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KÖNIGSHÜTTE 
This is the largest and most central of a cluster of towns situated within a 
triangular area of about 150 square miles of coal and iron producing country in 
the extreme south-easterly corner of the German Empire, bordering on the 
Russian and Austrian frontiers, and known as the Upper Silesian Black 
Country. Of the towns grouped round Königshütte the most important are 
Gleiwitz, Beuthen, Zaborze, Kattowitz, Myslowitz, Ruda and Chorzow, with 
populations of 61,000, 60,000, 56,000, 36,000, 13,000, 13,000 and 10,000 
respectively, while Königshütte itself numbers some 66,000 inhabitants. 
Though separate units for purposes of local government, all these towns have 
been brought into such close communication with each other, not only by 
railway but also by a system of electric tramways, that they may almost be 
regarded as forming a single urban agglomeration. 
The development of the Upper Silesian coal-mining industry may be said 
to have begun with the opening of the Brandenburg Mine near Ruda, a few 
miles west of Königshütte, in 1750. In the last decade of the eighteenth century 
two other mines were opened, and in connection with one of these (called the 
Königsgrube or King’s Mine), a blast furnace was erected in the year 1802, near 
some small pools a few miles east of Ruda, and this was the origin of the 
present town of Königshütte. Some forty years later the Upper Silesian 
railway was built, and immediately gave a great impetus to the local coal and 
iron industries. Succeeding years saw a rapid extension of transport facilities 
over the whole of the district and at the present day every mine and iron and 
steel works in the Upper Silesian Black Country is connected by a narrow- 
gauge line with the Prussian State railway system and so brought into 
communication with all the great industrial and distributing centres of 
Germany, Austria-Hungary and Russia. Königshütte is within forty miles 
of the point where the river Oder becomes navigable, i.e. at the town of Ratibor, 
whence products of the Upper Silesian Black Country are conveyed in barges 
down the Oder to Breslau, Frankfort, Stettin and as far as Swinemünde on the 
Baltic Sea. Except for purposes of business, Königshütte has few visitors from 
other parts of Germany, and this is equally true of the other industrial towns in 
this remote corner of the Empire. In the stretches of open country lying 
between various centres of population and traversed by the electric tramway 
system already referred to, the winding gear of colliery shafts, mounds of 
colliery and blast furnace refuse, smoking chimneys and stagnant pools are the 
outstanding features. The environment is rendered additionally depressing by 
the appearance, at frequent intervals, of posts exhibiting the sign of a skull and 
cross bones, and intended as a warning that the adjacent surface has been 
rendered dangerous through the mining operations carried on beneath the soil. 
The appearance of the workpeople, which suggests cheerlessness and poverty, is 
in harmony with these surroundings. The men and women are neither so 
robust nor so well clad as those of North and West Germany, while their 
children almost without exception go barefoot in all weathers and, in general, 
give the impression of being indifferently cared for. Both in origin and 
sentiment the great majority of the workpeople of the Upper Silesian Black 
Country are Polish, and in their intercourse with each other seldom make use of 
any other language. In spite of their apparent inferiority of physique, however, 
they are regarded by local employers as being at least equal in endurance to the 
workpeople of German origin, and as they have also the reputation of being 
more tractable and less exacting in their standard of comfort than workpeople 
from other parts of Germany, they are preferred to the latter for all work in 
which the quality of endurance is the main requisite. 
Asa town Königshütte had no existence until the year 1869, its official 
recognition as such having been conferred by a Royal Order dated July 17th, 
1868. The earliest census figure for this town relates to the year 1871, when