Good Diepenbenden
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The Good Diepenbenden is a first time in 1616 and 1820, newly built estate with a 1829 subsequently decorated landscape garden in Aachen district Diepenbenden. In its eventful history it served as a mill, pottery, chemical factory and was the birthplace of the painter Alfred Rethel . The estate and the landscape garden are under monument protection .
history
Already in the early modern times there were several mills in the district “Diepenbenden”, which means something like “deep meadows”, whose ponds were fed by the worm, which rose a few hundred meters away . Around 1500 it was mainly copper mills that were later used for other purposes. The most famous mills in Diepenbenden were the “Obere Diepenbender Mühle” on Grindelweg, also called “Vullenbroich-Mühle”, and the “Untere Diepenbender Mühle”, called “Geudensmühle”.
In the area of the lower mill it was reported in 1616 by protocol of the imperial free court life that a stately home was built there by members of the Hanff family. In 1643 Heinrich Hanff († 1662), who also operated the upper Vullenbroicher mill as a copper mill and owned a pharmacy in Aachen, is the owner of the house and estate. After Hanff had first sold the upper mill in 1643, he also sold the "Gut Diepenbenden", as the lower mill was now called, on January 5, 1657, along with 85 acres of land and half of the fish population in the ponds. The buyer of the Diepenbenden estate was Baron Johann Bertram von Wylre (1623–1679), who later became multiple mayor of the imperial city of Aachen , whose son Hubert Friedrich Hyazinth von Wylre (1676–1714) inherited the estate and in 1710 to the wine merchant and banker Freiherrn Michael de Broe (* 1668) sold, who at the same time also acquired the Vullenbroicher mill. In 1740 Gut Diepenbenden received Michael’s son Franz Augustin de Broe, who passed it on to his son Franz Joseph de Broe (* 1752) about three decades later; the latter two were also multiple mayors.
During the time when the de Broe family owned the “Untere Diepenbender Mühle”, there were massive and sometimes violent neighborhood conflicts, especially with the needle manufacturer and mayor Cornelius Chorus (1701–1774), who is based on today's “Gut Chorusberg” " would have. The adversaries fought over access routes, water rights and the fishing of the mill ponds; The Reich Chamber of Commerce in Wetzlar had to be asked for arbitration in this regard several times .
After the civil servant Jean (Johann) Rethel (1769–1839) from Strasbourg was transferred under Napoléon Bonaparte in 1801 as Prefectural Council to the Département de la Roer , based in Aachen, and in the same year the daughter of a manufacturer, Johanna Schneider (1782–1857) had married, he bought the Diepenbenden estate a year later. Rethel set up a chemical factory in the wing of the former copper mill, in which he produced Berlin blue and salmiak for coloring the cloth and for ink.
On August 5, 1813, the property was hit by a cyclone in the course of a violent summer thunderstorm in the absence of Rethel and badly damaged. According to the records, the manor, the manor, the brickworks, the kiln, the pottery and the gardens were completely devastated, only the factory building was largely spared. The economic damage was enormous and even the later visit of Emperor Franz I of Austria to Rethel's factory did not bring any hope of sufficient compensation and new orders. In addition, after the withdrawal of the French in 1815, Rethel lost his office as prefectural council and was only taken over as accountant by the now Prussian government in Aachen. In these uncertain times, his son Alfred Rethel was born on May 15, 1816 at Gut Diepenbenden, shortly before the house and farm were sold by the mortgage creditors to the factory owner Bertram Friedrich Johann von Rappart (1774–1833).
He had the destroyed house rebuilt and today's landscape park laid out. In doing so, however, he had taken over financially and was forced to sell everything again in 1830. The Aachen pharmacist Johann Peter Joseph Monheim took over the facility together with the Fey siblings and from then on used the former chemical factory there for his “drug production”. A few years later he also took over the share of the Fey siblings and expanded the property by another 15 hectares. Gut Diepenbenden remained in the Monheim family until June 28, 1894, when it was taken over by the grandfather of the current owners, the Raeren building contractor Johann Peter Radermacher, who had the building extensively restored and the garden designed in a contemporary way.
description
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In its early years, Gut Diepenbenden appeared as a four-winged courtyard with a large inner courtyard, according to a map from 1760 and the map of Copzoo from 1777. This was surrounded by a moat, over which a bridge led to the main entrance. According to Quix's description, the estate was known as “Diepenbenden Castle” at the time it was owned by the de Broe family, but this did not take hold in the long term.
Before the great destruction in 1813, the four-wing building complex consisted of the residential building of the owner families with an attached farm and tenant wing, a pottery with an integrated apartment for the potter and a factory wing for chemical production. In addition to a garden with a fountain, the estate also included other meadows, farmland and ponds in the vicinity. Gut Diepenbenden thus had around 35 Prussian acres, which at that time corresponded to around 89 hectares.
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After the major storm damage in 1813, only two wings of the former four-wing courtyard were rebuilt: the slightly nested main wing, consisting of several individual sections, and the elongated tenant building on the right. In addition, the former moat was completely filled in except for a small piece in the area of the main entrance. The wrought-iron wing gate at today's main entrance is held in place by two square gate pillars with heraldic panels.
Most of the building complex is made of brick and has recently been whitewashed. With the exception of part of the two-story main house, the other buildings are mostly single-story and predominantly covered with hipped roofs, with only the tenant's wing having a fully developed attic. The rectangular cross-frame windows are framed in bluestone on the main wing . The tenant wing also has a round-arched, former and now glazed, large gate entrance, which is also framed with bluestones.
The park, which was first mentioned in 1829 and was set up in the style of an English landscape garden , consists in the rear of an old stock of trees, including around 130 to 150 different deciduous trees , including eight imposing plane trees, classified as a natural monument, with a height of around 35 meters and a trunk circumference of around 5 , 50 meters, around 40 types of coniferous wood and around 50 types of rhododendron . This division is supplemented in the front area by magnificent flower beds, a garden pavilion, a fountain and a forest pond.
The garden level rises slightly from the building wing along the line of sight, is interspersed with gravel paths in the foreground and is emphasized by the fountain in the center. The background is determined by the forest-like composition with the pond at the head of the area. In earlier years this was fed with worm water via a lead pipe, which was then passed through the property, where it could, among other things, drive the mill wheels of the factory in order to then flow back into the main course of the worm.
literature
- Christian Quix : Historical-topographical description of the city of Aachen and its surroundings , Du-Mont-Schauberg 1829; P. 135/136 ( digitized )
Web links
- Portrait on Glücksplatz.com
- Bernd Büttgens: Theater setting in the diffuse Öcher summer light , description of Gut Diepenbenden on the occasion of the Open Monument Day. In: Aachener Nachrichten of August 13, 2002
Individual evidence
- ↑ The mills along the Wurm , on the pages of the Ecology Center Aachen
- ↑ Luise Freiin von Coels von der Brügghen : The lay judges of the royal chair of Aachen from the earliest times until the final repeal of the imperial city constitution in 1798 . In: Journal of the Aachen History Association . No. 50 . Publishing house of the Aachen History Association , Aachen 1928, p. 386-391 ( online on rootsweb ).
- ^ List of existing natural monuments in Aachen , on the website of the city of Aachen; No. 255-262
Coordinates: 50 ° 44 ′ 36.5 " N , 6 ° 4 ′ 59.5" E