Baumwollspinnerei Ermen & Engels, Industrial museum in Engelskirchen, Germany.

The Baumwollspinnerei Ermen & Engels is a former cotton spinning mill in Engelskirchen, now a site of the LVR Industrial Museum. Its hydroelectric power plant, with turbines, regulators and switchboard, forms the centre of the exhibition. The restored ensemble includes factory buildings, some now used as Engelskirchen's town hall, and a villa.

The mill was founded in 1837 when Friedrich Engels Senior moved his textile operation from Wuppertal-Barmen to Engelskirchen to take advantage of the water power provided by the Agger River. Over the following decades, the factory expanded into one of the largest operations of its kind in the region.

The factory carries the names of the two founding families and shows how cotton spinning shaped everyday life in the Agger valley. Walking through the old production buildings gives a sense of how closely work and daily routines were once tied together here.

The site is in central Engelskirchen and easy to reach on foot from the train station. Plan enough time to walk through the different buildings, as the grounds cover a fair amount of space.

The Engels family's fortune began with Johann Casper Engels (1715–1787), who settled in Barmen and used the lime-free water of the Wupper for linen bleaching. His son Friedrich Engels Senior sent his own son Friedrich to the firm's Victoria Mills in Salford in 1842; there the younger Engels wrote The Condition of the Working Class in England between September 1844 and March 1845.