Qualla: Emil Siepmann

Emil Siepmann: Introduction

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

His name is on a street sign in Warstein. Emil-Siepmann-Straße runs through the small Westphalian town that he and his brother Hugo turned into a regional industrial power, the same town where his grandparents had been cabinet makers and small traders. Emil Ludwig Siepmann was born on 25 August 1863 in Hagen, the third of nine children of a wood wholesaler whose business was ruined by the financial aftershocks of the Franco-Prussian War. The collapse meant Emil could not afford university. He took a commercial apprenticeship in Hagen instead, served a year as a volunteer in the Royal Bavarian Infantry Lifeguards in Munich, and then drifted - lamp factory in Neheim, railway work into his mid-twenties - until a phone call the week before New Year's 1891 changed everything.

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Emil Siepmann: Peters & Co, and the Shape of a Company

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The call came from his brother-in-law, Louis Peters, who had just taken over the bankrupt plant of Hüsing & Company in Warstein. The works made spades, shovels, hay forks, manure forks - the unromantic edge of farm equipment, forged from steel and iron. Peters wanted Emil to come...

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Emil Siepmann: The 85-Ton Hammer

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Over the next two decades the brothers reshaped the company. Drop forging replaced hand work. New customers arrived: bicycle manufacturers at the turn of the century, then the early automobile industry, then the railway industry. In 1916 - in the middle of a world war - they inst...

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Emil Siepmann: Marks for an Orphanage

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Emil married Marie Magdalene Schuette in 1896, and they had five children, of whom four reached adulthood. One son, Hans, was deemed the heir to the family business; he died of unknown cause in 1919, aged twenty-two. The grief seems to have pushed the Siepmann brothers further in...

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Emil Siepmann: Two Houses, Two Brothers

Sat, 23 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Emil and Hugo Siepmann lived next door to each other on Hauptstrasse in Warstein - Hugo at number 145, Emil at number 143, two houses on a split parcel of land where their families' children grew up together. They worked together for sixty years. Emil died on 2 November 1950, age...

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