Rolandmühle

In the course of the construction of the oil mill of Franz Köcheln at Stephanitorsbollwerk in Bremen during the 1810s, the master miller, who came from Groningen, brought along many assistants, among whom was the 30-year-old Berend Erling, who was singled out as "uncommon skilled". Erling remained in Bremen after the construction, established himself as a miller, and raised his own first windmill in 1832. The Am Wall Windmill (Herdentorswallmühle) stands today as the last windmill along the old Bremen city wall (Wallanlagen). It was followed in 1846 by the mill at Stephanitor (Stephanitorsmühle), whose upper part burned down in 1911. The bottom part served until 1930 as housing, and was demolished during the renovation of the platforms of the Weserbahnhof train station. Erling's son Johann took over the company and built the steam mill at Tannenstraße in Vegesack in 1882, which burned down in 1897.

After the first steam mill was destroyed, and with windmills no longer being economically profitable, Carl Erling founded in 1897 a stock company and built a brick building with a steam mill at the Bremen Holzhafen. It had a capacity of 100 tons per day. The wheat that it used was imported from around the world, and the flour that it produced was shipped by barge within Germany. For overseas export, seagoing ships were used.

In the following years the mill was enlarged and its capacity grew to about 800 tons per day. In 1925, the first silo tower was built to a plan by Carl Heinrich Behrens-Nicolai, and five years later it made its first acquisition of another mill. In 1940 a second silo was inaugurated that gave the Rolandmühle a storage capacity of 30,000 tons.

After acquiring competitors like the Grohner Mühlenwerke and the Hansamühle AG during the Great Depression, Hans Erling made the Bremer Rolandmühle AG a family-run company in 1937 with himself as the board director.

The demolition of the mill by explosion on the instigation of the Wehrmacht was interrupted in 1945 by the end of the Second World War.

At the beginning of the 1970s, a steel grain silo at the Rolandmühle broke open due to corrosion and emptied out its grain onto the street, without causing any injuries or further property damage.