Kollermühle - a mill in isolation
The Kollermühle is located on the Creußen and was first mentioned in documents in 1577. The old mill has only been part of Grafenwöhr since 1946, after the dissolution of the municipality of Thomasreuth.
As can be seen in historical plans, the water for the Mühlbach was diverted from the slowly flowing Creußen at about the height of Bärnwinkel. The length of the mill canal was almost 500 meters. Today this body of water can still be recognized as the Kollermühlgraben.
The name Kollermühle refers to the iron industry in the Middle Ages. There were numerous iron processing companies on the Haidenaab, which needed a lot of fuel to stoke their furnaces. There were several charcoal kilns around Grafenwöhr. Field or family names such as Koller, Köhler or Meiler indicate this. There was no permanent miller family at the Kollermühle; it had an eventful history. The reason for this was the mill's remote location, which only offered the miller a meager living.
The miller Lobenhofer is recorded at the Kollermühle from 1833 to 1848. He became sadly known nationwide for a capital crime. He had a lover and child in Amberg and wanted to get rid of his wife. Several attempts failed, so that he finally sent his wife to Amberg with money to pay a bill for him. In what is now the military training area near Röthelweiher, hired murderers waited for the Kollermühlen woman and strangled her. The perpetrators and the Kollermühlen were brought to justice and beheaded in Amberg. Until 1985, a shrine at the crime scene commemorated the crime that was to accompany the Kollermühle for many decades.
The mill was not blessed with the murder of the miller's wife. Five changes of ownership are recorded before a miller's wife, Lederer, tried her luck there. She married three times, the first two men died and it was only her third husband, a Speckner from the long-established miller family at the Schaumbachmühle, who gave her a son. This Josef Speckner was to be the last miller at the Kollermühle. He sold the property in 1919 on the grounds that since the murder of the Kollermüller's wife, there had been no luck in the house and no man at the Kollermühle lived to be older than 45.
Finally, in 1919, the property became a state-owned moorland farm under the management of the Pressath Forestry Office.
(Source: City of Grafenwöhr)