The American Cyclopædia (1879)/Halberstadt

HALBERSTADT, a town of Prussian Saxony, in the district and 28 m. S. W. of the city of Magdeburg, on the right bank of the Holzemme; pop. in 1871, 25,421. The principal public buildings are the Dom or cathedral, a Gothic structure restored in 1850, which contains celebrated collections of the episcopal and priestly robes of the middle ages, and the Liebfrauenkirche, erected in the 11th century, in the Byzantine style, with singular bass-reliefs and wall paintings. Halberstadt has a gymnasium and a number of schools, two large libraries, and good collections of coins, antiquities, and pictures, many of the last in the so-called “temple of friendship.” The chief manufactures are woollen cloth, gloves, carpets, refined sugar, leather, tobacco, cigars, and chemical products. The poet Gleim gathered around him in this town a large circle of authors, which was called the poetical union of Halberstadt; and he was buried here. In the middle ages the bishopric of Halberstadt formed a state of the empire.