HISTORISCHES MUSEUM HELLENTAL

Description

Welcome to the Regional LandMuseum for History, Archaeology and Everyday Culture in the Solling 

From Forest to Glass to Village - Inside.Outside.Digital.

 Nestled in the hill country of southern Lower Saxony, the Historical Museum Hellental, as an attractive regional museum with its cultural-historical guiding themes FOREST│GLASS│VILLAGE, is the central cultural institution around the picturesque mountain village of Hellental — not far from Amelungsborn Monastery. 

The volunteer-run LandMuseum is located in the northern Solling, a gentle low mountain range whose landscape was widely used as a resource, shaping a historically developed cultural landscape. 

At least since the Middle Ages, people increasingly shaped the natural environment of the Solling according to their needs, from which the cultural landscape of today’s open grassland valley developed, as well as the original glassmakers’ settlement and the later pre-industrially planned workers’ village of Hellental. 

From the Middle Ages until the second half of the 18th century, Hellental was a resource-rich high-tech area for the production of forest glass.

Today the remote village of Hellental is an early example of proactive economic and settlement-policy measures in the pre-industrial 18th century in the Duchy of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel under Duke Carl I (reigned 1735–1780) and his chief huntsman Johann Georg von Langen.

As a state-planned commercial village of forest workers, small farmers and rural craftsmen, Hellental developed in the second half of the 18th century into a settlement for incoming settlers with typical housing in the run-up to the resource-oriented establishment of profitable, early-capitalist manufactories. 

The LandMuseum was awarded the Museum Quality Seal in Lower Saxony in 2025. 

We offer:

Exhibitions on roughly 475 m² in two authentic locations

Permanent exhibition: From Forest to Glass to Village - Special and rotating exhibitions

Virtual tours

Public guided tours 

- through the exhibitions

- Glass│Walk and Talk: themed tours on the glass history of the northern Solling 

Open meeting place 

- TennenSchnack — listening and conversing together -

Public bread-baking days 

Research on forest, glass and village

Data catalogue of regional forest glassworks

Digital museum collection