Heusenstamm - History

History

In 1211, Heusenstamm had its first documentary mention in an Eppstein fief book in which Gottfried of Eppstein documented that he held the castle and village of Huselstam in fief from the Empire and that he had further bestowed these holdings upon Eberhard Waro von Hagen-Heusenstamm. The place was later called Husinstam and, beginning in the 15th century, Heussenstain. About the middle of the 12th century, Eberhard Waro von Hagen-Heusenstamm had a moated castle built here. From the Middle Ages until 1819, Heusenstamm and Rembrücken belonged to the Biebermark, an area held in common with several other villages.

After the Lords of Eppstein died out, their position was filled by the new feudal lords, the Counts of Königstein, and later, beginning in 1581, by the Elector of Mainz. In 1545, Sebastian von Heusenstamm was chosen Archbishop-Elector of Mainz. In 1560 Eberhard von Heusenstamm gave leave to introduce Protestantism, but Roman Catholicism was reintroduced in 1607.

After the Lords of Heusenstamm died out in 1616, the castle and the lordship passed to the family’s Austrian sideline, who then leased the place to the Frankfurt patrician Stephan von Cronstetten. During the Thirty Years' War, the village and the castle were almost utterly destroyed. In 1661, the lordship over Heusenstamm, to which also belonged the places of Obertshausen and Hausen, was sold to the Mainz Oberamtmann (chief local administrator) Philipp Erwein von Schönborn.

When Emperor Franz I was living at Schloss Heusenstamm in 1764 on the occasion of his son’s coronation (Goethe relates the event in his Dichtung und Wahrheit), an ostentatious tower was built in his honour, which stands to this day. In 1806, the Schönborn Amt of Heusenstamm with Obertshausen and Hausen was put under the Princes of Isenburg-Birstein. The Amt of Heusenstamm then passed to the Hesse-Darmstadt. In 1819, when the Biebermark was partitioned, Heusenstamm got its share of the forest. In 1896, the railway line from Offenbach by way of Heusenstamm to Dietzenbach, a branchline of the Rodgaubahn from Offenbach to Dieburg, was opened.

On 26 May 1959, Heusenstamm was granted town rights, thereby sidestepping Offenbach’s efforts to absorb the community. Instead, the new town itself expanded by absorbing one of its neighbours, Rembrücken, in 1977 in the course of municipal reform. In 1978, the town bought the estate of Patershausen, the Klosterwald and the Forst Patershausen (both wooded properties) as well as the Forst Heusenstamm (another wooded property) from Rudolf Graf von Schönborn (“Graf” being his noble title, “Count”). The castle the town likewise acquired in 1979 from the Counts of Schönborn, converting it in the year that followed into the Town Hall.