Frauenfeld Audio Tour: Hidden Gems and Echoes of Ergaten-Talbach

On your left stands a pale stone-and-stucco building with two uneven wings, a rounded corner dome tower, and a lantern-like crown rising above Löwenplatz.

This is Frauenfeld’s Main Post Office, and it tells the story of how a town learned to make itself legible far beyond its own streets. The communications revolution here did not begin in a purpose-built monument at all. It began in coaching inns: a postal receiving point opened at the Gasthof Kreuz in seventeen ninety, then the first official post office moved into the Krone in eighteen oh seven, and by the end of the nineteenth century the old arrangement could no longer keep up.

So in eighteen ninety-eight, the federal government opened this new post house. For the first time, letter post, telegraph, telephone, and passenger mail all worked under one roof. The ground floor handled the public. Upstairs, the wires and switching equipment did their quiet, exacting work. By then telephony had already arrived in town: on the fifteenth of June, eighteen ninety, the first telephone exchange opened at the Goldener Hirschen, and it connected just sixteen subscribers. Sixteen voices, and then the network began to spread.

The architect was Theodor Gohl, one of the federal building administration’s leading designers, who came to Frauenfeld after earlier posts in Winterthur and Saint Gallen. He gave the town more than a service building. He designed a civic signal: a grand post office with a corner dome tower that anchors this raised site where the streets fall away on both sides. The richly decorated exterior told citizens that administration could also have presence, dignity, and style.

Yet the real drama was always in the unseen systems. In that sense, this place shares a secret with the Baliers: different technology, same hidden logic. Water once powered work through channels and control; here, messages moved by timetables, clerks, cables, and coded signals.

A photograph from nineteen oh five shows women and children by the roadside with baskets in hand while a Frauenfeld-Wil-Bahn steam train passes in front. The building was never aloof. It sat right inside the town’s daily circulation of errands, travel, and trade. If you glance at the before-and-after image, you’ll see horse-drawn postal traffic yield to modern streets while the historic building remains unmistakably itself. Its dome even carried the town’s technology on its head: first a wire support for telephone and telegraph lines, then a flagpole in nineteen twenty-eight. When restorers rebuilt the lantern in nineteen eighty-one, they first got the proportions wrong, then cut it back to the proper historic height. Later additions came and went, and in twenty eighteen a new Z-shaped building wrapped around the old core so Gohl’s façade could be read clearly again rather than swallowed by extensions.

In a few minutes, we leave this public engine of connection and turn toward a quieter kind of influence, where family memory and devotion shaped the town just as powerfully: the Rüpplin chaplaincy, about four minutes away. If you need practical matters, the branch generally opens Monday to Friday from eight until six-thirty, Saturday until noon, and closes on Sunday.

On your left, look for a modest plastered house with a steep roof and simple rectangular windows, marked out by the rare little open side courtyard that still survives beside it.

This is the Rüpplin chaplaincy, and its story begins with intention rather than grandeur. In fifteen eighty, Joachim Joner, called Rüplin, a citizen of Frauenfeld and an administrator for the Abbey of Reichenau, endowed this house as a chaplaincy, meaning a funded post for a priest. He did not do it as a passing act of devotion. He and his wife, Barbara Locher, shaped it as a family project, one meant to outlive them and quietly guide the city’s spiritual life.

Joachim had already gathered power with care. He bought lands from the former Helfenberg castle, acquired the local courts of Kefikon and Islikon, and added the Strasshof. This foundation belonged to that same strategy: wealth, land, law, and prayer woven together. The oldest Rüpplin son held the right to choose the priest. If the family line ever failed, that right would pass to the Locher family. Even the chaplain stood in an intriguing position: he supported the clergy of the parish, but he did not answer to the parish itself.

So this house was more than a residence. It was a piece of social machinery, almost invisible, yet enduring. In fifteen eighty-eight, Joachim extended his influence into Saint Nicholas Church by leaving it a late medieval statue, a gift that joined family memory to public worship.

The building itself has survived what much of Frauenfeld did not. After the devastating fires of seventeen seventy-one and seventeen eighty-eight, much of the old town had to be rebuilt, and this one kept the little in-between courtyards, the Höfli, that once separated homes for safety. They are the only survivors of that pattern here.

