Schloss Fürstenau

Schloss Fürstenau stands in Vechelde, a village in the Peine district of Lower Saxony. It was built in 1717 as a small pleasure palace for Elisabeth Sophie Marie, the third wife of Duke August Wilhelm of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. The site had once been the Haßlerhof farm, which she bought the year before. The palace lay near the border of the Prince-Bishopric of Hildesheim, just northwest of Braunschweig. Its life as a palace lasted only a few years before it became part of a working estate. The palace was a two-storey wooden building in three wings, open on the southeast side. It stood on a flattened mound surrounded by a ring ditch, reached by a drawbridge. Inside, a stone-flagged hall led to a parlour and kitchen, with a fireplace of amber stones and iron plates. A staircase of fourteen steps rose to a large hall upstairs, lit by three double windows and lit by a painted door. Outside the forecourt stood a timber-framed bell tower, two storeys high, with a slate-covered roof and a small bell cast in 1726 by S. H. C. Helmholtz of Braunschweig. After the duke’s death the estate was managed for income, and by 1737 it had barns, a dairy, a brewery and stables. The palace itself became a prison for the court at Vechelde. Later parts were torn down, and a new manor house was built in 1748. A separate house for guests and horses stood two kilometres away, reached by a corduroy road that led to the later village of Sophiental.