Dietzhölztal
Encyclopedia
The community of Dietzhölztal is the northernmost municipality in the Lahn-Dill-Kreis
in Hesse
, Germany
.
.
Rittershausen has 952 inhabitants, representing 14.2% of Dietzhölztal's population (as of 31 December 2005), making it the constituent community with the smallest population, but with a rural area of 1 847 ha (Dietzhölztal: 3 744 ha), that is, 49.3%, Rittershausen is almost as big as the three other communities of Ewersbach, Mandeln and Steinbrücken put together. The reason for this relates to what happened in the Late Middle Ages
(see History below).
, in the north on the town of Bad Laasphe
(both in Siegen-Wittgenstein
district in North Rhine-Westphalia), in the east on the community of Breidenbach
(Marburg-Biedenkopf
), in the southeast on the community of Eschenburg
, and in the southwest on the town of Haiger
(both in the Lahn-Dill-Kreis).
, the upper Dietzhölze Valley (German
: Dietzhölztal – the community's namesake), owing to its great number of trees, was an important centre for metal production. The ore
s were mined in the Dillenburg
area and smelted
in furnaces in the Dietzhölze Valley. Thus the "Hammerweiher" was dammed up at Steinbrücken. Even today, a few metalworking companies are still represented in the Dietzhölze Valley, among them Kreck Metallwarenfabrik GmbH in Rittershausen.
(Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, HL Mainz 19, folg. 210 v. [12th century]). A landlord named Lager and his wife Duda donated to the Nazarius Monastery at Lorsch
(near Heppenheim
) under Richbodo's abbacy three farmyards, as many subsistence farms and five bound farmers in Mauventelina (Mandeln) in the Perfgau, whose political and ecclesiastical centre was Breidenbach.
This old village, under the name Moyndille, lasted until at least 1298, but the village's downfall eventually came, presumably as a result of a dispute between the Landgrave
s of Hesse and the Counts of Nassau, putting the date of the destruction sometime between 1433 and 1443. The village lay waste, though, for hardly any longer than half a century, for in 1489, about a kilometre south of where the old village had stood, came the refounding of Mandeln by the widow von Hutzmanns Heinz with her son Henn, and Gerlach, a certain Mr. Palmenie's son-in-law from Roth in Hesse.
The population grew steadily, with the odd slight swing, between 1489 and 2005. The greatest change, and the only major one in a short time, came in 1597 when the population fell from about 100 to about 20 owing to the Plague
. A greater than average rise in population was seen in the 1970s due to the eviction of the weekend cottage area of Ebachseite and the arrival of guest workers'
families. An upswing also came with German Reunification
and the inflow of ethnic German
s from the former Soviet Union
. In 2004, there were 1430 people living in Mandeln in 450 houses.
There were, however, people living in the area much longer ago. About 1912, the Reverend Karl Nebe, with sponsorship from councillor of commerce and local landowner Gustav Jung, and under the leadership of the State Museum in Wiesbaden
, carried out a number of digs around the Ley (≈ cliff or crag). Ceramic
objects, tool
s and jewellery
were unearthed from what turned out to be a ringwall, as these structures are known, from Celt
ic times, between 450 and 250 BC, in the time of the La Tène culture
.
Rittershausen's first documentary mention came in 1344 when the Mann- und Zinsbuch der Herren von Bicken ("Man and Interest Book of the Lords of Bicken") mentioned that in Ruderszhausen disz seyt der Bach (ie "this side of the brook"), the Lords were entitled to Groß- und Kleinzehnt (great and small tithe
s).
Within the fields attached to Rittershausen once lay the villages of Langenbach, Dunnenbach, Hilgeshausen, and possibly also Kirsebach. Nobody quite knows when these places were abandoned, but according to the aforesaid Reverend Karl Nebe, who was reporting local oral history, Langenbach was destroyed by the Plague, and the last few survivors moved to Rittershausen. Langenbach is mentioned in a list of nobles from about 1400, but in the record of the sale of the court district of Ewersbach by the Lords of Bicken to the Counts of Nassau, Langenbach is not mentioned, and there has been no further mention of it. To this day, there is a field called Dorfwiese – "Village Meadow" – even though the village disappeared centuries ago. These former villages' rural areas are now attached to Rittershausen.
and Catholic
church parishes, the Theological Seminary and the Allianz-Mission (Evangelical missionary society), part of the Bund Freier evangelischer Gemeinden in Deutschland (League of Free Evangelical Communities in Germany) have their head offices in Ewersbach. Moreover, there are many clubs.
