Road Trip 2025 (5) - Sturefors Castle

Monday, 11 August - Part 1
Sturefors Castle (near Linköping)

From Linköping we drove south-east to Västervik on the east coast (see map at the bottom of the page); but we also made a couple of stops on the way down there. 

Not far from Linköping, and just a minor detour from the main road, there is an old castle that I wanted to visit: Sturefors. The castle itself is private and not open to the public, but part of the surrounding park (with a view of the castle) is. And the reason that I wanted to see it is that back in the 1920s, my paternal grandmother's older half-sister Gerda (born 1881) worked there for a while, as lady's maid to a Countess Bielke. The castle is still owned by the same family, Bielke (an ancient noble family). 

Back in 2022, I wrote a post about this in my family history blog Greetings from the Past. Sturefors seems have been Gerda's last place of employment before she became lady's maid to Estelle Bernadotte (born Manville; an American young woman from Pleasantville, New York) who married the Swedish count Folke Bernadotte in 1928. I have since got it confirmed from a reliable source that Gerda was kind of "headhunted" for the latter position in the autumn of 1928, before their wedding (which took place in Pleasantville). (Folke was related to the Swedish royal family; became a well-known diplomat towards the end of WWII and after; and was sadly assasinated in Jerusalem 1948. But Gerda remained with Estelle for the rest of her life; and lived to be nearly 92.)

In the 1920s, Gerda sent this postcard of Sturefors castle to her step-mother Selma (my paternal great-grandmother):

(original postdard, yellowed with age)

(edited back to b&w by me)

 ... and I was curious to see for myself how it compares to 2022!

Alas my impression was that the present-day family is probably struggling to keep the estate going at all - or at least keeping the park with the huge mirror pond free from weeds does not seem to have been their first priority of late... The maintenance of the park also seems to have deteriorated quite a bit even since the photos in the Wikipedia articles were taken! So it takes quite a bit of imagination now to try to envisage what it all looked like when my great-aunt was living and working there, a hundred years ago. (I'm still glad we took the trouble to find it, though.)

The castle itself still looks rather impressive - but alas, the public is not allowed any closer than that yellow sign.

 

Turning around, and looking in the other direction: 

 

Walking back towards the car park, and some other buildings belonging to the estate:

 

 
Even this "cultural heritage" sign looks rather old and tired by now...

 

 

 

  

 

Linking to Sepia Saturday 789