Trippstadt House: A Late-Baroque Manor House in Germany
Site at a Glance
- Rating
- 4.3
- Popularity
- Low
- Country
- Germany
- Primary era
- Early Modern
- External website
- Open
- Eras represented
- Early Modern
- Civilizations
- Electoral Palatinate, Holy Roman Empire
- Site type
- Domestic
- Remains
- Manor House
On this page9 sections
History
Trippstadt House is an eighteenth-century late-Baroque manor house in Trippstadt, Germany. Commissioned by Franz Karl Joseph von Hacke and his wife, Amöna Marie Charlotte Juliane Sturmfeder von Oppenweiler, it was completed in 1767 and is designated a cultural monument.
Construction and aristocratic ownership
Franz Karl von Hacke served as the Electoral Palatinate’s chief master of the hunt, a senior official responsible for the ruler’s hunting administration, in the 55-square-kilometre Lordship of Wilenstein. Amöna was the daughter of the Dirmstein nobleman Marsilius Franz Sturmfeder von Oppenweiler. The architect Sigmund Jacob Haeckher completed the house under the name Maison de la Campagne, meaning “Country House.”
The grounds were expanded around 1780 when Friedrich Ludwig von Sckell planned and created a French garden, a formal style based on geometric layouts and controlled views. The garden’s naturalistic extension was the Karlstal valley, through which the Moosalbe flows.
On 17 April 1776, the Mannheim physicist Johann Jakob Hemmer installed the first lightning conductor in the Palatinate on the house. A lightning conductor protects a building by directing an electrical discharge safely into the ground.
War, transfer, and forestry use
French Revolutionary troops partly destroyed Trippstadt House on 13 July 1794, leaving only the lower level habitable. The property passed into Alsatian ownership in 1803. In 1833, Reichsrat Ludwig von Gienanth acquired the entire Trippstadt manorial estate, including the house. A Reichsrat was a member of the upper chamber of the Kingdom of Bavaria’s legislature and the title was also used as an honorific. Gienanth sold the estate to the Kingdom of Bavaria in 1865.
Bavarian authorities established a state forestry office in the house in 1885 and rebuilt its ruined section in 1888. A forestry school also operated there. It closed in 1915 during the First World War and reopened in 1946 as a forestry school for the Palatinate.
Institutional history and preservation
Trippstadt House served as the seat of the Rhineland-Palatinate State School of Forestry from 1960 to 1980. In 1987, it became the official seat of the Forest Research Institute of Rhineland-Palatinate. The municipality of Trippstadt assumed responsibility for the gardens in 1985 and converted them into a recreation park.
The house’s 1767 water-supply installation also survives in part. Its surviving gallery leading to the castle well is known as the Well Tunnel and is designated a municipal cultural monument.
Remains
Trippstadt House stands in the southern part of Trippstadt beside the main road, at an elevation of just over 400 metres above sea level. Its southeast-facing front forms the principal side of a red-sandstone building, while the garden extends behind it toward the Kaltenborn stream and the Karlstal valley.
Manor house and grounds
Trippstadt House
The house is a single-wing red-sandstone building measuring 48 metres long, 19 metres wide, and 18 metres high. It covers 912 square metres and contains a basement, two storeys, and an attic. Dormer windows provide daylight to the street-facing side of the attic. Above the front entrance, a gable relief carries the date 1766 together with the names or alliance coat of arms of Franz Karl Joseph von Hacke and Amöna Marie Charlotte Juliane Sturmfeder von Oppenweiler.
Castle garden and surrounding buildings
The approximately four-hectare castle garden lies behind the house and slopes gently toward the Kaltenborn stream. It continues into the naturalistic Karlstal valley, through which the Moosalbe flows. On the main road northeast of the house stand the neighbouring Catholic parish church of St Joseph, built in 1752–1754, the Ironworks Museum, and the Protestant parish church, built in 1744–1745.
Water-supply system
Constructed at Quellbachhübel northeast of the residential buildings in 1767, the underground system began at a spring chamber, a built underground space that collected water from several springs. Three accessible galleries carried the water down a slight gradient to the castle well, the Upper Well, and the Deer Well in the residential area. The Upper Well and Deer Well were destroyed after 1965, while the gallery leading to the castle well survives for 300 metres as the Well Tunnel.
Nearby sites