Lahn-Dill-Kreis
Lahn-Dill is a Kreis in the west of Hesse, Germany. Neighboring districts are Siegen-Wittgenstein, Marburg-Biedenkopf, Gießen, Wetteraukreis, Hochtaunuskreis, Limburg-Weilburg, Westerwaldkreis.-History:...
in Hesse
Hesse
Hesse or Hessia is both a cultural region of Germany and the name of an individual German state.* The cultural region of Hesse includes both the State of Hesse and the area known as Rhenish Hesse in the neighbouring Rhineland-Palatinate state...
, Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
.
Geography
The community is located in a valley of the same name, only a few kilometres east of the border with North Rhine-WestphaliaNorth Rhine-Westphalia
North Rhine-Westphalia is the most populous state of Germany, with four of the country's ten largest cities. The state was formed in 1946 as a merger of the northern Rhineland and Westphalia, both formerly part of Prussia. Its capital is Düsseldorf. The state is currently run by a coalition of the...
.
Rittershausen has 952 inhabitants, representing 14.2% of Dietzhölztal's population (as of 31 December 2005), making it the constituent community with the smallest population, but with a rural area of 1 847 ha (Dietzhölztal: 3 744 ha), that is, 49.3%, Rittershausen is almost as big as the three other communities of Ewersbach, Mandeln and Steinbrücken put together. The reason for this relates to what happened in the Late Middle Ages
Late Middle Ages
The Late Middle Ages was the period of European history generally comprising the 14th to the 16th century . The Late Middle Ages followed the High Middle Ages and preceded the onset of the early modern era ....
(see History below).
Neighbouring communities
Dietzhölztal borders in the northwest on the town of NetphenNetphen
Netphen is a town in the Siegen-Wittgenstein district, in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. It lies on the river Sieg, roughly 7 km northeast of Siegen.-Location:...
, in the north on the town of Bad Laasphe
Bad Laasphe
Bad Laasphe is a town in North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, in the Siegen-Wittgenstein district.-Location:The town of Bad Laasphe lies in the upper Lahn Valley, near the stately home of Wittgenstein Castle in the former Wittgenstein district...
(both in Siegen-Wittgenstein
Siegen-Wittgenstein
Siegen-Wittgenstein is a Kreis in the southeast of North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. Neighboring districts are Olpe, Hochsauerlandkreis, Waldeck-Frankenberg, Marburg-Biedenkopf, Lahn-Dill, Westerwaldkreis, Altenkirchen.-History:...
district in North Rhine-Westphalia), in the east on the community of Breidenbach
Breidenbach
Breidenbach is a community in the west of Marburg-Biedenkopf district in Hesse, Germany.-Neighbouring communities:*Bad Laasphe*Biedenkopf*Dautphetal*Eschenburg*Steffenberg-Community divisions:...
(Marburg-Biedenkopf
Marburg-Biedenkopf
Marburg-Biedenkopf is a Kreis in the west of Hesse, Germany. Neighboring districts are Waldeck-Frankenberg, Schwalm-Eder, Vogelsbergkreis, Gießen, Lahn-Dill, Siegen-Wittgenstein.- History :...
), in the southeast on the community of Eschenburg
Eschenburg
Eschenburg is a community in the Lahn-Dill-Kreis in Hesse, Germany. The community inherited its name from nearby Eschenburg mountain.-Geography:...
, and in the southwest on the town of Haiger
Haiger
Haiger is a country town in the Lahn-Dill-Kreis in Hesse, Germany. The nearest city is Siegen, about 25 km north of Haiger.-Location:Haiger lies about 5 km west of Dillenburg, and 20 km southeast of Siegen on the eastern edge of the Westerwald range, near where the three states of...
(both in the Lahn-Dill-Kreis).
Constituent communities
The community consists of the following centres:- Ewersbach
- Mandeln
- Rittershausen
- Steinbrücken
History
In the Middle AgesMiddle Ages
The Middle Ages is a periodization of European history from the 5th century to the 15th century. The Middle Ages follows the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 and precedes the Early Modern Era. It is the middle period of a three-period division of Western history: Classic, Medieval and Modern...
