Ollweiler Castle

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Ollweiler Castle, drawing from 1865

The Ollweiler Castle ( French Château d'Ollwiller ) is a castle in the area of ​​today's municipality of Wuenheim ( German  Wünheim ) at the foot of the Hartmannswillerkopf in Alsace . It is about one kilometer southwest of the village and a good one kilometer west-northwest of the center of Hartmannswiller ( German  Hartmannsweiler ).

history

Builder of the castle: Dagobert Waldner de Freundstein

In the early years of the 13th century, Friedrich II, Count von Pfirt , gave the Ollweiler estate (1249 Olwilre, 1254 Ollewilre, 1260 Olwilr, 1271 Ollewilr, 1291 Ollinwilr, 1355 Ollewilere) at the foot of the Vosges in the Upper Rhine Plain to the Cistercians of the Lieu monastery -Croissant . This donation was made in 1249 by Bishop Heinrich III. of Strasbourg , the sovereign of the Counts of Pfirt, either confirmed or even extended by a considerable piece of land between Wuenheim and Hartmannswiller. The property was sold in 1260 for 1300  livres to the knight Conrad Waldner from Gebweiler , who made the purchase in his name and that of his brothers Hermann, Gunther and Eberhardt. The four of them gave the court to the bishop of Strasbourg, Walter von Geroldseck , as a fief in the following year and built a castle there , for which the Strasbourg bishop Heinrich IV von Geroldseck secured the right to open it in 1268 . The Waldners lived mostly on Ollweiler, although at the same time they were given the Freundstein Castle , on the border between the areas of the Benedictine abbey of Murbach and the diocese of Strasbourg , from both feudal lords - Murbach and Strasbourg - as a fief. They only called themselves Waldner von Freundstein about 300 years later .

The Waldner property increased steadily, and in the course of time they brought together a rule of considerable size in Upper Alsace . They were almost always soldiers, mostly in the imperial army up to the 17th century, and then in the French army since Alsace became part of France. Because they were also citizens of various Swiss cities ( Aarau , Basel ) and the Confederation “Zuewandter Orte” ( Mulhouse ), they mostly served in the Swiss regiments of France. The Maréchal de camp and later Lieutenant General Christian Frédéric Dagobert Waldner de Freundstein was in 1748 by King Louis XV. raised to the hereditary French count class in the primogeniture .

As early as 1750, Count Dagobert Waldner de Freundstein had Ollwiller Castle demolished and, in its place, a magnificent baroque castle built by the architect and builder Antoine Mathieu le Carpentier by 1752 . Forty years later, the Waldner von Freundstein family were driven out of their Alsatian property in the course of the French Revolution and went into exile, but they were not expropriated.

The castle and the associated estate were acquired in 1825 by the textile industrialist Jacques-Gabriel Gros (1782–1863), who turned the estate into a model farm and a modern winery . He had a large brickworks set up nearby , which in particular manufactured pipes for gas and waterworks and delivered them to northern Germany and even the USA. Finally, on May 14, 1849, the Haut-Rhin agricultural school was set up on the grounds of the estate.

In the First World War the castle during the bitter fighting around the was Hartmannswillerkopf on 21 December 1915 by French artillery shelling destroyed and thus triggered fire until remains of the outer walls. In 1925 it was rebuilt in its old size, but in a much simpler form.

On the night of May 8th to 9th, 2011, the oldest part of the castle was destroyed by fire.

description

architecture

The fortified complex of the Waldner family was a three-wing moated castle , the wings of which had a U-shaped floor plan. A square tower with a drawbridge belonged to the castle, one corner of which was marked by a round tower .

The baroque palace built by Dagobert Waldner de Freundstein consisted of a three-storey logis with two side wings at right angles, which flanked a courtyard of honor . On the east facade facing the garden, the three central axes were designed as a central risalit with triangular gables . Two groups of buildings belonged to the castle, the farm on one side and the dependencies on the other. The castle stood in the middle of a baroque garden with a garden pond. The castle garden was surrounded by a wall with round towers at the four corners. Under Jacques-Gabriel Gros, the garden was turned into a park .

The former dependencies of the complex were converted for residential purposes after 1925 by the Swiss architect François Wavre.

Grand cru Ollwiller

winery

Today, Château Ollwiller is one of only two wineries that market wine in Alsace under the name “Château”.

The location Ollwiller, almost 36 hectares vine varieties Riesling and Gewürztraminer at an altitude from 260 to 320 meters at the south-southeast slope between lock Ollweiler and Wuenheim, is one of a total of 51 Alsace individual layers, as Alsace Grand Cru are classified.

literature

  • Georges Bischoff: Wuenheim. Château d'Ollwiller. In: Roland Recht (Ed.): Le Guide des châteaux de France. Haut-Rhin . Hermé, Paris 1986, ISBN 2-86665-025-5 , pp. 171-172.
  • Georges Louis Durwell: Histoire d'une village d'Alsace et de ses environs. In: Fédération des Sociétés d'histoire et d'archéologie d'Alsace (ed.): Revue d'Alsace. Volume 48 (New Series, Volume 11). Neuilly-sur-Seine & Belfort, 1897, here pp. 356–357 ( digitized version ) .
  • Philippe-André Grandidier: Ollweiler. In: Fédération des Sociétés d'histoire et d'archéologie d'Alsace (ed.): Revue d'Alsace. 3rd series, volume 3. Colmar 1867, pp. 420-425 ( digitized ).
  • Felix Wolff: Alsatian Castle Lexicon. Directory of castles and chateaus in Alsace. Unchanged reprint of the 1908 edition. Weidlich, Frankfurt a. M. 1979, ISBN 3-8035-1008-2 , p. 253.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Ch. Knoll: Statistique Monumentale du Canton de Soultz (Haut-Rhin). In: Société pour la conservation des monuments historiques d'Alsace (ed.): Bulletin de la Société pour la conservation des monuments historiques d'Alsace. Volume 3, part 2. Berger-Levrault, Paris 1858, p. 209 ( digitized version ).
  2. a b Georges Louis Durwell: Histoire d'une village d'Alsace et de ses environs. 1897, p. 359.
  3. ^ Henri Bancilhon: Notices sur quelques châteaux et manoirs des Waldner. In: Société d'histoire des régions de Thann-Guebwiller (ed.): Annuaire de la Société d'histoire des régions de Thann-Guebwiller 1965-1967. Société française d'édition de journaux et d'imprimés commerciaux, Mulhouse 1968, p. 82 ( digitized version ).
  4. a b c Entry of the castle in the Base Mérimée of the French Ministry of Culture (French)
  5. Georges Louis Durwell: Histoire d'une village d'Alsace et de ses environs. 1897, p. 360.
  6. a b c Georges Bischoff: Wuenheim. Château d'Ollwiller. 1986, p. 172.
  7. ^ Jean-Marie Schreiber: Wuenheim: incendie au château d'Ollwiller. In: L'Alsace. Edition of May 9, 2011, ISSN  2102-6882 ( online ).
  8. cavevieilarmand.com , accessed April 17, 2017.
  9. ^ Hugh Johnson , Jancis Robinson : The Wine Atlas. 5th edition, 32nd edition. Hallwag, Munich 2002, ISBN 3-7742-0775-5 , p. 125.
  10. alsace-route-des-vins.com ( Memento of the original from September 18, 2009 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Accessed April 17, 2017. @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / www.alsace-route-des-vins.com

Coordinates: 47 ° 51 ′ 52 ″  N , 7 ° 12 ′ 6 ″  E