1911 Encyclopædia Britannica/St Goar

  ST GOAR, a town of Germany, in the Prussian Rhine Province, on the left bank of the Rhine, opposite St Goarshausen and just below the famous Lorelei, 12 m. above Boppard by the railway from Coblenz to Mainz. Pop. (1905) 1475. It is in part surrounded by the ruins of its old walls, and contains an Evangelical church, with some Renaissance monuments, and a Roman Catholic church with an image of St Goar of Aquitania, around whose chapel the place originally arose. Below the town, high on an eminence above the Rhine, stands Schloss Rheinfels, the property of the king of Prussia, the most perfect of the feudal castles on the banks of the river. In the later middle ages St Goar was the capital of the county of Katzenelnbogen, and on the extinction of this family it passed to Hesse-Cassel. It came into the possession of Prussia in 1815.