There is a modest resemblance between the image on the Ritter Mystery Cup and the present day Heiligen Mühle. What do you think?
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There is a modest resemblance between the image on the Ritter Mystery Cup and the present day Heiligen Mühle. What do you think?
Categories: uncategorized
MyFamilyHistories.com 
I believe you are right, the picture and the painting are just reversed, as in a negative might reverse a picture. The gable is right, the windows have ornamentation that may have been added later on top. But I think this is the right mill.
In my opinion the buildng on the cup which reminds of the today’s “Heiligen Mühle” cannot be the mill itself (talking about the one on the cup). No miller of that time was numb enough to have curtains on his mill’s windows. This must have been the family’s home. If there is a mill shown on the cup it must have been the small building in the middle behind the yard. The one to the right has curtains as well and there is a number of chimneys to be seen on the roof. Usually mills had no furnace – for obvious reasons (safety). Only oil mills made use of wood stoves… but did not come with curtains on their windows either…
What leaves me clueless is the huge amount of timber seen on the picture. Maybe there was a sawmill on site (which was quite common in German grain mills of that time to also have a saw and maybe even an oil mill powered by the same water) but the small yard in which the timber is stored in an unusual upright position looks very weird. My idea about this is that the artist painted the mill under construction in a state where most buildings had been already finished (the millers’ families had even moved into the building – look at the curtains) but the millwrights were still doing their work on the wooden gears, flour spouts inside the mill… We can even spot a pre-fabricated black (iron?) wheel in the yard that waits to get pulled inside.
But why those huge amounts of round timber??? I can hardly believe that they were chopped into beams all by hand at that time… so they either had a sawmill on site or were in the wood trade as a sort of side business…
All in all – nice piece of artwork but I doubt that you will be successfull in finding the true place of the mill shown. There must have been tenthousands (if not more) of theses small mills in Germany…
Kind regards – good luck and “Glück zu!”