Reisdorf (Grevenbroich)
The submerged hamlets of Reisdorf and St. Leonhard were in what is now the city of Grevenbroich . Around the beginning of the 1960s, the place had to give way to what was then the Frimmersdorf-West opencast mine, which was merged into the Garzweiler opencast mine . At that time there were still 69 residents living here, spread over eight properties. Today a wayside cross on the Grevenbroich energy path on the recultivated area reminds of the location of the village.
location
The small settlement was south of the old village of Elfgen and west of Gustorf .
history
Reisdorf belonged to the Hülchrath office in the Electorate of Cologne until 1794 .
Around 1321 Reisdorf belonged to the possessions of the Counts of Hochstaden, the family seat was Husterknupp near Frimmersdorf. The Order of the Teutonic Knights (Fürth) owned a farm in Reisdorf around 1500. There were repeated disputes with the Dyck family about the income from this farm. In 1539, a decision was made in favor of the Teutonic Order before the Reich Chamber of Commerce.
The St. Leonhard Monastery was formerly located within today's Garzweiler open-cast lignite mine, west of Gindorf, and St. Leonhard Street in Gindorf still reminds us of this today. The buildings of the monastery were on a small hill, barely two kilometers from Gindorf.
It is not known when monks first settled on the lonely hill in the middle between Gustorf, Garzweiler, Elfgen and Elsen. In a document from 1587, Werner Graf Salm von Schloss Dyck wrote that the St. Leonhard Monastery, like St. Nikolaus bei Dyck, was founded by one of his ancestors. Paul Clemen dated the age of the choir in the monastery chapel, which was demolished around 1900, to the 13th century. The oldest known document in which the monastery is mentioned dates from 1484, in which Loeff von Honseler is mentioned as the prior of the St. Leonhard monastery.
The monks of the monastery belonged to the Order of the Holy Sepulcher (Ordo S. Sepulchri). The choice of Saint Leonhard as the patron saint for their settlement was possibly also due to the veneration of this saint by the rural population in the area. The hermit Leonhard is said to have lived near Limoges in France in the 6th century. Promoted primarily by the Cistercians, worship spread rapidly across Central Europe from around 1100. Since the 15th century he has been invoked primarily as the patron of cattle (especially horses).
The donations and contributions of the faithful initially flowed in abundance, so that the property of the monastery increased. On February 1, 1486, the Carthusian monastery Vogelsang near Jülich sold 36 acres of land on the mountain near Königshoven to the St. Leonhard monastery. Before 1492, Diedrich Scherfgen Honzeler transferred 200 Rhenish guilders to the monastery, for which the monks were supposed to read masses in memory of his relatives. Little is known of the monastery for the next hundred years.
In 1580 Spanish troops invaded our homeland. They came from the Netherlands, where the Spanish king was fighting for the apostate northern provinces. The mercenaries plundered through the Lower Rhine region and became a horror for the population. When they attacked Gustorf and Frimmersdorf, St. Leonhard was also looted.
The local population had to endure even greater suffering in the Truchsessian War (1582–1589). The Archbishop of Cologne, Gebhard Truchsess von Waldburg, had converted to the Lutheran faith and refused to recognize the Catholic Ernst von Bayern, elected by the cathedral chapter, as his successor. In the ensuing war, hardly a place in the Rhein-Kreis-Neuss was spared, many places were even completely destroyed. The monastery of St. Leonhard was also cremated. Initially, some of the monastery residents stayed in the rubble. Since the fields could not be tilled in the chaos of war, the monks were forced to go into debt in order to obtain the necessary food. More and more monastery residents had to leave St. Leonhard.
In 1587 there was only one monk left: Father Werner Gerardt. He turned to his confreres in the St. Nicholas Monastery near Schloss Dyck and asked for admission, which was granted to him. The St. Nicholas Monastery also suffered in the Truchsessian War, but was understandably better able to assert itself in the immediate vicinity of Count Werner than the lonely St. Leonhard.
After Count Werner had given his consent, the Vicar General of Cologne merged the St. Leonhard Monastery with the St. Nikolaus Monastery on June 17, 1587 on the condition that the donor masses previously held in St. Leonhard were now carried out by the monks of Nicholas Convent would be held.
Since the chapel on the monastery hill was also destroyed, the fate of St. Leonhard as a place of religious reflection seemed sealed. But the population of the surrounding towns could not forget the patron saint of their horses: soon work began on rebuilding the monastery chapel. In 1623 the chapel was completely restored. From then on, the priest of Gustorf performed the services. Until secularization, the monastery of St. Nikolaus, as the owner, paid the pastor of Gustorf an annual cash pension for his services in the monastery chapel. The sexton von Gustorf, however, was compensated in kind.
The popularity of St. Leonhard at that time is also reflected in the fact that the residents of the area often chose the name Leonhard for baptisms. In the neighboring parish of St. Pancratius in Garzweiler, this name was chosen 37 times as a baptismal name between 1697 and 1850, almost twice as often as the name of the parish patron there.
Fair at the monastery
On November 6th of each year the population celebrated the anniversary of the death of St. Leonhard with a special solemnity. It has been documented since 1654 that a fair was held on St. Leonhard on this day. There were also annual fairs in some of the surrounding towns, but none of the rural population in this area was as popular as that of St. Leonhard. The season of the memorial day may have played a role here. The weather could already be inhospitable at the beginning of November, but on the other hand there was more time, since the peasant work had stopped. After the harvest was brought in, the population had new money. The fair on St. Leonhard also offered the opportunity to look for a new employer. Many travelers offered all kinds of everyday things in simple stalls.
