Cornberg - History

History

The outlying centres of Rockensüß and Königswald had their first documentary mentions in 1274 and 1351 respectively. The village of Cornberg was founded only in 1938 as a mining settlement for Electoral-Hessian bituminous shale (Kupferschiefer) mining in the Richelsdorfer Gebirge. It is the only new settlement in the old Rotenburg an der Fulda district to arise since the Thirty Years' War.

There was however, from 1296, a Benedictine monastery here. It was long a provost’s seat of Hersfeld Abbey. The monastery was dissolved in 1526 and converted into an agricultural estate. In 1582, Philipp Wilhelm von Cornberg, a son of William IV, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel born out of wedlock, acquired the monastery and its lands as a fief. Philipp Wilhelm sold it in 1598 to his half-brother Maurice, Landgrave of Hesse-Kassel, who transferred it in 1627 to the so-called Rotenburger Quart. It became a Vogtei that remained in the ownership of the Landgraves of Hesse-Rotenburg until they died out in 1834, whereupon it passed back to the Electorate of Hesse. Until 1964, the former monastery was a state domain of the Land of Hesse. The trade and dwelling buildings around the monastery, which by this time were falling into ruins, were all torn down between 1957 and 1973. Only the Gothic cloister is preserved. Between 1990 and 1994 it was restored. The former two-naved church (the cloister’s north wing) with the still preserved nuns’ gallery is used today as a cultural stage. Two other wings house the community centre and the museum. In the east wing is found a gastronomical business.

From 1945 to 1949, the whole community of Cornberg and the monastery were a UNRRA displaced persons camp mainly for forced labourers from the Soviet Union and Poland. Many of them emigrated from here to Canada and the United States. While living in Cornberg, these displaced persons lived in barracks-style accommodations, often many families to one room while they waited for final emigration clearance to their eventual homes overseas.