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Stadt Lahr, Stadtmuseum Tonofenfabrik

City Museum Clay Kiln Factory Interesting facts from the Lahr City Museum

The Lahr City Museum: three buildings - one story

You can see a brick building, the former clay kiln factory, which houses part of the town's history museum. It has 3 floors, high windows and an equally high extension on the right made of pink concrete.
View of the clay kiln factory in the city center.
Source: City Museum Lahr/ Ronald Buck

The Lahr Town Museum consists of three buildings, each of which focuses on a different aspect of the town's history:

The former clay kiln factory
The permanent exhibition uses numerous multimedia stations and an ArchaeoLab to take visitors on a journey through the town's history from Roman times to the modern day. Regular special exhibitions complement the town history exhibition.

The stork tower
Lahr's landmark is located just a few meters from the clay kiln factory. It was built around 1220 and symbolizes the founding of Lahr like no other.

The Roman complex
The Roman complex consists of a reconstructed strip house with an archaeobotanical garden. It is located in the Bürgerpark on the grounds of the Landesgartenschau. Everything here revolves around the life of the Gallo-Romans, who founded a settlement on this very spot in the 2nd century.

The history of the clay kiln factory

For around a hundred years, the building that is now the town museum was the production site of the C.H. Liermann stove and pottery factory. In the company's heyday, around 40 employees produced over 3,000 tiled stoves a year here.

The clay stove factory is a typical example of Lahr's industrial architecture at the end of the 19th century. The Lahr architect Carl Meurer built the building in Kreuzstraße in 1896 on behalf of the factory owner Carl Friedrich Liermann. His father, Christian Heinrich Liermann, had founded the C.H. Liermann stove and pottery factory in Lahr in 1854, which had exhausted its premises on the opposite side of the street.


In the new factory, the company produced up to 3,000 tiled stoves per year. The production process ran from top to bottom: On the second floor, the factory workers shaped the pottery. The tile decoration ranged from simple to a variety of typical Art Nouveau patterns specially designed by artists. The glaze was located on the second floor, while the blast furnaces for firing the pottery were on the first floor and in the basement. The clay store, clay preparation and glaze mill were located on the Schlossplatz, attached to the town mill. Employees transported the raw materials to the factory by handcart.


With the spread of central heating, production in the clay kiln factory was discontinued in 1957. The company was closed down and the building was rented out to various companies. At the beginning of the 21st century, only the first floor and the second floor were still used as office and storage space and the building fell into disrepair. In 2014, the city of Lahr acquired the listed building and converted the old clay kiln factory into a museum of the city's history according to the designs of the architectural firm "heneghan peng architects" from Berlin with financial support from the federal government and the state of Baden-Württemberg.

The Lahr City Museum has its own Pixi book!

The picture shows the cover of a Pixi book. It shows a little girl, an adult woman and a small ghost. They are standing in front of the Tonofenfabrik city museum in Lahr. The title reads: Lola and Leonardo in the museum.
The cover of the Pixi book shows the clay kiln factory.
Source: Lahr City Museum

Many people are certainly familiar with the little Pixi books. The handy little books have already covered numerous topics, and now there are also several books set in various German museums. The Pixi of the city museum is unmistakable: the clay oven factory is depicted directly on the cover.

While the story and the characters were predetermined - Lola and ghost Leonardo visit the museum - the museum team was free to decide what to draw in some places. The name of the museum educator is no coincidence either, it was also left up to them to decide.

Interested museums were able to contact the German Museums Association, which created this offer in cooperation with Carlsen Verlag, as early as 2020. The book about the Lahr Museum was published in September 2022. The illustrations are by Ralf Butschkow, the story by Corinna Fuchs.

The Pixi book is now available to purchase in the museum store for 0.99 euros.

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