Wine and beer, which was widely awarded, came from the area, as can be seen from the old district names. The area northwest of St. Leonhard was called "Auf dem Burgunder" and, in contrast to the common Wingert names, even showed the type of wine. In Elfgen the large garden behind Hof Schoenen (most recently Lambertz) was called “Im Hoppebongert”, a reminder that hops were once grown here for the production of beer.
The annual fairs on St. Leonhard, which were held until the end of the 19th century, gained a certain fame because of the annual scuffles in which the village boys from whole villages often beat each other. In the "good old days" the brawls between the inhabitants of different villages were much more frequent than they are today, and it was often difficult for a young boy to get through a neighboring village unscathed, especially when he was walking on bare feet. At the annual markets on St. Leonhard, however, the location of the monastery property contributed to the fact that brawls and brawls were the order of the day. In the immediate vicinity of St. Leonhard, the Jülich, the Kurkölner and the Dycker Land as well as the empire-free rule of Elsen came together. This made prosecution by the authorities extremely difficult. To maintain order, the rifle leader with seven riflemen and the court messenger from Bedburdyck were usually sent to the festival in St. Leonhard, but these few men could do little in a real scuffle. If the perpetrators quickly withdrew to the area, their authorities were powerless.
In the middle of the 17th century there was regularly one of the most important pig markets in the region on St. Leonhard, as noted in the chronicle of the Dyck rule. In this chronicle you can also find that the Lords of Dyck around St. Leonhard exercised the hunting rights. Because of a hunt on the St. Leonhards market days, there was a trial at the Cologne official. The result was the transfer of sole hunting rights to the Dingstuhl zu Fürth (district of Grevenbroich).
The end of the monastery
The monastery of St. Nicholas leased the monastery property until secularization. By the legislation of Napoleon, the property was expropriated and given to the civil parish of Gustorf. At the beginning of the 19th century, the Schumacher siblings became owners of the property; A Herr Fassbender bought it from them. In 1873 it was bought by Josef Broich, born in Noithausen, whose grave monument stands in the middle of the Elsen cemetery. Around 1880 Josef Broich and his daughters in front of the monastery chapel on St. Leonhard were photographed by the local researcher Jakob H. Dickers, who was active in Grevenbroich at the turn of the century. A street near the Grevenbroich cemetery is named after this local researcher Dickers.
In 1893, when Paul Clemen described the art monuments in the Grevenbroich district, the roof of the chapel was already half sunken. Clemen complains that the whole chapel is about to decay. The old church was completely destroyed very quickly: at the beginning of the 20th century, the owner Poßberg, who had bought the Broich estate, had the rest of the chapel building demolished. Possberg found the renovation and maintenance of the chapel too expensive. At that time there was still no talk of public monument preservation. When the chapel was demolished, the remains of two soldiers were found in a chamber in the foundation; Each of them had a sack of money and jewelry with them, as well as a horse, a dog and a well-preserved saber. The burial chamber of the monks of St. Leonhard was found in another chamber. However, the landowner Possberg did not want to remove the traditional veneration of Saint Leonhard by demolishing the chapel.
In the immediate vicinity of the property on the way to Gustorf, he had a path chapel built, the walls of which were only removed in the summer of 1974. The figure of Saint Leonhard was placed in this “holy house” and was in the monastery chapel until it was demolished. Until after the Second World War, the figure enjoyed a more or less great veneration by the residents of the area. And still the Gindorfer and Gustorfer went with their processions on Palm Sunday to St. Leonhard.
The monastery was not inhabited for a while at the turn of the 20th century. The carpenter Conrads from Morken took advantage of this. On a wheelbarrow he drove the old bell from the monastery chapel with the inscription SANCTE LEONHARDE ORA PRO NOBIS ANNO 1683 to Morken. There it hung until the end in the tower of the chapel, until this place also had to give way to open-cast brown coal mining.
In 1913, Fritz Zimmermann, who came from an old Mennonite family in Krefeld, acquired the monastery property with around 196 acres of property and extensive leased land. At times, up to 350 acres of leased land were also worked on from the estate. The yields on the fertile loess soil were good. Zimmermann soon built his house a little south of the old monastery chapel, popularly known as "the villa". The estate was badly damaged in the Second World War. The buildings were hit by several shells in a sixty-minute barrage. In 1953, what was then Roddergrube (now merged into what is now RWE Power AG) bought the entire monastery property, as the coveted lignite was located under its premises. After widow Frieda Zimmermann moved out, all the buildings on St. Leonhard were demolished in 1959.
What remains to be said is the fate of the wooden figure of Saint Leonard, who for so many centuries had been the destination of pious pilgrims. In accordance with a request from Mrs. Frieda Zimmermann, her daughter gave the figure to the Catholic parish of Gustorf. Pastor Karl Frenken had the 75 cm high statue restored by the church painter Dorr in Buir in 1961 and then installed in the chapel at Schillingshof in Gindorf.
Not least in view of the finds made around the turn of the 20th century, it would have been desirable if the site of the old St. Leonhard monastery district had been thoroughly archaeologically researched before the demolition.
Individual evidence
- ^ Resettlements in the Rhineland BUND , State Association of North Rhine-Westphalia.
- ↑ a b Jakob Bremer (ed.): The imperial direct rule Dyck . Grevenbroich district, 1959.
Coordinates: 51 ° 4 ′ N , 6 ° 33 ′ E
Allrath | Barrenstein | Bush | Elsen | Frimmersdorf | Gilverath | Gindorf | Greetings | Gubisrath | Gustorf | Shirts | Chapels | Laach | Long calves | Mühlrath | Münchrath | Neuenhausen | Neubrück | New Elfgen | Neukirchen | Neurath | Noithausen | Orcs | City of Hülchrath | City of Wevelinghoven | Südstadt | Tüschenbroich | Four winches
Former locations: Elfgen | Gurath | Reisdorf | St. Leonhard