Since nineteen fifty-five, no priest has lived here. The upper floor is rented, the ground floor serves parish life, and since the nineteen eighties locals have even known it as the Rüpplin Treff, a meeting place after mass. In a moment, we will walk to Saint Nicholas, where this family’s private design meets the public face of faith.

On your left stands a pale stone church with a broad front, a soaring tower above the main portal, and ranks of saintly figures set over the entrances.

St. Nicholas is one of Frauenfeld’s grand statements in stone, but its real story is less calm than its façade suggests. This hill of molasse rock above the bend of the Murg held sacred buildings from at least the ninth century, and a chapel here is certain by the late thirteenth century. By fourteen sixty-three, the patron was named clearly: Saint Nicholas of Myra.

Then faith here became something shared, and contested. After the Reformation reached Frauenfeld in fifteen twenty-nine, Catholics and Protestants agreed in fifteen thirty-one to use this church, and the church at Oberkirch, side by side. Imagine that for a moment: one building carrying two confessions, two sets of convictions, and one town trying not to split itself apart. That arrangement lasted until the Protestant church opened in sixteen forty-seven, and even then, the strain had already marked the place.

If you glance at the image on your screen, you can see an earlier version of the church in the old town setting, long before the present design claimed the skyline. That is the first surprise here: continuity in Frauenfeld rarely means standing still. It means rebuilding.

Fire proved that brutally. In the first city fire of seventeen seventy-one, half the town burned, and of St. Nicholas, almost nothing survived except the shaft of the tower. Peter Bein then raised a new late Baroque church on the old foundations, and when it opened in seventeen eighty-one, its clock did not belong only to parish clergy or wealthy patrons. Citizens across the town paid for that “city clock” together. Even in ruin, this church remained entangled with civic life.

And yet the church you see now is not that one either. In the late nineteenth century, the congregation outgrew the old building. Architect August Hardegger proposed one solution, but money stalled the plan. Then politics entered through the side door. When the city planned a new access road from the station to the cantonal government building, church land stood in the way. Dean Konrad Kuhn pushed hard for a new church, partly to solve overcrowding and partly to keep the site from being cut apart. Suddenly this was not only about worship. It was about who could shape the town itself.

The decisive figure became Albert Rimli. In bitter arguments, he outmanoeuvred Hardegger with a richly varied design and a persuasive perspective drawing that showed people exactly what could rise here. His church, built between nineteen oh four and nineteen oh six, gave Frauenfeld this striking tower and this blend of Neo-Baroque drama and Art Nouveau softness. Look at the sculpted portals, the layered stonework, the scroll-like volutes. This building does not hide that it fought to exist.

And perhaps that is the question the church presses on you: how can one place belong to more than one confession, more than one generation, even more than one version of the city?

There is one more quietly moving detail. In nineteen oh six, St. Nicholas received a new ring of six bronze bells from Aarau, tuned in harmony with the Protestant church’s bells, an early, deliberate gesture of cooperation. The parish called it a small gesture of Christian cooperation. Even the sound above Frauenfeld learned to share.

If you want a glimpse of the church before this reinvention, the second image shows the late Baroque predecessor that stood here after the fire. So no, sacred space in Frauenfeld was never simple; it was argued over, rebuilt, funded together, and made to endure. In about one minute, we’ll step to the Bernerhaus, where shared ground turns from sacred to civic and political. If you plan to return later, the church is generally open daily, with hours varying across the week.

On your left, look for the pale plastered town house with an angled street-facing corner, rows of rectangular windows, and a stately round-arched doorway set into the canted wall.

Bernerhaus can seem almost discreet, as though it would rather not boast. But its older name, Haus zur Gedult, hides a deliciously political secret. This was not simply a family home. It served as the Bernese envoy house, a diplomatic address in the middle of ordinary town life.

That matters because the Eidgenössische Tagsatzung in Frauenfeld - the regular assembly where delegates from the Swiss cantons met to negotiate and govern - turned the town into a political stage from seventeen thirteen to seventeen ninety-eight, and houses like this one lodged the Bernese envoys. Frauenfeld mattered because Thurgau was not yet a self-governing canton. It was ruled jointly by others, so decisions about law, administration, and power often unfolded not in some remote palace, but in lodging houses like this one.

And that is the twist this building offers: power in Frauenfeld did not remain only in the castle. By the eighteenth century, it unpacked trunks in town houses, sent secretaries upstairs, and led horses into rear courtyards.

