A gift with far-reaching consequences: in 1758 the successful Leer merchant Geerd Garrels, owner of several houses on the Leda, buys a building on Neue Strasse in Leer for his son Johann Hinrich Garrels. Mainly because of the grocery shop it contains – but his son, also a merchant, is more interested in the small timber business which is also located in the building. After a short time, the year is 1759, he takes charge of the timber business – and has a plan …
J.H. Garrels uses his existing contacts from the trade in groceries and British goods in the interests of his timber business. The merchant maintains good business relations with various European trading companies, as well as with relatives in London and Amsterdam. This enables him to import large quantities of premium-quality foreign timber. And this is urgently needed in East Frisia, because the region has a lot of moorland but little usable forest. And because there are also few roads, coastal and canal shipping is becoming increasingly important. Garrels supplies the wood for the flourishing shipbuilding industry. In order to be able to process the required quantities of wood more efficiently, the company and its partners set up two wind-powered sawmills on the Nesse peninsula on the other side of the Leda.
