Directly on the bank of Niederlahnstein rises an imposing industrial building - the Löhnberger Mühle. The special feature: The large mill in late classicist style resembles purely visually more a representative castle complex than a production and storage facility. Due to its architectural peculiarity, it is a listed building and part of the UNESCO World Heritage Upper Middle Rhine Valley.

In the early 1890s, the Löhnberger Actien-Gesellschaft commissioned master mill builder Carl Ehrenberg to build a branch on the Rhine, primarily to process southern Russian grain. Thanks to his Berlin origins, Ehrenberg was very much in the tradition of the school of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose buildings, reminiscent of the architecture of antiquity, still characterize the cityscape of Berlin and Potsdam today.

And so the Löhnberger Mühle is also an exemplary example of this architectural style, which was new at the time. The six-story main building extends along the Rhine. Together with the adjoining wings, it forms a U-shaped building whose symmetry was only broken in the early years by a square tower adorned with battlements and a flatter northern extension. Associations with castles and palaces were intended. The brick building is decorated with the typical elements of classicism, such as stone belt bands and balusters (show railings made of small columns).

After two years of construction, the steam mill, equipped according to the latest technical knowledge, started its work. In addition to the mill itself, the facility housed a boiler house and a grain and a flour store. After a first structural extension in 1911, the plant was able to process up to 120 tons of grain per day, which was unloaded directly from the Rhine ships onto the premises. In 1929, Kurt Kampffmeyer acquired the mill and founded the Rheinisch-Nassauische Lagerei- und Speditions-Aktiengesellschaft Niederlahnstein. Milling operations were discontinued, and the site was henceforth used as a storage facility and transshipment point for various agricultural products. The addition of fertilizers and fuels necessitated an extensive expansion of the facility, during which the storage capacity was multiplied. Since 2010, the former Löhnberger Mühle has been part of Beiselen Lagerei- und Umschlags GmbH, which also handles a wide range of agricultural products and bulk goods there.

The Löhnberger Mühle is a listed building

The appearance of the main building has remained unchanged despite all the modernizations of the past 125 years. Plans to further adapt the site to the needs of modern industry envisage at least the preservation of the main façade facing the Rhine due to the preservation order. This means that visitors to the Middle Rhine Valley will continue to be able to marvel at classicist industrial architecture in Lahnstein in the future. Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator (free version)