Step yard

The Tretenhof is a historic estate that belongs to Seelbach in the Ortenau district. From the late Middle Ages onwards, the farm was a Meierhof of the Lords of Geroldseck , was temporarily fallow after 1700, and from 1867 was an early domicile of the later congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of the Divine Heart of Jesus . From 1892 the Hofgut was the hospital and poor house of the community of Seelbach, from 1900 the convalescent organization of the convalescent welfare association in Baden . During the Nazi era, the yard was a district training camp for the NSDAP, and the workers' welfare organization has been using the yard for various purposes since 1951.

history

The Tretenhof was first mentioned in a document in 1417 with the mention of a burgseß in the Drettenbach . The yard was a Fronhof of the gentlemen von Geroldseck and was administered by a Meier . In 1436, the Hofgut in Tretenpach, along with other estates, was the subject of a division of the Geroldseck estate, with Johann and Diebold von Geroldseck each owning half of the farm. In 1458 Diebold von Geroldseck acquired the other half of the farm from a Hesso von Keppenbach. The farm was loaned to Meier over the centuries and was vacant for a long time after 1700. Around 1800 the tenant Melchior Fautz had the main building of the farm built today. Under the new husband of his widow, the property was foreclosed in 1846 due to economic difficulties and came to the Kippenheim bourgeois family Metzger-Stulz. In 1866 the Strasbourg citizens Baumwald, Buchmüller and Arbogast bought the farm, but could not finance the purchase price and sold the property in 1867 to the pastor Berger from Seelbach.

Wilhelm Berger founded a religious community on the Lenzlisberg farm in Wittelbach in 1866 and urgently needed a sufficiently large accommodation for this growing group, which he found on the Tretenhof. At that time the farm was called Klösterle . Berger's group was banned in 1876, but after 1891 it was able to reorganize as the Congregation of the Franciscan Sisters of the Divine Heart of Jesus in Gengenbach .

After the Franciscan nuns left, the Tretenhof property came into the possession of the Seelbach community in 1892, which among other things set up a poor house and a hospital there. As early as 1898, an official medical expert asked for the hospital to be closed because the estate was not sufficient for such a facility. In 1899, the convalescent welfare association in Baden acquired the property, had it completely renovated and built a convalescent home for workers in it. The convalescent home existed until the sponsoring association went bankrupt in 1927.

After no new interested party had been found in the property by 1933, the NSDAP used the yard for party purposes, from 1937 as a district training camp. After the Second World War, former Polish and Russian prisoners of war were quartered in the courtyard. These people had permission to loot, so that raids started from the Tretenhof mainly on the nearby individual farms. Afterwards the estate was temporarily empty again.

In 1951, the Arbeiterwohlfahrt acquired the property and initially built a girls' holiday home with a home economics school. The girls' home was relocated to Lahr in 1978, after which the farm was completely renovated and converted into a rest home.

literature

• Fred Singler: The checkered history of the Tretenhof in Seelbach. In: Geroldsecker Land, Issue 22, 1980.

Coordinates: 48 ° 18 ′ 3 ″  N , 7 ° 56 ′ 44.2 ″  E