Herderskotten

It just started. The first Robert Herder knives were sharpened in Herderskotten am Kuckesberg after Robert Herder separated from his mother and siblings at Keusenhof and became self-employed.

As the company developed, the work of other grinders in other Solingen Kotten was added, such as the Kuckesberger Kotten, the Brucher Kotten and the Wipperkotten.

Our knives were sharpened here by first-class grinders up until World War II. We already made the handles, called handles, in our handle milling shop. The blade control, assembly of the knives, packaging and shipping also took place in the buildings on Benrather Strasse in Solingen-Ohligs.

A Kotten is a small, independent business facility, usually located on a watercourse, as water power was needed to drive forging hammers, grinding stones and molding wheels, for example for making knives and scissors.

The rapid first years were followed by a carefully planned, continuous development of the Robert Herder company. The premises at the Keusenhof became too small. Therefore, in 1895 he acquired a property at Benrather Straße 7. He moved his company headquarters there and built a two-storey commercial building there in 1896, in which people lived, managed, and where the goods were packed and shipped. At that time, the specialists from our company for the grinding and polishing of the blades, and for the grinding and turning out of the handles, sat exclusively in the Kotten of Solingen such as the Herderskotten, the Wipperauer Kotten or the Brucher Kotten, because there was no watercourse on Benrather Straße , which could have supplied the energy for the whetstones and pleated discs.

The company did well, building a reputation for good quality and also exporting heavily to the Dutch East Indies (Indonesia), Belgium, the Netherlands and South America. The family was frugal and continuously invested in the factory. The positive development was interrupted by World War I. In 1917 Robert Herder died. Paul, his son became the sole owner and successfully led the company through the difficult post-war years.

Efforts to produce independently continued. In 1921 a storage shed was built. In 1922 an important project was added, the construction of the grinding shop. Now the company is almost in a position to carry out all knife manufacturing processes itself.

At that time, the construction cost of this massive brick building, which is still in use today, was 80,000 marks. For cost reasons, it was built only half as large as originally planned. In 1926 the drying room for the mechanical drying of the stained wooden handles was built.

In 1927 an open building, a kind of woodshed, was added to cook the handles with logwood extract for black pickling, a process that is still practiced to some extent today.

The Second World War also affected our company greatly. Paul Herder and his wife Anna died during the war. Günter Herder comes home injured at the end of 1943, his brother Werner, also injured in the war, returns home later. Günter Herder saves the company and the house from burning down after a bomb attack. After the end of the war, the years of hunger and the currency reform in 1948, the two brothers go back to work.

The company is producing again, the customers are making contact. The demand for Windmill knives is strong and sales are picking up again. The domestic and foreign business is growing and the expansion of the production becomes necessary.