About the museum branch

The Wielopolski Palace and its park form a palace complex entered into the register of immovable monuments of the Świętokrzyskie Voivodeship on 16 September 1975. It is one of the most valuable monuments in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski.

The history of the Wielopolski Palace is closely linked to the history of the Ostrowiec estates, which included Częstocice.

These estates were purchased in 1836 from the widow of the previous owner, Jerzy Dobrzański, by Count Henryk Łubieński, vice president of the Bank of Poland. After its bankruptcy in 1845, they became the property of the bank and then of the Fraenkel S.A. Trading House in Warsaw.

Antoni Edward Fraenkel commissioned the architect Leandro Jan Ludwik Marconi (1834–1919) to design a palace that was to be built in the Klimkiewiczów settlement, located near Częstocice. Ultimately, the palace was located in Częstocice, on the site of an old wooden manor house that had existed until the mid-19th century. The construction, which began in the 1870s, was completed by the next owner of the Ostrowiec estate, the Warsaw banker Władysław Laski, who designated Częstocice as a dowry for his daughter, Maria. Construction work on the palace lasted from 1887 to 1899.

In 1886, Maria was married to Count Zygmunt Wielopolski (1863–1919), a landowner and politician—president of the Real Politics Party with a pro-Russian orientation. From that time on, the Ostrowiec estate with Częstocice became the main seat of this Wielopolscy line, and the palace, together with the Hunting Palace located in Kuźnia, on the other side of the Kamienna River valley, was the cultural, administrative, and economic centre of these estates.

Zygmunt and Maria lived in the palace with their four children: Władysław, Józef Aleksander, Aleksander Władysław, and Maria Stefania. Among their guests were many distinguished personalities—in 1920, the Wielopolski family hosted General Maxime Weygand and Captain Charles de Gaulle, who were staying in the area with a French military mission.

Twelve years after Zygmunt’s death, in 1931, Maria Wielopolska sold the palace and the park to Ostrowiec Works, which was seeking to purchase it. At that time, the palace was converted into a hotel for shareholders and a club for the technical staff of the Steelworks, around which the cultural life of pre-war Ostrowiec centred.

During World War II, the palace served as an apartment for officials of Ostrowiec Works, and in the basement, soldiers of the Home Army produced hand grenades. From mid-1944 to January 1945, after the palace was seized by the Germans, it housed a military hospital.

In the post-war period, the Wielopolski Palace building housed two primary schools from Częstocice and Szewna, a common room, and a kindergarten. In 1959, the deserted building was increasingly devastated. In 1963, the management of the Ostrowiec Steelworks handed over the palace and the park to the Presidium of the Municipal National Council in Ostrowiec Świętokrzyski for use as a Regional Museum, which was opened on 3 December 1966.

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