Gröningen Castle

Gröningen Castle is a four-story Renaissance building in the Gröningen district of the municipality of Satteldorf in the Schwäbisch Hall district in Baden-Württemberg.

The castle, a simple plastered building with sandstone elements, was built from 1611 to 1627 by Hans Philipp von Crailsheim and his wife Margarethe von Berlichingen, after the lordship of Gröningen had come into their possession. However, the castle initially remained mostly uninhabited. It was only after it came into the possession of the Lords of Seckendorff through inheritance towards the end of the 18th century that a court was maintained in Gröningen with a coachman, valet, chambermaid, gardener, and hunter.

In 1865, the castle was sold to the merchant and innkeeper Leonhard Keller from Engelhardshausen, who set up a grocery store with a guesthouse in it in 1866. When he went bankrupt in 1879, the castle was auctioned off by the farmer Georg Kraft from Heuchlingen, who transferred it to his daughter and her husband in 1881. The two, Georg and Katharina Frank, continued to run the guesthouse and the shop. After her husband's early death, Katharina Frank, as a single woman, was not allowed to run a guesthouse, and the premises were initially leased and then sold in 1903 to Wilhelm Wacker and his wife, who operated a guesthouse with a shop in the castle from 1904.