Museum Wasseramt

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The Museum Wasseramt is a cultural history museum in the Wasseramt district of the Swiss canton of Solothurn . The museum, run by a public foundation, is located in the municipality of Halt near the A1 motorway exit from Kriegstetten .

Tower of Halt, center of the Museum Wasseramt.

history

Location

The castle site, originally surrounded by a moat, is located on a hill above the Emme alluvial plain . The hill was created in the last Ice Age as the terminal moraine of the Rhone Glacier .

History of the Castle of Keep

In the Middle Ages, the castle of Halt was the center of a small aristocratic rule in the Swiss territory of the Dukes of Zähringen . After the end of this dynasty in 1218, the lower Emmeregion was in the Murgeten district court of the Landgraviate of Burgundy , which was administered by the Counts of Buchegg in the 13th century and by the Counts of Neu-Kyburg in the 14th century .

According to the new building research, the medieval tower castle was built around 1200. The first written source that indirectly transmits the name of the castle comes from the same time, a document from the St. Urban Monastery from 1201 in the Lucerne State Archives . In it Notker von Halt is listed among the ministerials of Duke Berchtold V. von Zähringen . The Knights of holding remained until the mid-14th century belonged to the castle, which in the illustrated Bern Chronicle of Benedict Tschachtlan is shown, namely the report on the gümmenenkrieg in 1332 when the troops of the cities of Bern and Solothurn the Kiburg castle hold conquered. Similar drawings of this fortress, based on Tschachtlan's original, are also contained in the volumes of the Official Bern Chronicle and the Spiezer Chronicle by Diebold Schilling , which were created a few years later .

The castle has belonged to the noble von Spiegelberg family since the 14th century . According to the will of Imer von Spiegelberg, the rule of Kriegstetten came to the city of Solothurn in 1451, which in 1466 was also able to acquire the tower itself and thus form the core of the Vogtei Kriegstetten.

Until the end of the 18th century, the city had a small remand prison in the tower. In the 16th century, she built the new prison tower in Buchegg in the Bucheggberg district based on the same building concept . During the Helvetic Republic , the state sold the parcel in 1801 to Kaspar Glutz (1758–1836) von Derendingen , who soon afterwards ceded it to Jakob Schnider (1744–1815) von Halt.

History of the museum

Since June 16, 1962, the castle area, which is protected as a historical monument of regional importance, has been under the care of the “Museum Wasseramt Foundation. Tower on hold ». With the support of the cantonal preservation of monuments and the Federal Commission for the Preservation of Monuments , the foundation repaired the tower. The opening ceremony of the museum took place on June 25 and 26, 1966. Around 1970, the preservation department had several historical storerooms and an old furnace house from various communities in the canton of Solothurn transferred to the castle tower. The result was a small open-air museum , which has since presented various specialist exhibitions in the buildings in a special experience room.

architecture

The masonry of the castle tower as a source of history

The walls of the tower of Halt come from the construction time in the High Middle Ages and from a renovation in the 16th century. An investigation by the geologists Hugo Ledermann and Roland Bollin confirmed that the original castle tower mainly consists of fragments of boulders from the Rhone glacier and large bosses made of limestone from the quarries near Solothurn. The limestone cuboids resemble the workpieces that were used in the fortifications of the city of Solothurn. The construction with glacier boulders is proven particularly early here, as for example with the foundations of the great Zähringen fortress in Burgdorf .

The transported over the glacier alpine stone material in the walls of the tower meets the Haltner already by Albert Heim identified Valais Leitgesteinen of the Rhone Glacier. For comparison, around 2,000 stone blocks that came to light in the Ice Age lateral moraines south of Solothurn during the construction of the A 5 motorway were erected in a boulder garden near the castle tower with the help of the cantonal office for national roads and the cantonal geology department of Solothurn .

After a fire in the residential tower in the early 16th century, the city of Solothurn had the ruins repaired and expanded in 1543 by the builders Peter zur Kilchen and Hans zur Kilchen. For new parts of the wall they used tufa blocks from the stone pits of Leuzigen .

Wooden building

The other museum buildings represent the historical timber construction tradition of rural architecture in the Bernese and Solothurn Central Plateau. The assembly includes various types of construction typical of the region since the ancien regime. The storage tanks are made of halves , stand construction and plank boards.

Directory of the outbuildings of the museum:

  • Speicher, origin: Bellach , 17./18. century
  • Speicher, origin: Derendingen , undated
  • Speicher, origin: Etziken , 18th century
  • Speicher, origin: Gretzenbach , date of construction 1792
  • Speicher, origin: Subingen , date of construction 1679
  • Oven house, origin: Lüterkofen , undated

  • Two storerooms and an oven house

  • Derendingen storage facility

  • Storage of Subingen

collection

Subject areas

The Museum Wasseramt owns folkloric , technical, agricultural and commercial historical objects, most of which come from the Wasseramt district. Furniture and work equipment from different areas of life and the tools and aids from skilled craftsmen can be seen as didactic objects in the museum's exhibitions.

Noteworthy, for example, is the range of ceramic objects with pottery items from three centuries and finds from an excavation at the castle site. Some pottery comes from known production locations in Switzerland ( Aedermannsdorf , Langnau , Heimberg ), the origin of others has not yet been determined. According to a study by the Ceramica Foundation, the stock of anonymous, simple household dishes from the 18th and 19th centuries is a rarity. Oven ceramics are well represented among the other areas of ceramic history . Archaeological finds from the Castle of Halton show that there had been tiled stoves in the tower since the 13th century . The museum has a richly painted room stove from the early 19th century, made by the stoner Johann Jakob Grütter (1787–1864) from Seeberg in the canton of Bern for a house in Oekingen , the neighboring town of Halt, and faience tiles by the stoner Johann Jakob Andres (1770–1839) with paintings by the ceramic painter Johann Heinrich Egli (1776–1852), who was then active all over German-speaking Switzerland . In the meantime, individual ceramic objects in the museum can also be researched online in the CERAMICA CH image database .

