Visit to Neergaard Relatives
in Denmark; June 1992
My wife Lois and I, with our
two oldest children Susan and Arthur, drove on June 6th from Copenhagen to the
estate Gunderslevholm, about an hour and a half to
the southeast. We were met there by the
owner and our sixth cousin Rolf de Neergaard, a most
gracious and charming man to whom we had previously introduced ourselves by
mail. He welcomed us cordially and gave
us a tour of his estate, showing and telling:
his deer park with 200 deer on 200 acres, a 2-kilometer lane of lilac
trees he’d planted, a forest of 2,000 acres with cherry, oak, four varieties of
beech, raised as high-quality lumber for furniture and boat-building (his trees
were used for the last of Denmark’s tall ships), or as Christmas trees. Another 2,000 acres are devoted to rye grass
for seed. He drove us along a 9-km-long
lake, 40% in his estate; and by the
estate’s several villages (97 houses in all), spread over rolling meadows and
gentle hills (which Rolf described as his “Danish mountains”). The estate supports itself from the income
from these sources, augmented by the leasing of hunting rights. Rolf has a staff of four to supervise the
running of the estate: chief gamekeeper,
forestry manager, agricultural manager, and finance manager. While Rolf’s English is excellent, it’s his
third language, French being his first (his mother was Swiss), and of course
Danish. He sadly described to us Danish
taxation .....income taxes aggregating at 80%, with estate taxes equally
confiscatory. In spite of this, the Neergaard family has managed actually to enlarge its
several estates in the area, over the past several generations.
It was a gorgeous day, and
the drive to the accompaniment of Rolf’s wry travelogue, was great fun. After the tour, lunch was served in the
chateau; guests were Rolf’s lovely
sister Tofa and two forestry friends from
Jutland. The food and wine were
delicious, and the occasion was altogether gracious and comfortable.
We met Rolf’s son Peter, 30,
stock-broker and student, as he left en route to a
wedding. Rolf’s older son Claus, in the
throes of a divorce, lives on the estate but was away (Rolf himself is recently
separated and welcomes visitors in his “big, empty house”). Rolf inherited the house, which had come into
the Neergaard family in 1802, from his grandfather, who was an ordinary
engineer in Copenhagen until selected as heir by a childless uncle. The astounded young man was too immersed in
his engineering job even to respond to the initial notification. When he did get around to addressing the matter,
he realized that it was an awful fortune indeed; the transfer taxes he would have to pay were
huge and would require him to go overwhelmingly into debt. He agonized for 6 months, then refused. At that point his wife weighed in and shamed
him into “doing his family duty”. ..... fortunately for Neergaard
posterity as it turns out, since in the end he made a success of it.
The chateau of Gunderslevholm is homey as well as being beautiful. The wall-covering in the reception rooms is
tooled leather, its oak wainscoting is 10,000 years old, recovered, preserved,
from a bog on the grounds. Details are sumptuously finished; e.g. the door knobs and lock plates are of
ivory. The foyer, modeled on that in
Belvedere in Vienna, is a knockout and is, Rolf believes, the only execution of
that style and quality in northern Europe.
Family crests are everywhere, from emblazoned on dishes to sculpted in
relief over archways. The portrait
gallery features a large oil of the Danish royal family of a century ago as well
as various Neergaard portraits, which our son
dutifully photographed to be included in our eventual genealogical study. As a matter of interest, the chateau was used
as setting for several scenes in the film “Babette’s Feast”.
After lunch Rolf took us to
visit another, neighboring, Neergaard estate, Førslevgaard, a property as impressive as Gunderslevholm, owned by Nicholaj
de Neergaard, a man quite young for such
responsibility, about 35, but possessed of obvious high intelligence, intense
interest in the operation of the farm, and leading-edge technical
knowledge. Nick graciously gave up part
of his Sunday afternoon to guide us through his extensive high-tech
agricultural (sugar-beets), and dairy-farming facilities (e.g., a fleet of
enormous state-of-the-art tractors and combines; cows with transponders around their necks for
computer tracking). Nick’s lawn, to put
some scale to it, takes 14 hours to mow.
Using a tractor.
