The Girmes works
1879 to structural decline: the mill that shaped a town
Burg Uda is talked about because it is 700 years old. The Girmes works have to be talked about because they changed life in Oedt more deeply than any medieval siege. Anyone growing up in Oedt in the twentieth century knew someone who worked at Girmes – or worked there themselves.
In 1879 Johannes Girmes, the son of a farmer, founded the firm Johannes Girmes & Co in the town. The business grew into the largest employer in the municipality: at its peak the works employed several thousand people and made Oedt a centre of textile production on the Lower Rhine.
At a glance
Textiles in Oedt
Before the factory: the weaving trade
Textile production did not arrive in Oedt in 1879 – it had been there for a long time. Linen weaving is documented in the municipality from the seventeenth century onwards, and from around 1860, as the town opened up, production shifted increasingly to velvet ribbon weaving. The trade flourished, and the many weavers' houses along the approach roads still show it today.
On the Lower Rhine weavers traditionally worked at home. The loom stood in the living room or the cellar; work was done for merchant clothiers, often as a sideline to a smallholding. This structure shaped the region for generations: many small, scattered producers linked by middlemen who brought raw material and collected finished cloth.
That arrangement also carried the seed of a crisis. The handloom weavers of Oedt received their orders from merchant clothiers in Krefeld and had to carry their finished cloth there. They fell increasingly into dependence on the „velvet and silk barons" and were cheated of their wages, so that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century a period of severe hardship came over the population – made worse by advancing industrialisation.
The scale of the change is visible in one figure: in 1880 there were 800 handlooms in Oedt for a population of 3,200.
Two firms, two kinds of relief
Help came in two stages. In 1850 the founding of the Oedt bleachworks and dyeworks Peter Mertes & Söhne, which shortly afterwards added workwear manufacture, made the last linen weavers partly independent of outside merchants and won them fairer payment.
For the majority, the velvet weavers, noticeable improvement came only when Johannes Girmes founded his firm in 1879. Yet the mechanisation of the looms and their installation in factories made handweaving uneconomic. The home weavers gave up, and some of them moved to Girmes.
Velvet and plush: the product
Girmes produced velvet and plush – pile fabrics. In these, additional threads stand upright out of the base weave and form a dense, soft surface; velvet has a short pile, plush a longer one.
Such fabrics are technically demanding. They require special looms, precise thread control and careful finishing. That was precisely the opportunity for a medium-sized location: a firm that mastered a difficult speciality did not have to compete on price alone. Demand was considerable – velvet and plush went into clothing, upholstery, curtains and decoration, and later into vehicle interiors.
A factory shapes a town
The Girmes family shaped Oedt as more than an employer. The firm built the first power station in the county, supplied the municipality of Oedt with electricity from 1899 and installed the first street lighting in the town.
As the business expanded and needed workers, Girmes built 90 workers' dwellings on Dietrich-Straße and Johannes-Straße, along with twelve dwellings for salaried staff on Johannes-Girmes-Straße. Company housing was widespread in the nineteenth century and had mixed motives: it tied labour to the works, secured short journeys to shift, and gave the employer influence beyond the workplace. At the same time it offered many families housing of a quality they could not have afforded on the open market.
Alongside this stood the representative Villa Girmes, the family's residence, which today houses the local museum.
A critical note from the local history
The local historian Karl-Heinz Brocker judges the firm's role with reserve. The further economic development of Oedt was, in his account, determined by Mertes and Girmes – and not always to the town's advantage, since a broader economic base was prevented mainly by the Girmes firm. The overall development of the town, he writes, was repeatedly held back. A dominant employer secures employment and limits alternatives at the same time.
Structural decline from the 1970s
From the 1970s the German textile industry came under pressure it could not withstand in the long run. Production shifted to countries with far lower wage costs, trade barriers fell and transport became cheap. The skill and the plant in Oedt were still there – they simply could not be deployed competitively at West German wages.
The effect struck the whole Lower Rhine, and it struck Oedt hard. The Girmes works closed. The town's largest employer disappeared and the municipality had to reorient itself economically.
Ruptures of this kind leave two kinds of trace. One is physical: works sites, villas and housing estates that must find a new use or fall into decay. The other is biographical – working lives that break off, and a sense of local identity that shifts. Documenting both is today a task of the Heimatverein, whose yearbook collects eyewitness accounts from this period.
That the Villa Girmes survived the break is due to its conversion into the town hall of the municipality of Oedt. Many manufacturers' villas in the region were less fortunate.
Open questions
The industrial history of Oedt is less well documented than the castle's. We cannot currently verify the following points and therefore do not present them as established:
Not yet documented
• Peak workforce figure and the year it was reached
• Exact year of closure and the legal circumstances
• Full product range and export markets
• Location and extent of the workers' housing estates
• Present use of the former works site
• Relationship between Girmes and Peter Mertes
• Biographical data on Johannes Girmes
Sources and status
The statements draw on Karl-Heinz Brocker, Geschichte des alten Amtes und späteren Gemeinde Oedt (History of the former Amt and later municipality of Oedt), published by the Heimatverein Oedt e.V. (PDF) and on generally established outlines of Lower Rhine textile history. Individual references for company data will be added once archive research is complete. Points marked as open are expressly not documented.
Last updated: August 2026
Read on
Industrial history and the castle in context
Industrial heritage in Oedt
From handloom weaving to velvet and plush: the section overview.
To the overviewHeimatverein Oedt e.V.
Who maintains the castle and documents local history.
To the association