement faces the back of the property, talking to nobody.

Read more: Ewald Colliery on Qualla

Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ewald Colliery: Going Down 624 Meters

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Oskarp, CC BY-SA 3.0. Sinking began in 1872, in an area where coal had been suspected but never proven. The first vein opened in 1876 at 464 meters down, and production started the next year. Faults in the rock kept forcing the engineers to sink deeper, and by 1884 Shaft 1 was the deepest in the entir...

Read more: Ewald Colliery on Qualla

Image: Oskarp | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ewald Colliery: The Wrong Side of Things

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Arnoldius, CC BY-SA 2.5. If anything defines the Ewald story it is bad luck and good iron. The mine was merged with Schlagel and Eisen in 1989 and with the Hugo Colliery in 1997. For a brief stretch, the consolidated Ewald-Hugo operation ran twenty-one shafts - one of the largest pit configurations in Eu...

Read more: Ewald Colliery on Qualla

Image: Arnoldius | CC BY-SA 2.5

Ewald Colliery: Lighthouses on a Dead Sea

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. When closure was announced in 1999, the city of Herten and the mining company started planning the second life before the first had even ended. They called it Project Group Ewald and aimed for a thousand new jobs. The architects, Cino Zucchi with Martin Halfmann and Peter Koster,...

Read more: Ewald Colliery on Qualla

Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Ewald Colliery: From Coal to Hydrogen

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Nordenfan, CC BY-SA 4.0. The northern end of the site became the Hydrogen Competence Center H2Herten. In 2009, the construction began on the Blue Tower - a demonstration plant using staged reforming to make hydrogen-rich substitute natural gas from biomass, intended to deliver thirteen megawatts at full ...

Read more: Ewald Colliery on Qualla

Image: Nordenfan | CC BY-SA 4.0

Ewald Colliery: Travesty in the Boiler House

Sun, 17 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Frank Vincentz, CC BY-SA 3.0. The most surprising thing about Ewald might be what happens after dark. In October 2009, the theater entrepreneur Christian Stratmann opened the RevuePalast Ruhr inside the former boiler house, running a travesty cabaret in a space that used to feed flame into the colliery's stea...

Read more: Ewald Colliery on Qualla

Image: Frank Vincentz | CC BY-SA 3.0