page_title: Torfschiffswerft Schlussdorf
section_title: Bogs settled, peat cut and shipped
hierarchical_section_title: Torfschiffswerft Schlussdorf / Bogs settled, peat cut and shipped
caption_attribution_description: English: Teufelsmoor: Klappstau, a flap weir, invented by 1830 by Canal Steward (Kanalvogt) Müller from Wörpedorf (Wörpdorp). It is a leather flap vertically flexible and horizontally enforced by parallel wooden boards applicated on the downstream side and upheld on the upstream side by the headwater and on the downstream side by a guiding lateral edges bent upstream. So when a vessel approaches upstream its bow well sticks out above the upper edge of the concavely bent flap weir and by moving on its sloping underside gently presses down the flap, allowing the vessel to skim over it with the swashing downstream torrent. Moving upstream needs more manpower pushing the vessel's bow against the convexly bent flap weir to press it down against the headwater's counterpressure and then steering the barge against the downstream torrent. Mire Commissioner (Moorkommissar) Claus Witte (1796–1861; 1826-1861 in office) promoted Müller's idea, however, the new practical tool was very expensive, so that it took until 1840 that the first samples got installed in a watercourse at Eickedorf (Eekdorp), soon spreading to all navigable watercourses in the Teufelsmoor.
context_page_description: The Turf Shipyard in Schlussdorf, Lower Saxony, Germany, is a former boat builder's yard now used as an open-air museum. The yard, operating from 1850 to 1954, was specialised on barges to transport turf, that is dried peat used as fuel. In 1975 the Heimatverein Schlußdorf started to rescue the dilapidated shipyard buildings and reopened the site as a museum in 1977. The Turf Shipyard is about 3 kilometres north of Worpswede's outskirts.
  The Turf Shipyard is the only of its kind preserved in Northern Germany. As a museum it is undoubtedly in the front row of Worpswede's tourist sights. Among the attractions of the artists' village of Worpswede, the Turf Shipyard museum turned out to be a gem. The visit is especially recommended to people with children, as everything is presented very vividly.
context_section_description: Following Jürgen Christian Findorff's plans for the inner colonisation in the drained mires of the Teufelsmoor the village of Schlussdorf was founded in 1800 with originally 24 colonist families. Findorff (1720–1792), whom on 20 September 1771 George III of Britain and Hanover had appointed as Mire Commissioner (German: Moorkommissar) for the drainage and colonisation of the Teufelsmoor, included fuel turf sales as the necessary and available financial source for the colonists in their hard initial years. 
  The colonists sold fuel turf (German: Backtorf) prevailingly in Bremen and cities on the lower Weser, in order to raise money to make a living and build up their farms. By contract with the mire commission each colonist had to commit himself to replace the initial sod roofed A-frame shack by a solid farm building within the span of one year, however, so many failed that the commission already counted the presence of timber as fulfilment of that obligation, and thus some simple mire cottages (German: Moorkate[n]) were still to be found in the 1930s. 
  As the soil was poor, the farming revenues remained meagre, and their recipients lived in poverty and often suffered from malnutrition and disease such as rickets and tuberculosis. In springtime farmers started to cut peat from a lower peat layer, considered the best for fuel turf. If necessary the farmers compressed the peaty soil before cutting by hours-long barefoot tamping, a procedure called petten in Northern Low Saxon. Then the brick-formed peat pieces were piled up to stacks for drying in the summer sun to become fuel turf, before the deliveries started from autumn till mid-December. 
  After 1800 turf prices in Bremen soared. In 1830 fuel turf cost Thaler (Thl.) 4 to 8 (about mark [ℳ] 12 to 24) per 1 Hunt, which is 13.567 cubic metres (479.1 cu ft). In his teenage days the Schlussdorf-born Heinrich Schriefer (1847–1912) navigated turf barges to Vegesack and Bremen selling 1 Hunt of fuel turf for Thl. 2⅔ to 3 (about ℳ 16 to 18), as this author of rustic novels described. Between 1866 and 1884 turf prices per Hunt freely delivered rose from ℳ 60 (in 1866 still Thl. 20 circa) to ℳ 72. Selling fuel turf remained a main source of revenues for mire farmers till the begin of the 20th century, when modern fertilising sharply increased the harvests. Fuel turf experienced a last boom in demand by the end of the Second World War and in the immediate postwar years. For their own requirements some mire farmers continued heating with fuel turf until the late 1960s.
  All the 20 villages newly founded between 1751 and 1808 stretch as linear settlements along a ramrod straight causeway thrown up from material dug out from the drainage ditches running parallelly. The intermediate Royal-Electoral Chamber of Hanover (fiscal authority supervising and controlling the royal-electoral demesnes) and the provincial Bremen-Verden government in Stade paid for their part the main causeways in each village. 
  The colonists, again, had to maintain them and to build and to maintain connecting causeways (German: Communicationsdämme, i.e. communication dams) between the villages on their own, as well as all the hydraulic installations (drainage ditches, navigable canals, dikes, weirs, and bridges), to which each colonist had to commit in a contract with the mire commission. All royal-electoral causeways were open to everyone for the public good. Such causeways lacked soil compaction and pavement and were thus impassable for wayns and often even for horses, so inhabitants mostly walked them by foot using – if necessary – wheelbarrows for transport. 
  In rainy seasons or at seasonal floods the ways turned completely impassable, sometimes for days. In the beginning 30 villages in the Teufelsmoor were only connected by watercourses with 20 villages in the eastern mire part linked through the Wörpe and its tributaries, entering the Wümme. Until the regulation of the river Wörpe in 1860 the rather narrower navigable watercourses in its drainage basin only allowed ¼-Hunt barges, thereafter then ½-Hunt barges. 
caption: Flap weir while accessed by a turf barge pressing down the weir's leather-enforced blades else upheld by the headwater behind it, early 20th century
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