History - A park built on coal

Children play and people go for walks on grounds that originally were the site of hard labor. In January 1902 the ironworks company Maximilianhutte AG of Sulzbach, Rosenberg, began digging two shafts. The reason? The newly established colliery was to mine coal in the east end area of Hamm. However, this business venture proved to be more difficult than initially anticipated and soon digging became an issue due to water damage that time and again interfered with progress and made pit construction very difficult.

It was not until...5 years later that coal was able to be extracted. Yet, further setbacks followed and gas explosions began to occur, preventing consistent mining of significant amounts of coal. Finally in 1912, after 10 years of preparation, coal was able to be mined on a regular basis. Around 1,260 miners worked to bring 100,000 tons of "black gold" to the earth's surface each year. Unfortunately, the economic viability of the colliery did not last long.

Two years later disaster struck. A high amount of internal flooding occured and this brought coal extraction to a screeching halt. Water levels initially rose to the first level but soon became overwhelming when the surface was reached.The whole incident resulted in the abandonment of the mine altogether. As the miners said, the coalmine "sank". Two further attempts were made to bring the coal mine back into working order; but, they were unsuccessful. And finally in 1943 the era of the Maximilianhutte was beyond a shadow of a doubt over. After the closure of the coillery, the buildings were left to deteriorate; however, to everyones surprise all sorts of vegetation grew wildly on the site. These derelict grounds, which had been abandoned for over half a century, eventually became a haven for many endangered plants, most of which flourished without human intervention.