4 districts tour in Rixheim

On this square, adjacent to the Commanderie park, was the vegetable garden and the orchard of the Zuber family. It took its name because of the reconstruction of the former stables (mare house) of this family, a building imitating the Swiss chalets.

Former commandery of the Teutonic Order. Built between 1733 and 1745, this building was used after 1789 as a barracks, prison and military hospital, and in 1797 became the Zuber et Cie wallpaper factory. Today it houses the town hall, the wallpaper museum and the factory.

This district, consisting of modest farm workers' houses, probably took its name after the Thirty Years' War, when many Swiss came to repopulate Alsace3

Dating from 1798 and containing more than a hundred graves, it is a reminder of the existence of a strong Jewish community in Rixheim in the second half of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century, including the ancestors of Captain Dreyfus.

In the 19th century, two country houses surrounded by a park (Zuber and Naegely, hence its former name, the Naegeleberg, sold to Dollfus) were located here before the birth of this district in the 1970s, the work of the architect François Spoerry. A former ice house is the only remaining evidence of this earlier period.

Although the Sturm housing estate was not built until after the Second World War, it is a reminder of the existence of an important gravel pit exploited by the family of the same name. The first houses in this district, however, date from the end of the 19th century, but especially from the inter-war period.

This district was created in the early 1930s, when a large railway depot was built, of which only the workers' houses remain. A second phase of development of this district corresponds to the establishment of the Peugeot factories in the 1960s.

Built in 1878 when the Mulhouse-Müllheim line was opened. Also dating from this period, you can still see the signalman's house at 2 and 4 rue du Dépôt.

This monument marked with an N reminds us that it was Napoleon Bonaparte who, in 1802, ordered the digging of the Rhone-Rhine canal (begun in 1804 and completed in 1834). An island called the Rondelle, built in 1828 and levelled in the 1960s when the canal was widened to make it a wide-gauge canal, is the origin of the name of this district.

Erected in 1921, this stele reminds us that 8 people were shot in this place in 1915 and 1916 by the German authorities for spying or treason in wartime. Destroyed by the Nazis in 1940, it was rebuilt after 1945.

After 1871, the German soldiers stationed in Mulhouse came to train in this sector of the Hardt forest. Concrete walls, some of them impressive, remind us of the existence of this military ground which was used until the 1970s. During the First World War, 8 Alsatian civilians were shot on this military field (see J).

This sports circuit is mainly installed on the site of a former gravel pit. This gravel pit, like many others in the commune, is a reminder that, in addition to agriculture and wine-growing, the main economic activity in the commune before the French Revolution was linked to construction and roads.

Although a few houses were built before the Second World War, this district underwent a major expansion from the 1950s onwards. A final housing estate, the Rinderacker ZAC, occupies a plot of land on which an ancient Gallo-Roman villa was discovered.

Founded in 1864 thanks in particular to donations from the Zuber family, it was managed by the local charity office, with the care of the sick being entrusted to the sisters of Niederbronn. This establishment is today an EHPAD (establishment for dependent elderly people).

The first public building to be constructed after Alsace joined the 2nd Reich in 1871, and in accordance with the German law on compulsory education, the building was extended in 1903. Its construction was made possible by a donation from Yvan Zuber, a wallpaper manufacturer and mayor of the commune from 1859 to 1872 and from 1886 to 1902. A little further on, at the beginning of rue Saint Jean, there is a statue of Saint Jean Népomucène, patron saint of bridges and rivers.