Schalunen

Schalunen is a former municipality in the Bern-Mittelland administrative district in the canton of Bern in Switzerland. On 1 January 2014 the former municipalities of Schalunen, Büren zum Hof, Etzelkofen, Grafenried, Limpach, Mülchi and Zauggenried merged into the municipality of Fraubrunnen.

History

Schalunen is first mentioned in 1249 as Chaluna.

The oldest trace of a settlement in the area is a massive La Tène golden bracelet which was discovered north of the village in 1864. During the Late Middle Ages the village was owned by Fraubrunnen Abbey. After the Abbey was secularized during the Protestant Reformation, Schalunen village became part of the Bernese bailiwick of Fraubrunnen. After the Act of Mediation in 1803, the village became part of the new district of Fraubrunnen.

The residents of the village were always part of the parish of Limpach.

During the 19th century, many of the local farms shifted to raising dairy cattle, and the village's dairy opened in 1852. In 1916 the Bern-Solothurn-Bahn (now Regionalverkehr Bern-Solothurn) built a railway station in the village. In the 1960s the A1 motorway was built near the village. Both the railroad and the motorway provided easy access to the nearby cities of Bern and Solothurn and allowed commuters to settle in Schalunen. In the 1970s the Unterfeld and Holzrüti neighborhoods were built to house the growing population. By 2005 only about one quarter of all jobs in the village were in agriculture, while about half were in industry.