The ceiling of the dining
room at Førslevgaard contains such beautifully
crafted relief carvings that it was recently restored courtesy of the Danish
government as a national treasure. Nick
has an interesting collection of antique musical instruments on which his
ancestors were quite accomplished. Half
his house (his deceased mother’s wing) is closed off to reduce taxes, but the
lived-in portion is ample and gracious.
Nick introduced us to his beautiful young wife, his two charming
children, and his Labrador Felix who greets each visitor individually with a
distinctly Danish deep-throated rumble which would sound like a growl if it
weren’t so clearly friendly. Nick’s
grandfather, like Rolf’s, inherited his estate from a childless uncle, but in
Nick’s case through the drawing of lots among the nephews (Nick’s grandfather
was a young boy and, uninterested, didn’t bother attending the drawing, winning
in absentia).
When we got back to Gunderslevholm, Rolf took us on a tour of the estate’s
churchyard, showing us graves of various Neergaard
ancestors. We then parted but rejoined
for dinner at a restaurant north of Ringsted, where we had a noisy (due to a
raucous wedding reception being held there) but enjoyable evening.
The next day, this time on
our own, we went to two other Neergaard estates on
Zealand. The first, about 10 kilometers
northeast of Ringsted, was Svenstrup, leased by Thomas Madsen after he had
established his own farm, Nedergaard. Svenstrup was
subsequently bought by Madsen’s grandson and is now owned by the Barons Jens
and Christian Wedell-Neergaard. The other Neergaard
estate we visited, adjoining and about 5 miles to the northwest, was Skjoldenæsholm, now owned by Wilhelm Bruun
de Neergaard (we didn’t attempt contact, but just
drove by and took pictures). Both
estates were grander than either Gunderslevholm or Førslevgaard, especially Skjoldenæsholm
with its parks, gardens, lake, golf course and trolley museum. Its main building has been converted into a
convention center, the family having chosen commercial ventures rather than
agriculture to earn the income needed to sustain the estate. We had lunch at the Kuskehuset,
a charming country inn on the grounds of Skjoldenæsholm,
unfortunately just missing its owner, Wilhelm Bruun
de Neergaard, who had left just as we were coming
in.
We then returned to Ringsted
to visit St Bendt’s, the main church of Ringsted and
the oldest brick church in Europe, to see the three Neergaard
memorials there (the Neergaard family once owned much
of the land around Ringsted, which was Denmark’s first capital). Two of these Neergaard
tombs are inside of, and one is in front of, a side chapel just to the left of
the main alter of the church. The three
tombs are just across from (and rather grander than!) the center-aisle
floor-tomb of the first royal Danish family of a millennium ago.
The following day, we
extended our Ancestral Quest to Jutland, taking the ferry from Korsør to Nyborg on the mainland,
then driving north to Grædstrup, the town nearest Mattrup, the large estate of which the “Low Farm”, Nedergaard, had been carved out. Nedergaard
constituted a quarter of Mattrup, given to Thomas
Madsen by the king as part of a royal campaign to strip uppity nobles of power
, break up their estates,and portion out their
fragments to loyal commoners. We
tracked down (via the phone book, the local church and the parsonage) and
visited a contemporary ancient Neergaard, Johannes, a retired priest (sognepræst)
of 96, in a nursing home near Mattrup. We sought him out on the grounds that a Neergaard living near Nedergaard
might possibly be more closely related to us than were Rolf and the other
Zealand landowners, since our line - Johan Wilhelm’s - is that of the oldest
sons with surviving issue, a line which we thought would be the likely
inheritors of the original property.
Rolf and his neighbors are of a different branch of Madsen’s
descendants. (The first child of
Madsen’s first son, Johan of Sorøe Ladegaard, is our line’s ancestor. It is the fifth child of Madsen’s first son,
Peter, who is the ancestor of Rolf and the other contemporary Zealand Neergaard manor house owners. Peter became Minister of War of Denmark and
acquired large tracts of property in Zealand.
It was Peter who fathered the two Neergaards
who were ennobled in 1780, founding the “de” Neergaard
lines).
Gunderslevholm
Sophienberg Castle
Skjoldenaesholm-hotel
Løvenhom_Slot,_Djursland
Gyldenholm Manor, Slagelse
Fuglsang