Westerhofen Castle

The town of Westerhofen was first mentioned in a document in 1302. The builders of the noble seat are considered to be Knight Bartholomäus Marendl (died 1571) and his wife Susanne, née Stinglhamer zu Thürtenning (died 1576), whose tombstone can be seen at the parish church of Stammham. Between 1585 and 1598, the noble seat came into the possession of Paul Garzweiler, the administrator of Stammham-Etting, who was granted lower jurisdiction by princely concession in 1604. In 1692, the Garzweiler family sold the Hofmark to Johann Jakob Prugg, the Kastner of Ingolstadt and lord of the Hofmark of Schönbrunn, who had the castle, which had burned down in the Thirty Years' War, rebuilt in its present form. The new castle owner was an extraordinary personality: he had participated in the Turkish Wars in Hungary, was ennobled in 1693, was married three times to noble ladies, and was stabbed to death with a sword by a building commissioner in front of the Franciscan Church in Ingolstadt in 1703. For the underage heirs, a princely appointed feudal lord, the Munich mayor and city chief judge Maximilian Joseph Vauhier, exercised jurisdiction until 1727. Through the marriage of Anna Maria von Prugg, the Hofmark came into the possession of the Schmid zu Kleinaigen und Schachten, who were ennobled in 1761. The last lord of the castle from 1808 was Franz von Schmid. In 1823, the Hofmark was dissolved, and the castle initially came into state ownership and later into private hands.