Blåbæk Mill

Facts

Flour power - windmill helps watermill

By Lise Andersen, Museumsinspektør, mag.art. (17 stories)

Blåkilde Mill is in picturesque scenery near Fakse River. The earliest sources mention the watermill in 1472. The current mill building is from 1838. Some parts date back to the 1660s when the mill was rebuilt after the damage wreaked by the wars with Sweden. The mill has two overshot wheels. One drives the three grinders while the other once ran a stamp mill for frieze cloth. Later on, the wheel ran a saw. In 1828, a windmill was built to help out the water mill. The mill was a copyhold mill under the Rosendal Estate until 1929. It stopped working in 1939. Whereas the watermill can still function, the windmill is incomplete and rather heavily restored.

Partly a public place

Selected entry

Marriage in the wind

Story written by Lise Andersen

Time / Periode 1828

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Twenty-eight-year-old Søren Schiølert was perhaps more interested in Blåbæk Mill than in the miller's widow, Christiane Schrøder, who was 13 years his senior, when he married her in 1821. The couple had no children, and being the son of a miller himself, Schiøler diverted his energy into improving his milling skills. He applied to the Rosendal Estate and the King for permission to build a Dutch windmill to supplement the watermill. The windmill is impressive for its time with a gateway into the lower part of the mill, which is built of granite boulders. The body of the mill was originally straw thatched but has had a shingled roof since 1872. Christiane Schrøder died in 1845 but it's an ill wind that blows no good. The efficient miller wasted no time in evening the odds and marrying a woman 12 years his junior the same year, with whom he had several children before passing away in 1869.