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The Zollern II/IV colliery in Dortmund

The Emscherbruch district to the north of Dortmund was once an overwhelmingly agricultural landscape dotted here and there with a number of hamlets. Indeed the future site of the Zollern II/IV colliery was covered in woodland. The adjacent Provinzialstraße led southwards to the Hellweg trading route.

The Emscher Valley railway, which opened in 1878 and connects Dortmund with Herne, provided an ideal reason for the colliery to increase production near the line. Already in the 1850s there were attempts to sink pits near Kirchlinde, to the east of Westrich. But difficulties arising from the pit flooding and the enormous financial problems proved insoluble. In 1872 the Zollern Colliery finally obtained a rail link with loading facilities and as a result coal output rose twenty times within a year. It is impossible to overestimate the importance of the railways for a mining region.

The owner of the Zollern II/IV colliery was a large company by the name of the "Gelsenkirchener Bergwerks AG". Between 1898 and 1904 it had the Landwehr housing estate built right opposite the colliery gates. At the time the suburb of Bövinghausen was still small, and there was an urgent need for housing for the miners and pit employees. The Landwehr "Colony", as it was known, was built along garden city lines and followed the principle of homes being built near to the workplace. The high quality of the houses also meant that the workers were more likely to feel a bond between themselves and the colliery. The houses also included gardens and sheds to enable the colliers and their family to grow their own food, not to speak of offering them the opportunity to enjoy some active leisure in the open-air after a hard day down the mine. Soon the Colony proved too small for the 1000 or so miners, and in 1905 a second housing estate, the "New Colony", was quickly built on the Provinzialstraße. The somewhat plain blocks of rented housing units catered mostly for East Prussian and Polish workers.

In 1898 the official ground-breaking ceremony was held on the site of the future Zollern II/IV colliery, and regular mining started as early as 1902. The colliery possessed an electrical winding engine and soon afterwards it became the first fully electrified colliery in the Ruhrgebiet. The growing village of Bövinghausen and other surrounding villages also benefited from progressive electrification.

The coking plant which had come into operation on the pit site in 1904 was decommissioned in 1918. Bövinghausen station expanded and by the 1920s it has become one of the most important goods stations in the whole of Dortmund.

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