The new Mining Museum: a department store full of gold and gray mining history

Belgium and Germany are teeming with places where the memory of the coal mines is kept alive. It’s mostly about the men who did the heavy lifting. In Blegny in Wallonia, between Maastricht and Liège, visitors can descend underground themselves. It Dutch Mining Museum in Heerlen didn’t want more of the same in its new place, opened last weekend. It therefore opted for a broader story: how mineral extraction at a killer pace flattened out an Arcadian landscape and brought great prosperity – which disappeared even faster.

The location lends itself to it: in 1940, the Kneepkens department store opened in Heerlen, a hypermodern shopping oasis for that time, designed by architect Frits Peutz. The city had more of it, because the miners, mine workers and their families had quite a bit to spend. Heerlen and surrounding towns, now invariably high on lists of places with a lot of poverty and other problems, were among the richest municipalities in the Netherlands.

Consistently using a department store formula with departments and ‘product islands’, the Mining Museum brings the world of yesteryear to life. The group spirit and the hierarchy within the mining company in addition to the wealth that this yielded: material, but also in terms of pride, entertainment and club life – including Dutch first professional football.

Mine Police and Inspections

Miners came from Limburg, but also from other parts of the Netherlands, Europe, the world. The Church kept the families in this melting pot watch closely. In the special neighborhoods that housing associations had built, this supervision went even further; special mining police patrolled there. Residential inspectors came to see what it looked like behind the front door. Their reports on display in the museum also state the frequency of cafe visits and the number of books read.

The new Mining Museum shows the contrast between the prosperity in Heerlen’s glory years and the dark sides of mining. Above the floor with the ‘gold’ theme is the floor with the ‘grey’ theme. Miners had to deal with nasty occupational diseases and industrial accidents. Nearly 1,500 of them did not survive. To give an impression of that number, prayer cards like cards have been drawn up in line with the names of the victims. Curator Simone Claessens: “It’s not even all of them.”

And prosperity turned out to be finite. In December 1965, Minister of Economic Affairs Joop den Uyl (PvdA) announced in the Heerlen theater that all mines would be closed within ten years. The pulpit behind which the minister delivered his speech is one of the museum pieces.

Den Uyl promised alternative employment. The government did its best, but in the end only jobs were created for roughly a quarter of the people who had worked underground in the unprofitable mines. It was often not suitable work. Part of the government compensation also ended up outside the mining area, for example in Maastricht, the city that got a university.

Claessens also knows some of the miserable stories from her own family history. One of the most striking pieces on display is a spirit lung in spirit. Many (former) miners got the disease silicosis as a result of their work, which slowly but surely took their breath away. Employers preferred to point to other causes, such as rabbits or pigeons kept during leisure time. “My great-grandfather suffocated in the end,” says Claessens.

Her grandfather belongs to the generation that started in the mines, but over time had to look for a new future. “He became unemployed due to the closure, but after a while he was able to work as a furniture maker for a company that was lured to this region with a government subsidy. But that company went bankrupt. He then followed a pedagogical training course, but teaching only lasted a short time, because the emptying of the region meant that there were fewer students and he became redundant. In the end, he had a few nice last working years as a teacher at Licom, the sheltered employment facility.”

Not only was the economic base pulled away from the region with the mine closure

Every foundation disappeared

Not only was the economic base withdrawn from under the region with the mine closure, the museum shows how almost every foundation disappeared. The employer had always made sure that the child benefit forms were completed and the hedges in the mining districts were trimmed. Precisely at the time when the shaft towers and other industrial heritage were disappearing, the church also lost its natural authority and the relationships of authority in the family came into question.

In the multifaceted story told in the museum, the slightly propagandistic angle of the audiovisual spectacle on the top floor is somewhat out of place. This shows how half a century later the black of the coal era has changed into the green of the planted waste heaps, the white of the country’s longest indoor ski slope, the pink of Pinkpop, the blue of the Central Bureau of Statistics, which was brought to Limburg and the cyan from chemical group DSM. If you don’t know any better, you will leave with the thought that everything in Heerlen and the surrounding area is back to normal.

That is not true. The worst grayness may be behind us, but after times of turbulent growth and equally turbulent decline, the region is still searching for itself.