“QUARTIERSLEUTE” IN THE WAREHOUSE @museum.de

If you look at the brickwork, you can see the gilded letters of the firm of "Eichholtz & Consorten Quartiersleute". They operated here as warehousing specialists on behalf of various merchants. The gold lettering was displayed on the outside wall of our warehouse until the free port was shut down in 2012.

As an occupation, “Quartiersmann” – warehouseman – originally evolved from the cooper’s trade. Almost all goods were transported in barrels – the containers of the Middle Ages, according to some people. The quart as a cubic measure was a widespread and important unit of measurement.

The skilled trade of “Quartiersmann” no longer exists. These days, the job title is "specialist for port logistics".

In the old days, workers would receive the piles of sacks at the doors overlooking the street – load them on to a three-wheeled cart and drive them to a designated place in the warehouse. There, two men would take hold of each sack with grappling hooks. The sacks weighed up to 70 kilogrammes or 155 pounds each. So it took a great deal of oomph to hurl each one on to a pile that might be as much as two metres high – over six feet, in case you were wondering.

But the warehousemen’s work also included counting, weighing, sampling and cleaning the different types of coffee, grading them by bean size and finally blending them.

On the small lectern, you’ll find the original Eichholtz warehouse book from 1956. Take a look at it to see what was stored here back then.

On the wooden shelf, we have various tools the warehousemen used. The warehousing firms provided the traders with a full range of services: from processing the ship's documents, via sampling and storing the goods to delivering them to the buyers – and that applied to all the goods in the warehouse district!