RIVALIZATION & DRAMATICS

The story of Ry Guesthouse is not boring.

After the construction of the inn, which also housed a grocery store, the owner Søren Sørensen immediately applied for an inn permit. But the grant was delayed. To Sørensen's great annoyance, the grant had not yet arrived when the railway workers began to flock to Ry in connection with the major work on the new railway line between Skanderborg and Silkeborg. However, it could not hold back Søren Sørensen, who still chose to open his inn without the necessary permission. This decision certainly did not go down well with the competing innkeeper in Gl. Rye, who, like Søren Sørensen, had also applied for a permit to run an inn in connection with the new station. He therefore reported Søren Sørensen for running an illegal pub, and Sørensen thus had to close and wait nicely to get his license.

Not long after, however, there was to be a market day in Ry, which could mean a big profit for Søren Sørensen. But as his grant had not yet arrived, he had to keep the inn closed as market guests began to flock to the town. In the evening, when all the guests passed by once more to get home, it was too much for Søren Sørensen. He told that he had received his inn permit during the day and opened the inn for refreshments. Subsequently, Sørensen kept his inn open, noticing that the grant was still waiting for him.

However, this was not the end of the rivalry over the inn grants in the new station town. Some years after the inn's opening, Jacob Strunge and Søren Madsen built a large house with an accompanying travel stable just opposite the station and Sørensen's inn. When it subsequently came to Sørensen's attention that Strunge and Madsen, in connection with the construction, had applied for and received an inn permit for the newly built establishment, he immediately took action. He bought the place from them for 400 Daler and imposed on the property and the associated land a clause that from then onwards no inn could be run on the place. It turned out, however, that Strunge and Madsen had taken Sørensen well and thoroughly by the nose, as they had never received the grant they had applied for.

Despite Sørensen's own lack of permission, his wife later took over the operation of the inn, as Søren Sørensen himself became ill and bedridden. However, the fact that it was now Sørensen's wife who ran the inn did not mean that the rivalries over the right to inn in Ry had thus ended.

I Gl. Rye lived the rich Mrs. Petersen, who had repeatedly applied for a license to run an inn in the station town. As an argument in her applications, Mrs Petersen had stated that the town's current inn, which was run by Sørensen's wife, was not up to date in relation to the standards one might expect in the 1890s. When both the Parish Council and the Chief of Police subsequently agreed with Mrs Petersen's criticism of the town's inn, it became too much for Mrs Sørensen, who wrote a letter to the county council, in which she explained the conditions at the inn. When Mayor Andreas Thiele subsequently inspected the site, his assessment was that the conditions were much better than expected.