The History of the Froebel House

The Froebel House (Fröbelhaus) is a timber-framed house in Griesheim, a village belonging to the town of Stadtilm in the Ilm district of Thuringia, Germany. Built in 1710 as the "Neuenhaus" — the "new house," its year of construction carved into the sandstone archway — it served as a princely summer residence, a forester's lodge and a nursery garden. And it is the place where Friedrich Froebel's life's work began: in 1816 he rented the upper floor and founded his first school here, the Universal German Educational Institute ("Allgemeine deutsche Erziehungsanstalt").

Our house carries its year of construction in stone: the year 1710 is carved into the sandstone archway. In that year it was built as the "Neuenhaus" — as a summer residence for the princes of Schwarzburg-Rudolstadt, to whose upper dominion Griesheim then belonged. With its exposed timber framing and finely articulated façades, it is among the oldest surviving buildings in the village.

In the decades that followed, it was a house of the nobility: from 1713 the family von Griesheim lived here, and later members of the families von Heßberg, von Ziegeler, von Pflug and von Gleichen. After 1730, Christian Wilhelm von Lindenfels — a princely chamberlain and master forester — established a forester's office in the house; the high-princely forester moved in, and the surrounding heights, the Singer Berg and the Willinger Berg, became the prince's hunting grounds.

Three centuries have left their marks: in the beams, the infill panels and the windows. Look closely, and the house reads like a manuscript written by many generations of inhabitants and craftsmen.

In 1816, Friedrich Wilhelm August Froebel (1782–1852) came to Griesheim. The village was family ground for him: his brother Christoph had been its pastor until he died in 1813 — in the aftermath of the Wars of Liberation — of hospital fever. Froebel took on the upbringing of his orphaned nephews, giving up his post at the Mineralogical Museum in Berlin to do so.

In this house, Froebel rented the upper floor in order to teach his nephews. On 13 November 1816 he founded the Universal German Educational Institute ("Allgemeine deutsche Erziehungsanstalt") here. It began about as small as a school can begin: with five pupils from his own family — Christoph's three sons and two sons of his brother Christian. Among them was Julius Froebel, born in Griesheim, who would later become known as a publicist and a member of the Frankfurt National Assembly. The institute's name carried an educational ideal within it: the idea of a shared, "German" education in the years after the Wars of Liberation.

"Around St John's Day" — in late June 1817 — the young institute moved on to Keilhau near Rudolstadt, to an estate that Christoph's widow had acquired. The Griesheim foundation was Froebel's first school, and in both structure and spirit it anticipated much of what would later shape the country boarding school movement.

After Froebel, the house lived many lives. Until around 1900 it remained a forester's lodge; from 1933 into the 1980s, the house and garden were used as a nursery garden. In 1993 the entire property was placed under heritage protection — followed by years standing empty. Since 1997 the property has had a new owner; since then the listed building and its grounds have been undergoing a long, careful restoration.

So over three centuries the house has watched inhabitants, uses and eras come and go — and it still stands. As a privately owned listed building, it is being preserved and repaired step by step.