Examples from the collection

  • Stove tile by Johann Jakob Grütter with painting by Johann Heinrich Egli, dated 1829

  • Stove tile by Johann Jakob Andres with painting by Johann Heinrich Egli

  • Beehives

  • Sugar bowl from Heimberg

Exhibitions

The castle

The history of the monument is presented in the former castle tower. According to the findings of recent building research and objects from the cantonal archeology of Solothurn and the Altes Zeughaus Museum in Solothurn, the medieval way of life is indicated in a small castle. The exhibition provides information about people from the von Halt family of knights who, for example, occasionally held the function of mayor of the city of Thun in the Kyburg state administration and that of the head of the Fraubrunnen monastery in the neighborhood , and about the emergence of the Solothurn district of Kriegstetten from the holdings .

Technology history

The Museum Wasseramt mainly deals with areas of technology and craft history . It thus illustrates aspects of the older economic history of the Solothurn region, including the history of measurement systems and the work with different materials in traditional production processes. The fact that wood was omnipresent in architecture and everyday culture is also shown by the architectural model of the medieval castle tower in Halte. The museum's collection includes fragments of farm buildings made of wood and numerous woodworking objects and tools . In the open-air museum, equipment, machines and other material clearly document agricultural history , which in the canton of Solothurn can otherwise only be grasped through the object collection of the cantonal agricultural school Wallierhof .

Special exhibitions

The Museum Wasseramt organizes special exhibitions on a regular basis.

See also

literature

  • Louis Jäggi: Solothurn water authority . 1966.
  • Peter Kaiser: The people, the community, the mill of Halt. History of a village in the water authority . Hold 2001.

Web links

Commons : Museum Wasseramt  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Peter Lätt: Buchegg - and the Buchegger. Contribution to the history of the Buchegg house from the 12th to the 14th century . Buchegg 1984.
  2. ^ Anne-Marie Dubler : The Oberaargau region. Origin, concept and scope in the course of time . In: Jahrbuch des Oberaargaus, 44. 2001, pp. 74–114.
  3. ^ Archeology and Monument Preservation in the Canton of Solothurn , 5. 2000, pp. 72–77.
  4. ↑ Ambros Kocher: Solothurner Urkundenbuch , Volume I. Solothurn 1952, p. 141, No. 249.
  5. ^ Government council resolutions of October 22, 1935 and July 6, 1948. See: Yearbook for Solothurn History, 21st 1948, p. 110. - Federal Council resolution of August 23, 1965.
  6. ↑ Initially under the company name “Stiftung Heimatmuseum Wasseramt. Tower on hold ».
  7. ↑ Ingrid Edeler: Typology Museum of Cultural History. Open-air museums and cultural-historical rooms . European University Theses, Series 28, Volume 79. Frankfurt am Main, Bern, New York, Paris 1988.
  8. ^ Johann Rudolf Rahn : The medieval art monuments of the Canton of Solothurn . Zurich 1893, p. 93.
  9. ↑ In northern Germany, the blocks transported by the (Scandinavian) glaciers, often used for architectural purposes, are called field stones .
  10. ↑ Peter Kaiser: The medieval castle tower of Hold - An archive for ice age research in the Solothurn water authority. History and natural history of a monument . in: Mitteilungen der Naturforschenden Gesellschaft des Kantons Solothurn, 41. 2011, pp. 159–170.
  11. ^ Daniel Reicke: "Of strong and great flüejen". An investigation into megalithic and humpback brickwork on castle towers in the area between the Alps and the Rhine . Swiss contributions to the cultural history and archeology of the Middle Ages, 22. Olten 1995, p. 82.
  12. ↑ See: Walter Moser: Foundlinge in the canton of Solothurn, witnesses to two ice ages . In: Jahrbuch für Solothurnische Geschichte, 67. 1994, pp. 137–151.
  13. ↑ Benno Schubiger: The tufa limestone in the Solothurn building industry - a building material in the mirror of the sources . In: Jura leaves. Monthly for Heimat- und Volkskunde , 57, 1995, pp. 145–155.
  14. ^ Edwin Huwyler: House research at open-air museums. The Swiss House Research and the Ballenberg Open Air Museum . In: Albrecht Bedal (ed.): Open-air museum and house research. What weight do the open-air museums have for house and building research? Stuttgart 2012, pp. 100-111.
  15. ↑ Roland Blaettler: Ceramica CH. National inventory of ceramics in the public collections of Switzerland, Volume 2, Solothurn . Basel 2014, pp. 40–41.
  16. ↑ Andreas Heege : A tiled stove by Johann Jakob Grütter, Hafner from Seeberg, and Johann Heinrich Egli, stove painter from Aarau . In: Burgdorfer Jahrbuch, 2014, pp. 21–40.
  17. ^ Anne-Marie Dubler : Mass and weights. In: Historical Lexicon of Switzerland . - Hans Sigrist: Coins, measures and weights in old Solothurn . In: Yearbook for Solothurn History, 63, 1990, pp. 88–115.
  18. ↑ 100 years of the Agricultural Cantonal Association of Solothurn 1845–1945 . Solothurn 1945. - Peter Lätt: Insights into everyday rural life . In: Landwirtschaft für alle , 1994, pp. 65–90.


Coordinates: 47 ° 10 '5.4 "  N , 7 ° 36' 14.1"  E ; CH1903:  six hundred and twelve thousand five hundred thirty-two  /  224147