Haus Unterbach

Haus Unterbach stands in Erkrath, Germany, and its origins reach back to the Carolingian era, which suggests it was first established by builders of the early medieval Frankish realm.

Records and later reports place the site’s first major development in the early Middle Ages. Around the year 900 the grounds are said to have been enlarged into a fortified place, though documentary proof for that specific enlargement is limited. The estate appears in written records as a knight’s seat in 1169, establishing its role as a local centre of noble residence and authority by the high medieval period.

Around 1300 the defensive works were transformed into a more imposing stronghold, with the enclosure rebuilt and multiple towers erected; at that time the complex was surrounded by a broad water-filled ditch. Over the later medieval and early modern centuries the estate owned several parcels of land in the Unterbach area, including the property known variously as Velthusen or Feldhaus. Sales of portions of these holdings produced place names such as Unterfeldhaus and later Rohrsmühle, and an “Unteres Feldhaus” is documented in the eighteenth century.

Material recovered from recent work at the site links the place to the late fifteenth century through the early modern period. Ceramic fragments dated to the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and a Siegburg funnel-neck beaker bearing the coats of arms of Margarete Quad zu Wickrath and Schwanenberg and of Johann Wilhelm von Harff zu Alsdorf and Geilenkirchen, a couple married in 1481, were recovered from moat deposits; the beaker is read as an individually commissioned wedding vessel. A historian and surviving fifteenth-century documents also mention an old chapel once connected with the estate.

From the nineteenth century the grounds took on a landscaped character when garden and park work was laid out by Maximilian Friedrich Weyhe. In the mid-twentieth century Heinrich von Hymmen and his wife Margareta von Beaulieu-Marconnay placed the house at the disposal of the Confessing Church congregation for the years 1933 to 1945. Heinrich von Hymmen later received civic and chivalric honors in the 1950s. In the 1920s the holdings associated with the estate were substantial and included Gut Unterbach (about 347 hectares), Grondstein-Polkshof (about 92 hectares), Zissendorf (about 158 hectares) and a farm called Auros in what was then South West Africa.

Recent archaeological and building investigations have led to a revised understanding of the manor house, revealing medieval vertical post-and-beam timber framing and survival of baroque floor surfaces, and conservation work on the moats and park has uncovered historic water-control elements. Descendants of the von Hymmen family remain at Haus Unterbach and are carrying out restoration aimed at a historic condition while the site continues to be made available for non-commercial community events.