The Bernerhaus stood in a row of ten houses that once formed the northwestern edge of the old inner town, almost like a built city wall. Fire swept through that entire row on the ninth of July, seventeen seventy-one. Every house fell. The people who owned this property then included Johann Peter Mörikofer and his family. When the ashes cooled, the contest began. House owners and the town all wanted the same profitable guests: the cantonal envoys, who arrived reliably each year around the feast of Saints Peter and Paul, on the twenty-ninth of June, and paid on time.

The Mörikofer siblings moved quickly. When this rebuilt house stood ready in seventeen seventy-four, they offered it again to Bern’s representatives. Bern agreed in principle, then granted them a building loan of five thousand five hundred gulden - a very serious sum, worth roughly several hundred thousand Swiss francs in today’s terms. That tells you how valuable this address had become. Hosting Bern’s envoys meant status, income, and influence.

Look closely at the odd angle of the front. Most tourists pass it by. Locals notice it at once. The façade still bends toward the old Obergasse, and in that angled stretch there had once been almost no windows, only a grand arched entrance. It was the formal access point to the Bernese property - a neat architectural wink that says this house handled arrivals, business, and rank.

The envoys did not travel lightly, either. They brought secretaries, often horses and carriages too, and the Bernerhaus included stabling behind. So this address held diplomacy at one end, household life at the other, and all around it the old town carried on with trade, worship, and gossip.

Today, the rooms hold different kinds of authority. Since nineteen seventy-six, the Evangelical church of Thurgau has owned the house. The ground floor belongs to the Kunstverein, the art society, with changing exhibitions and its own painting collection. Upstairs, church offices and meeting rooms continue the old habit of filling the building with deliberation.

So the house still shelters people who come here to interpret, organise, and preserve. Just ahead, the Museum of Archaeology Thurgau takes that same instinct one layer deeper - from furnished rooms and remembered politics to the older traces beneath the town itself.

On your left, look for the solid pale masonry building with its plain rectangular front and the entrance reached through the museum garden.

This house marks a lovely turning point in Frauenfeld’s story. Until now, so much of our trail has clung to walls, towers, chapels, and façades. Here, the city opens the ground beneath them. This is curated memory in its clearest form: the past does not rise up and explain itself. Someone must recover it, sort it, frame it, and decide how it will speak in public.

The Museum of Archaeology Thurgau opened here in the summer of nineteen ninety-six, in the former rooms of the cantonal investigative prison. I find that transformation rather marvellous: a place once used to hold bodies now releases buried time. Under the same roof, the Nature Museum keeps company with it, as if land and life had agreed to share their evidence.

Inside, the journey runs from prehistoric lake-dwellers to Romans, and on to a battlefield from seventeen ninety-nine touched by Napoleon’s campaign. One of its quiet stars is the Goldbecher of Eschenz, a gold cup dating to about twenty-four hundred before Christ, roughly four thousand four hundred years old, and often described as one of the oldest gold vessels in the world. Such a small object, and yet it carries astonishing authority.

The museum’s great strength lies in finds from the lake settlements around Lake Constance, especially preserved wood from wet ground. Those timbers allow dendrochronology - dating by tree rings - so archaeologists can tell not just an era, but sometimes the very year a tree fell. In the vaulted cellar, the exhibition called Anderswelten, meaning “other worlds,” explores death and ritual, giving hard evidence an unexpectedly emotional pulse. Even Archie the badger, the museum’s playful guide for families, reminds you that serious knowledge need not be severe.

So tell me: does a city speak more truthfully through the buildings still standing above us, or through the fragments lifted from underneath them? We carry that question on to the Cantonal Library, where objects in cases become knowledge on shelves. If you want to come back, the museum is closed on Mondays and usually opens from two to five Tuesday to Friday, and from one to five on weekends.

On your left is a long, pale rendered building with a broad rectangular frontage, evenly spaced tall windows, and a formal central doorway that gives it the calm authority of an old schoolhouse.

This is the Cantonal Library of Thurgau, and it tells one of Frauenfeld’s quietest, most revealing stories: memory here rarely survives by accident. Someone notices what might be lost, carries it elsewhere, gives it a shelf, a catalogue, a new life.

