Stockenroth is a village now belonging to

Sparneck Sparneck is a municipality in Upper Franconia in the district of Hof in Bavaria in Germany. Location The market town of Sparneck lies at an average height of in the Pfarrbach valley, which forms the larger part of the area. The Saxon Saale r ...

in the Hof district,

Bavaria Bavaria ( ; ), officially the Free State of Bavaria (german: Freistaat Bayern, link=no ), is a state in the south-east of Germany. With an area of , Bavaria is the largest German state by land area, comprising roughly a fifth of the total lan ...

Germany Germany,, officially the Federal Republic of Germany, is a country in Central Europe. It is the second most populous country in Europe after Russia, and the most populous member state of the European Union. Germany is situated betwe ...

Geography

The village is situated on the river

Saale The Saale (), also known as the Saxon Saale (german: Sächsische Saale) and Thuringian Saale (german: Thüringische Saale), is a river in Germany and a left-bank tributary of the Elbe. It is not to be confused with the smaller Fränkische Saale, ...

between the mountains of Fichtelgebirge and

Frankenwald View to Döbraberg The Franconian Forest''Franconian Forest''
at www.britannica.com. Acce ...

. Highest Point is the Schachtel- or Schlegelsberg (591 m) in the southwest, lowest point is the Saale (512 m). The village has, together with the twin-village Germersreuth 110 inhabitants. The only four original

homestead Homestead may refer to: *Homestead (buildings), a farmhouse and its adjacent outbuildings; by extension, it can mean any small cluster of houses *Homestead (unit), a unit of measurement equal to 160 acres *Homestead principle, a legal concept th ...

farms where situated in a loose manner around the small creek Foehrenbach, which flows into the Saxonian

after only a short way. All four original houses face the center of the village, an unusual set up, as normally the houses at that time faced south.

History

Stockenroth-Germersreuth, as the village officially is named, was founded in the beginning of the 12th century by the Walpots. Shortly after foundation the power was transferred to the Knights of Sparneck. These put their lands in 1356 under the

Bohemian crown The Lands of the Bohemian Crown were a number of incorporated states in Central Europe during the medieval and early modern periods connected by feudal relations under the Bohemian kings. The crown lands primarily consisted of the Kingdom of Bo ...

, a state that only changed when the

Principality of Bayreuth The Principality of Bayreuth (german: Fürstentum Bayreuth) or Margraviate of Brandenburg-Bayreuth (''Markgraftum Brandenburg-Bayreuth'') was an immediate territory of the Holy Roman Empire, ruled by a Franconian branch of the Hohenzollern dyna ...

became an integral part of

Prussia Prussia, , Old Prussian: ''Prūsa'' or ''Prūsija'' was a German state on the southeast coast of the Baltic Sea. It formed the German Empire under Prussian rule when it united the German states in 1871. It was ''de facto'' dissolved by an em ...

in 1792. Castle Stockenroth was the seat of the administration for the surrounding villages from 1563 until 1731. During that era the village and its castle were heavily used for hunting purposes by the margraves of the Principality of Bayreuth. During that reign of the

Hohenzollern The House of Hohenzollern (, also , german: Haus Hohenzollern, , ro, Casa de Hohenzollern) is a German royal (and from 1871 to 1918, imperial) dynasty whose members were variously princes, electors, kings and emperors of Hohenzollern, Brandenb ...

, which lasted in Stockenroth till 1806, the castle was also a centre of

horse breeding Horse breeding is reproduction in horses, and particularly the human-directed process of selective breeding of animals, particularly purebred horses of a given breed. Planned matings can be used to produce specifically desired characteristics in ...

, related of the famous Trakehner horses in then Prussian Lithuania. It was also relevant in introducing the

potato The potato is a starchy food, a tuber of the plant ''Solanum tuberosum'' and is a root vegetable native to the Americas. The plant is a perennial in the nightshade family Solanaceae. Wild potato species can be found from the southern Unit ...

as a staple food in Prussia through its connections to Bohemia, which was then reigned by the Habsburg dynasty and therefore had indirect access to the Spanish colonies.

Culture

The sports club ''ASV Stockenroth'' has 220 members. Main sports is football (soccer), cross-country skiing, and athletics. The auxiliary fire brigade Stockenroth was founded 1875. As the then ruling Hohenzollern became Protestants in the 16th century, the inhabitants are mainly of

Lutheran Lutheranism is one of the largest branches of Protestantism, identifying primarily with the theology of Martin Luther, the 16th-century German monk and reformer whose efforts to reform the theology and practice of the Catholic Church launched th ...

believe.

External links

The legend of the shephert of Stockenroth (German)

Aerial view and map

References

{{Reflist Hof (district)