Heisingen Manor

Haus Heisingen is a former knight's estate on the right bank of the Ruhr in Essen-Heisingen, whose oldest preserved building fabric dates back to the 12th century.

As a fief of Werden Abbey, it was owned by the Barons Staël von Holstein for over two centuries from 1458, before it was converted into a summer residence for the Werden abbots at the beginning of the 18th century. After secularization, it first came to Prussia in 1815 and then into private ownership in 1890. Today, the complex houses rental apartments.

The great importance of the house for the town was reflected in Heisingen's unofficial coat of arms. This shows Haus Heisingen in a highly simplified form as a crenellated wall with a stone round-arched gate under six red spheres, which were adopted from the family coat of arms of the Staël von Holstein.

The 65 by 45 meter complex is located on a gently sloping terrain, protected in the north by a terrain incision and in the east by a steep slope. It consists of an eastern manor house made of quarry stone and bricks and a two-winged outbuilding at the southwest corner, dating from the 18th/19th century. In the north and southeast, the area is bordered by a quarry stone wall, which is up to 0.8 meters thick. Depressions and embankments on some sides of the complex suggest that Haus Heisingen was formerly surrounded by a moat.

The two stories of the simple manor house rise on a 29.5x9.5 meter floor plan. Its southern part comprises the oldest building stock of the complex. The house is plastered white and has small attachments in the form of an onion dome with a weather vane on both gable ends of its hip roof. Above its entrance is the coat of arms of the Werden abbot Coelestin von Geismar, under which the following inscription was formerly to be read:

REVERENDISSIMUS ET ILLUSTRISSIMUS DOMINUS CAELESTINUS, MONASTERIORUM IMPERIALIUM ET IMMEDIATORUM EXEMPTORUM WERDINENSIS ET HELMSTADIENSIS ABBAS, HANC ARCEM CUM OMNIBUS IURIBUS ET PERTINENTIIS IMPERIALI ABBATIAE S. LUDGERI INCORORAVIT ANNO MDCCIX EAMQUE VETUSTATE COLLAPSAM RESTAURAVIT ET IN MELIOREM FORMAM APTARI FECIT.
(English: The most distinguished and venerable Lord Coelstinus, Abbot of the imperial and immediate abbeys of Werden and Helmstedt, incorporated this castle with all rights and appurtenances into the imperial abbey of Saint Ludger in the year 1709 and had it, fallen into disrepair with age, restored and brought into a better form.)

The round-arched portal at the northwest corner was also built in the Baroque style from quarry stone and bears above the passage the coat of arms of Benedict von Geismar, who, according to an inscription, had the gate built in the 1740s. In the area of the access road, foundation remains of a round tower with a diameter of 6.20 meters were also uncovered during a building history investigation. It belonged to a medieval predecessor building of the present house and was probably demolished in 1779.

Haus Heisingen emerged from a main court of Werden Abbey. In the 9th century, the place was on the border of the Frankish and Saxon settlement areas, and the so-called Hof Kofeld (also Coefeld, Coveldt and Covelde) secured the claims of the Franks against their neighbors. From this estate, a small castle developed in the 11th and 12th centuries through expansion and fortification, which from the beginning of the 13th century was a male fief of the Werden monastery. Documented as the seat of the Werden bailiff in 1370 by mention in the Werden tax register, Heinrich von Luttelnau was the feudal tenant of the Hof Kofeld manor in 1384. In 1423, the abbey enfeoffed the ministerialis Arnold von Walsum with it. On May 31, 1458, the Vogt and Amtmann of the abbey, Ruprecht I. Staël von Holstein, bought the property. His son Lutter was enfeoffed with the court in 1464, thus succeeding the von Dücker family as residents of the house.

For seven generations, the Staël von Holstein remained in possession of the estate, until the family died out in the male line with the unmarried Ferdinand Wilhelm Staël von Holstein zu Heisingen in 1696. His sister Amalia Eleonore and her husband Johann Georg von der Hauben inherited Haus Heisingen and sold the heavily dilapidated complex in 1709 for 23,000 Reichstaler to the then Werden abbot Coelestin von Geismar. He had it converted into a summer residence for himself and his successors. For this purpose, not only was the dilapidated manor house rebuilt, but an L-shaped economic wing was also erected to the southwest of it, and the entire area was enclosed by a ring wall. Under a successor of Coelestin, Benedict von Geismar, the entrance area was equipped with a representative portal that corresponded to the Baroque taste of the time.

Through secularization, Haus Heisingen came to the French state in 1803, which ceded the complex – like all Werden property – to the Grand Duchy of Berg in 1808. However, due to the agreements of the Congress of Vienna, another change of ownership followed as early as 1815: Haus Heisingen became Prussian. It subsequently served, among other things, as the residence of the local pastor and the last Werden rentmaster, before Prussia sold it in 1842 to a mining company, which used it as an operational building. From them, the Heisingen merchant Johann Sonnenschein acquired it on July 2, 1890. His family is still the owner of the complex today.

After both the interior of the manor house and that of the outbuildings were converted into smaller units, Haus Heisingen is now used for residential purposes.