- Joined
- Oct 16, 2014
- Messages
- 2,736
- Reaction score
- 1,890
- Points
- 113
- Location
- Worms / Germany
- Website
- www.Ruinenland.de
Born in 1873, Carl, founder of the factory for health foods, was originally head chef at Prince Albert, Prince of Monaco. While loading the princely steam sailboat, Carl had an accident and sustained serious injuries. Thereupon he returned to his German homeland and turned to a healthy lifestyle - he only ate vegetarian food, stopped drinking alcohol and went hiking a lot. In 1899 he founded his first health food store and in 1910 he published a book about "practical health food". During one of his hikes he came across a derelict blacksmith shop, which he acquired in 1912. First he built a weekend house there and then his factory for health foods next to the house.
Carl died in 1964, but already in 1929 his son Ralf took over the management of the company. Production continued even during the war. From 1952 the factory mainly specialized in the manufacture of various chocolate products.
Ralf died in 1991, after this the factory was closed in 1992. Altought partly already in decay, the house next to the factory was still inhabited for many years (by Ralf's widow or daughter, I don't know), a quite aggressive woman, before she had to leave the property in 2018 after a foreclosure auction. The house was bought by an architect. For whatever reason, he only made optical cosmetic repairs on the facade, but without renovating the house itself, and today the building is completely abandoned again. So the house has continued to fall apart a lot and most of it has already collapsed now.
In May 2020 an attempt was made to sell another part of the factory premises in an auction, but to the best of my knowledge no buyer was found.
My first visit to the chocolate factory was in 2013, and even then it was in a ramshackle condition. In the meantime the roof has collapsed and the buildings are so dilapidated that they can hardly be saved.
I usually don't tell very accurate historical dates and I remove company names, etc. from my photos so as not to make the location of the places obvious.
However, the chocolate factory already has been very well known for a long time and you can find hundreds of pages of it on the web with photos, even after searching with the simplest keywords. So it would be nonsensical to cover up anything here.
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The residential building
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