Wormsfelde Manor

Wormsfelde estate lies in the village of Wojcieszyce, about 4 km north-east of Gorzów Wielkopolski (formerly Landsberg on the Warthe), beside Lake Wojcieszyce. The place is recorded in 1337 as Wormesvelde in the land register of the Neumark and previously belonged to the Duchy of Greater Poland. Early owners were the von Rakow family, and from the early fifteenth century the von Strauss family (with the church patronage). In 1654 Jan Weitzmann bought the settlement, which had been heavily damaged in the Thirty Years’ War. Later owners included the Polish chamberlain Żychliński (1714), Major-General von der Marwitz (1715) and Ludwig von Burgsdorff (1718). In 1736 Margrave Heinrich Friedrich of Brandenburg-Schwedt acquired the village together with Różanki and parts of Santok. After his death in 1788 the property passed to Leopold Friedrich of Anhalt-Dessau and remained an entail in the house of Anhalt. The village burned in the Seven Years’ War. In 1907 Otto Schleusener leased the domain, and in 1921 Jan Schleusener; in 1929 the Ducal Anhalt Trust Administration was owner, the tenant Hans Schleusener, and the area about 850 ha.

The farm complex dates essentially from the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and comprises the manor house, granaries, dovecotes, stables, a distillery and further farm buildings. The manor house (the so-called palace) consists of two parts: the western two-storey section with a mansard roof and a round corner tower under a conical roof was built in 1907 as the tenant’s residence; the eastern single-storey section with a pitched roof was added during the Second World War. A portal with a profiled cornice and a veranda on the north side mark the building; the whole is enclosed by a fence with old pillars. The farm buildings partly reuse older foundations.

In 1945 the estate was confiscated and thereafter used as a state agricultural farm (PGR, later a plant-breeding station). Since the 1990s it has belonged to the Agricultural Property Agency and is leased. The manor house and farmyard are listed monuments and are in private use. The late-Romanesque village church of the thirteenth century with a half-timbered tower of 1705 is a separate monument.