Fork (lock bottom)

The former village of Gabel was a small settlement on the northern border of the Hildburghausen district . The village consisting of the Obergabel farm and the Untergabel forest workers' settlement belonged to Schönbrunn from July 1, 1950 . According to the plans of the GDR economic planners, the Schönbrunn dam was built in the upper Schleusetal in the 1970s and put into operation in 1977. In October 1968 the last residents of Untergabel therefore left their homes and moved to Schönbrunn. The Untergabel district had to be abandoned because it was in the backwater of the resulting Schönbrunn dam and was later completely flooded. The direct road connection to Schönbrunn was also interrupted by the dam.

location

In top fork

The suburb of Untergabel was located at the level of today's “Vorperre Schleusegrund”. There the Gabelbach flows into the lock from the left. The houses stood on the edge of the forest of the Gabelsgrund along an old forest road that continues past Obergabel in several serpentines to the Rennsteig and ends in Neustadt am Rennsteig . Further forest roads open up the high areas in this part of the Thuringian Forest and lead to the neighboring village of Frauenwald in the Ilm district, just two kilometers to the west .

The Gabelsgrund with the Gabelsbach lies on ( 550  m above sea level ), it is in the east of the Kleiner Gabelskopf ( 722.7  m above sea level ) and the Drechslerkamm ( 661.3  m above sea level ) - both outlets from the Großer Burgberg ( 817.4  m above sea level ) on the Rennsteig, and in the west by the Vorderen Arolsberg ( 703.9  m above sea level ).

history

The forest village of Gabel was first mentioned in documents in 1350. The breaches made in the jungle by the settlers in the late Middle Ages were expanded into mountain meadows and enabled modest grazing. The meadow strips, which are distributed over several splintered areas and still occupy 181 hectares in total, have already been designated by the GDR administration as the "Obere Gabeltäler nature reserve".

During the Thirty Years' War the frightened inhabitants of the foreland sought protection from the plundering and murdering army in the dense forests and gloomy, narrow valleys of the upper lock valley around Gabel. The geographer and historian Georg Brückner , who comes from the neighboring town of Oberneubrunn , describes the situation in Gabel around the middle of the 19th century in the second volume of his "Landeskunde des Herzogthums Meinigen".

Gabel or Untergabel… has 11 residential and two factory buildings, 19 families, with the upper fork 77 souls, 40 head of cattle (27 cattle, 3 pigs, 10 goats). There 1 cutting mill. The bottom of the valley up to the Grauwacke fork, mica schist all around, cut through by a few quartz porphyry strands. This is the floor of the corridor, which contains 17 ¼ ares of fields and 100 ares of meadows. Accordingly, the corridor is tiny, but also the community without wealth and also the hard-working and ecclesiastical, but not very thrifty inhabitants, very poor. They are woodworkers, day laborers and coal and carters. In the past people built on iron and copper here and in the neighboring grounds, especially in the Burbach; there was also a copper hammer above the place (lower fork).

Obergabel, a detached house, originally a colliery house, in Gabelsgrund, ¼ hour above Untergabel, on the front Aroldsberg. Here construction on fluorspar. Both places, pastured and trained in Untereubrunn, owe their founding to the excellent mountain pastures, for which the cattle were still driven here in later times.

On July 1, 1950, the previous communities of Gabel, Oberneubrunn , Schönau and Unterneubrunn were merged to form the new community of Schönbrunn . This has belonged to the Schleusegrund community since 1994.

In 1969 the cemetery was moved and in the period from 1970 to 1974 the Schönbrunn district was almost completely demolished. A forester's house and a house with a barn have only been preserved in the higher Obergabel. Today the buildings are used by the forest.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Official topographic maps of Thuringia 1: 10,000. LK Schmalkalden-Meiningen, LK Sonneberg, LK Hildburghausen, district-free city of Suhl . In: Thuringian Land Survey Office (Hrsg.): CD-ROM series Top10 . CD 6. Erfurt 1999.
2. ^ Georg Brückner: The topography of the country . In: Country studies of the Duchy of Meinigen . tape 2 . Brückner and Renner, Meinigen 1853, p. 407-408 .
3. ^ Heidi Moczarski, Hans-Jürgen Salier : Small district chronicle Hildburghausen. Verlag Frankenschwelle, District Office Hildburghausen, 1997, p. 138

Coordinates: 50 ° 34 ′ 3.6 ″  N , 10 ° 53 ′ 1.7 ″  E