9 - the old town hall

The Old Town Hall with Infirmary and Fire Station

According to the Bavarian Monument Atlas, the house at Försterstraße 1, in Kipfenberg, is an elongated, narrow, two-story residential building which actually consists of two buildings. The core of the building probably dates back to the 16^th or 17th century. In the 19^th century, the building’s gables received the stair-step pattern we see today. If we take an old map of the town, we see that this building stands directly on the former course of the Roman Limes and probably just outside the medieval city wall.

Date of Construction

At the top of the northern gable is a stone tablet bearing the year 1505, with the coat of arms of the Eichstätt cathedral’s administrative body and the coat of arms of Prince-Bishop Gabriel von Eyb, with its three seashells. It is not known for certain if the building was actually constructed in 1505, but it was most probably built in the first half of the 16th century. One can only speculate about the purpose for which the house was originally built. Kipfenberg's local chronicler, Dr. Elmar Ettle, found some evidence in municipal archives suggesting that the Amtshaus initially included the residence of a municipal employee and that Kipfenberg’s night watchman lived there until after the First World War. The building also housed a detention center for petty offenders, such as wood thieves, whom the municipal council was authorized to imprison for a few days. In a ledger containing municipal expenditures from 1756, Dr. Ettle discovered the following entry: "...5 farmers from Böhming were locked in the local Amtshaus for refusing to pay for wood [...], 4 guilders and 29 kreuzers were paid out."  The building also housed firefighting equipment and the local infirmary.

Mayor's Office

We don’t know when this building became Kipfenberg's first town hall, but it was probably around the mid-19th century. Back then, the mayor's offices, on the upper floor, were accessible via a wooden staircase on the outside. The building served as our town hall until September 1931, when the mayor and the town offices moved to a vacated schoolhouse on the Frankenring. That is the building in which the Sparkasse, a savings bank, is now located. In the following year, 1932, a bookbinder purchased the old town hall. The infirmary and firefighting equipment had long since moved out, and the new owner set up a bookbinding workshop, with a stationery store, on the ground floor. Even today, the building houses a stationery store, along with a small post office.