Haus Crange

Haus Crange in Herne, Germany, was built around 1440 under the authority of Duke Adolf II of the Duchy of Cleves. The house began life as a moated stronghold set on an island in the lowlands of the Emscher, erected within the political and social world of late medieval Cleves.

The site was conveyed into private stewardship shortly after construction. On or about Laurence Day, 10 August 1441, Duke Adolf II enfeoffed the house to Derick van Eykel, who acted as bailiff for the regional office at Bochum. A chapel dedicated to Saint Laurence was established to the north of the house and was formally consecrated in 1449; religious furnishings from that chapel, including a three-winged altar associated with the Soest painting tradition, survive today in Ahausen Castle. The von Eickel family retained control of the property until 1637, when ownership passed to the von Rump family.

In 1761 the house suffered a destructive fire and was rebuilt within the same year. The rebuilding introduced a classical arrangement of rooms above an earlier Gothic vaulted cellar, reflecting a change in interior layout while retaining medieval substructure. Residential use continued until 1812, when the owners vacated and the property thereafter was let. By inheritance the estate came into the hands of the Counts of Landsberg-Velen. In the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries the property changed hands several times: it was sold to the Harpener Bergwerksgesellschaft in 1884, transferred to a Kanalbaugesellschaft in 1905, and in 1962 reached industrialist Robert Heitkamp through the Essener Steinkohle AG. The Laurence chapel north of the house was demolished in 1873, though its altar was preserved elsewhere.

During the late twentieth century the building fell into increasing decay. The site received legal heritage protection in 1984, and a group formed in 1991 to support its rescue. The city of Herne acquired the property in 1992 and undertook conservation work over roughly a decade. In September 2012 the remains were opened to the public as a maintained ruin; the historic fair known as the Cranger Kirmes still takes place a few metres from the site, its origins reaching back to a sixteenth-century horse market held on Laurence Day where wild horses from the Emscher marshes were sold.