Sankt Andreasberg was founded in the 1480s. It was first mentioned in a letter from the Count Heinrich zu Stolberg to Dietrich von Witzlebenon on 3 November 1487. The establishment of the village took place around the market. The first silver mines are assumed to be the St. Andrews Cross Mine () at the foot of the
Beerberg and the St. Andrews Mine (
Grube St. Andreas) by the market. In 1521, St. Andreasberg received the right to mine from Counts Heinrich and Ernst von Hohenstein. It was proclaimed in
Mansfelder Land and in the mining areas of
Saxony and miners were invited to dig for silver and other metals.
Natural monuments blocks: the
Dreibrodesteine The area around Sankt Andreasberg is especially rich in habitats worthy of protection in within the
Harz National Park, but also around the town in the form of
Upper Harz mountain meadows. In the national park north-northwest of Sankt Andreasberg are the
Dreibrodesteine (at ca. ; ;
ND GS 43), three outsize blocks of
granite that have been formed by
spheroidal weathering. According to legend they originated as the three loaves of bread of a heartless woman who would not help a starving miner. With the words ("I'd rather my three loaves became stones") she spurned the miner, whereupon the loaves grew into giant stones and squashed the woman into the mossy earth. The granite blocks were considered a warning against heartlessness. At the
Dreibrodesteine is checkpoint no. 154 (
Dreibrodestein) in the
Harzer Wandernadel hiking system and a memorial to the
foresters and officials of the Andreasberg Forestry Office who fell in the two
world wars. Other natural monuments are a group of chestnuts on the market square (ND GS 42) and the
diabase deposit in the village of
Silberhütte (ND GS 45).
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe researched in 1783 the Hohe Klippen rocks (ND GS 146) on the
Rehberg mountain above the present-day Goethe Place on the
Rehberger Graben (ditch), because he believed he would find evidence there for his assumptions about the earth's history. The boundary between the
geological platform made of
greywacke hornfels and the underlying fine-grained
granite from
Brocken runs by the Hohe Klippen. == Religion ==