Oedenthal Castle (Lüdenscheid)

Oedenthal Castle is a manor house in the northwestern area of the city of Lüdenscheid. It is located on a mountain spur above the confluence of the Grebbecke and Linnepe, a tributary of the Volme. Starting from the B 54, a driveway leads past the property towards Heerwiese / Brockhauser Ebene.

The first documented mention was in 1160 as Odincdala. At that time, it was a property subject to tribute to the Werden main court of Schöpplenberg. The Lords of Odendal, as they were called at the time, also owned estates in neighboring Othlinghausen since the 13th/14th century. Their coat of arms, in the form of three linked rings, matched that of the Neuhoff family at Neuenhof Castle, suggesting that they were of the same lineage. From the mid-16th century, Oedenthal was owned by various changing noble families. In 1725, it was auctioned. Georg Hermann von Holtzbrinck acquired the estate, as well as Haus Rhade in the Volme valley in the same year. Von Holtzbrinck was General Crown Postmaster with ministerial rank in Wettin Poland and had been elevated to hereditary nobility by the Saxon Elector and Polish King. As he remained childless, he appointed his nephew, the Prussian War Commissioner Georg Wilhelm von Lent, as his main heir, should his second wife, a Baroness von Büna, remarry. After this happened, but she still claimed inheritance rights, a settlement was reached: Frau von Büna received Holtzbrinck's Saxon and Polish estates, while von Lent received the Sauerland-Märkisch ones. At his uncle's request, he himself adopted the name von Holtzbrinck. For about two hundred years, his descendants resided at Oedenthal as a country and partly also main residence. Two of them received a renewal and recognition diploma of their "old nobility" from Frederick the Great in 1767. Heinrich Wilhelm von Holtzbrinck, Prussian President of the Government and temporarily Prussian Minister of Commerce, spent his retirement at Oedenthal. Since 1931, it, along with the associated farms and lands, has been in bourgeois ownership. The predecessor building of the current manor house is said to have been a moated castle with a drawbridge, "not as surprising as one might assume, given the abundance of water even for a spur location like this." After a fire around 1865, the existing buildings were erected.