The library began in eighteen oh five, not in a grand hall, but in a cupboard. Johannes Morell, the first cantonal librarian and a government councillor, kept the earliest collection in his private apartment. Those first books were practical things, mainly law books for the young canton’s officials and highest courts. So the institution that now guards centuries of writing started as a handful of working volumes folded straight into daily government life.

Then came the great change. When Thurgau dissolved its monasteries in eighteen forty-eight, their books did not simply vanish into dust. In eighteen fifty-two, collections from Fischingen and Ittingen arrived in Frauenfeld and were stored in the attic of this very former cantonal school building, long before the library itself moved here. Those monastic books, reborn in the canton, changed the library’s character. A small administrative collection suddenly became a keeper of prayer, scholarship, literature, and regional memory. Later, books from Kreuzlingen and Saint Katharinental joined them as well.

If you glance at the image in the app, the building’s restrained exterior feels almost fitting. It does not boast. It keeps.

By eighteen fifty-eight, the first printed catalogue already listed about five thousand volumes. Only a few years later, the librarian Johann Adam Pupikofer counted ten thousand works. In eighteen sixty-four, the library absorbed the Frauenfeld city library, which had grown out of a civic reading society. That opened the doors wider, though not everyone in charge welcomed the change. The library had to become several things at once: official, scholarly, and public.

In eighteen sixty-eight, it moved into a purpose-designed space in the government building, complete with a lending counter and reading room. But this address became its home in nineteen thirteen, when the old school building stood empty and the library moved in with the cantonal supreme court. Friedrich Schaltegger, librarian from nineteen twelve, helped shape that new chapter. He also drew up the first catalogue of the library’s earliest printed treasures, nearly eight hundred books from the dawn of printing. That matters more than it sounds. To catalogue is to rescue. What is named can be found; what can be found can endure.

Even fragments survived because someone chose not to throw them away. Two leaves from a medieval romance, Flore and Blanscheflur, lasted because they had been reused as the cover of a document in nearby Oberkirch. Here, preservation often begins with such improbable mercy.

And that is the deeper grace of this place. It does not merely store the canton’s past; it decides, carefully and continuously, what the canton will still be able to remember. In a moment, continue on for about four minutes to the Penguin Fountain, where memory turns lighter, stranger, and a little more playful. If you decide to return another time, the library is generally open Monday to Friday from eight to six, Saturday from eight to two, and closed on Sunday.

On your right stands one of Frauenfeld’s most charming acts of civic mischief: the Penguin Fountain, a drinking fountain beside the Spanner schoolhouse. Otto Schilt created it and the city installed it in nineteen thirty-three. Schilt was born here, and he helped shape modern Frauenfeld’s shared visual world. His father pushed him toward law, so he studied in Geneva and Leipzig, sat in art classes at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, learned from James Vibert, passed his legal exams, even took the Thurgau bar exam here in town, and then quietly refused the lawyer’s life. He became a sculptor instead.

That choice mattered. In nineteen nineteen, his soldiers’ memorial near today’s state archive made him the city’s public artist. Later he moved to Zurich, married the pianist Hedy Kraft in nineteen twenty-six, and kept returning in stone and water.

Now, look closely at this fountain for a moment. A city of castles, churches, archives, and schools chose a penguin for one of its everyday landmarks. Why?

The answer is deliciously local. In nineteen thirty-one, the council planned merely to move an old fountain onto the schoolyard. Then the municipal community offered something new from Schilt’s workshop. He had already sent in a model in August nineteen thirty-two: a fountain a little over two metres high, in reddish cast stone, topped by a standing penguin. The council hesitated, not over the price of two thousand francs, about thirteen thousand Swiss francs today, but because a penguin seemed too exotic for a Swiss schoolyard. Schilt defended it calmly. The bird, he said, worked artistically, practically, and everyone knew what a penguin was. The council gave way, but insisted on two drinking spouts so children could actually quench their thirst.

At first the water overflowed; workers corrected the problem, and by the nineteenth of July nineteen thirty-three the town recorded the fountain as finished. Later, many forgot who made it, even though generations of children drank here.

And perhaps that is Frauenfeld’s quiet secret: memory does not live only in grand facades. It also perches, unexpectedly, on a school fountain, where art and usefulness meet. That is how the city’s hidden treasures speak to one another. This little landmark is accessible at any hour, day or night.