460 mAnsager Tourist
The same modernization in Ansager: local links grew from bicycle repair, taxi, and bus services.
At Ansager Mill, you stand by a small piece of technical history that began with the water in Ansager Stream. Here, the old mill was linked to the town’s first electricity plant, and the energy did not come from a distant power station, but from the dammed stream right by the buildings.
The place is best experienced from the outside today. The old buildings are still there, and the site can be read as a meeting between mill, turbine house and the stream that once drove the machinery. It is not a museum with open galleries, but a place where masonry, watercourse and local memory still belong together.
When plans for electricity came to Ansager, not everyone was convinced. An older man is said to have remarked that they claimed they could “mål så stærkt ned’ o æ møl”, so that it could light up in town – but he did not believe that now. The scepticism says almost as much as the technology: electric light sounded like something that had to be seen before it could be believed.
The mill had already had several roles before it became part of the power-station story. Grain, dairy, distillery, electricity and later other uses have succeeded one another here. Perhaps the most striking trace is precisely the contrast between the old water power and the modern wires that brought the “light” into the ceilings of houses in Ansager.
In the photo, power plant manager E. Birk Pedersen stands by Ansager Power Plant’s first diesel engine: a B&W machine from 1912 with 80 hp, installed in 1929 in a new engine room.
It marked a shift in the power plant’s history. The two water turbines from 1921 produced a total of 43 hp, but the town’s consumption grew beyond them. In 1952, the plant was running with three diesel engines and two water turbines at the same time.
In 1964, Ansager Power Plant closed after 57 years as the local supplier of electricity by the mill. The problem was not only price. Households and industry got more machines, and they required alternating current, while the small local plants belonged to an older form of supply.
For a while, converters could bridge the gap from direct to alternating voltage, but development pointed toward larger systems. The old plant ended as a local full stop for the electricity that once began in the power of the river.