Timeline · The estate is broken up

Holtermann restores the church

1756

At the end of 1756 a service is held in the marble church on Giske again, for the first time in thirty years. It had stood unused since 1726. The owner, the commerce councillor Hans Holtermann, has restored the decayed church together with Hans Strøm, the 30-year-old curate in Borgund, the parish around today's Ålesund.

Holtermann was born around 1709 and was a wealthy merchant and landowner. He bought Giske farm from Martinus Hørloch, its owner since the 1730s, around 1750, according to Lokalhistoriewiki, while other sources give 1756. Strøm writes that he restored the church in 1755, so he owned it by then. Four years later, in 1760, he bought the manor of Austrått at Ørland in Trøndelag, where fru Inger Ottesdatter, who also laid claim to Giske in the 1520s, had lived two hundred years before.

The work was celebrated with a memorial tablet. Strøm had an epitaph written praising Holtermann, and it says: «Sikkert var gudshuset faldt, / glemt som det var alverden» (Surely the house of God had fallen, / forgotten as it was by all the world). Beneath the chapel Holtermann had a burial vault made, and according to Tennø and Ekroll (1914) around a hundred coffins were placed there, among them from the Hagerup, Løech and Rønneberg families.

Hans Strøm, born in 1726, became known for describing the whole of Sunnmøre: the mountains, the fishing, the farms and the people. «Søndmørs beskrivelse» came out from 1762 to 1766 and is one of the main sources for the history of the estate after 1582. In 1766 he wrote that a case about the church's old right to tithes had not yet been decided.

Holtermann was married to Ingeborg Catharine Hagerup, daughter of Bishop Eiler Hagerup. Her brother, Hans Hagerup, was the man who two years later sold the rest of the Giske estate at auction, farm by farm. In Europe the Seven Years' War began the same year the church was taken back into use.

Sources

Hans Strøm, Søndmørs beskrivelse (1766), s. 110 til 113; Wikipedia, Hans Holtermann (etter Moe, Norske Storgaarder 1920); Tennø og Ekroll, Litt om Giske kapel (1914); SNL, Giske kirke; Lokalhistoriewiki, Giskegodset; SNL, Hans Hagerup; rapporten «Giskegodset etter 1582».