Eisenerz

Eisenerz is a market vicinity and old mining city within the Austrian kingdom of Styria, sixty eight mi. N.W. Of Graz with the aid of rail. Pop. 6,400. It is located inside the deep Erzbach Valley, dominated at the east through the Pfaffenstein 1871m, on the west with the aid of the Kaiserschild 2084m , and at the south by means of the Erzberg 1465m. It has a medieval fortified church, a Gothic edifice based by Rudolph of Habsburg in the 13th century and rebuilt in the 16th century. At the turn of the past century the Erzberg furnished such rich ore that it was quarried inside the outside like stone, in the summer time months.

There is documentary evidence of the mines having been worked as some distance back as the twelfth century. They afforded employment to two or three thousand fingers in summer season and about half of as many in wintry weather, and yielded some 800,000 lots of iron in step with annum. During World War II, a subcamp of Mauthausen awareness camp become placed right here. It furnished slave labour for local industry. Eisenerz become connected with the mines through the Erzberg Railway, a ambitious piece of engineering work, fourteen miles long, built at the Abt's rack-and-pinion system.