Rheine. The Municipal Museums Rheine have successfully applied for a grant from the Ministry of Home Affairs, Municipal Affairs, Building and Digitalization. At the end of last week, the state of North Rhine-Westphalia announced that € 36,000 from the funding program “Heimat-Fonds” for the exhibition project “Salt. Stories of the white gold from Rheine” are granted.
The cultural-historical exhibition is to be shown from September in the municipal Falkenhof Museum. It will focus on Rheines past as a “salt city”. For many centuries, the salt works in Rheine-Bentlage supplied the people of Münsterland with the “white gold”. Today, the saltworks are still present as architectural monuments and many visitors enjoy inhaling the salty air at the graduation towers, but the knowledge of the exciting historical contexts is in danger of being lost.
How did our ancestors react to an energy shortage? Why were skilled workers recruited from Thuringia? How did the saltworks workers live around 1800 and which picture sources could be recovered from the estate of a photographer as an attic find? The museum’s scientists/researchers are looking forward to working with volunteer citizens of our town to realize an exhibition concept that presents the saltworks’ history from the perspective of the people who used the brine and the salt p “Stories of the white gold” will be told in a new special exhibition in the graphic cabinet of the Falkenhof starting in the fall.