, the upper Dietzhölze Valley (German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
: Dietzhölztal – the community's namesake), owing to its great number of trees, was an important centre for metal production. The ore
Ore
An ore is a type of rock that contains minerals with important elements including metals. The ores are extracted through mining; these are then refined to extract the valuable element....
s were mined in the Dillenburg
Dillenburg
Dillenburg is a town in Hesse's Gießen region in Germany. The town was formerly the seat of the old Dillkreis district, which is now part of the Lahn-Dill-Kreis....
area and smelted
Smelting
Smelting is a form of extractive metallurgy; its main use is to produce a metal from its ore. This includes iron extraction from iron ore, and copper extraction and other base metals from their ores...
in furnaces in the Dietzhölze Valley. Thus the "Hammerweiher" was dammed up at Steinbrücken. Even today, a few metalworking companies are still represented in the Dietzhölze Valley, among them Kreck Metallwarenfabrik GmbH in Rittershausen.
Ewersbach
As of 1 January 2004, Ewersbach had 3,329 inhabitants. It was first documented mention under the name Ebirspach in 1302. Ewersbach itself was an amalgamation of three former villages, Bergebersbach, Straßebersbach, and Neuhütte. The last-named former village's name means "new foundry", reflecting the area's traditional industry.Mandeln
Mandeln, with 1200 years of history behind it, is one of the district's oldest villages. It had its first documentary mention on 13 July 800 according to the Lorsch CodexLorsch codex
The Lorsch Codex is an important historical document created between about 1175 to 1195 AD in the Monastery of Saint Nazarius in Lorsch, Germany. It consists of 460 pages in large format containing more than 3800 entries...
(Bayerisches Hauptstaatsarchiv, HL Mainz 19, folg. 210 v. [12th century]). A landlord named Lager and his wife Duda donated to the Nazarius Monastery at Lorsch
Lorsch
Lorsch is a town in the Bergstraße district in Hesse, Germany, 60 km south of Frankfurt. Lorsch is well known for the Lorsch Abbey, which has been named a World Heritage Site.-Location:...
(near Heppenheim
Heppenheim
Heppenheim is the seat of Bergstraße district in Hesse, Germany, lying on the Bergstraße on the edge of the Odenwald.- Location :...
) under Richbodo's abbacy three farmyards, as many subsistence farms and five bound farmers in Mauventelina (Mandeln) in the Perfgau, whose political and ecclesiastical centre was Breidenbach.
This old village, under the name Moyndille, lasted until at least 1298, but the village's downfall eventually came, presumably as a result of a dispute between the Landgrave
Landgrave
Landgrave was a title used in the Holy Roman Empire and later on by its former territories. The title refers to a count who had feudal duty directly to the Holy Roman Emperor...
s of Hesse and the Counts of Nassau, putting the date of the destruction sometime between 1433 and 1443. The village lay waste, though, for hardly any longer than half a century, for in 1489, about a kilometre south of where the old village had stood, came the refounding of Mandeln by the widow von Hutzmanns Heinz with her son Henn, and Gerlach, a certain Mr. Palmenie's son-in-law from Roth in Hesse.
The population grew steadily, with the odd slight swing, between 1489 and 2005. The greatest change, and the only major one in a short time, came in 1597 when the population fell from about 100 to about 20 owing to the Plague
Bubonic plague
Plague is a deadly infectious disease that is caused by the enterobacteria Yersinia pestis, named after the French-Swiss bacteriologist Alexandre Yersin. Primarily carried by rodents and spread to humans via fleas, the disease is notorious throughout history, due to the unrivaled scale of death...
. A greater than average rise in population was seen in the 1970s due to the eviction of the weekend cottage area of Ebachseite and the arrival of guest workers'
Foreign worker
A foreign worker is a person who works in a country other than the one of which he or she is a citizen. The term migrant worker as discussed in the migrant worker page is used in a particular UN resolution as a synonym for "foreign worker"...
families. An upswing also came with German Reunification
German reunification
German reunification was the process in 1990 in which the German Democratic Republic joined the Federal Republic of Germany , and when Berlin reunited into a single city, as provided by its then Grundgesetz constitution Article 23. The start of this process is commonly referred by Germans as die...
and the inflow of ethnic German
Ethnic German
Ethnic Germans historically also ), also collectively referred to as the German diaspora, refers to people who are of German ethnicity. Many are not born in Europe or in the modern-day state of Germany or hold German citizenship...
s from the former Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. In 2004, there were 1430 people living in Mandeln in 450 houses.
Rittershausen
For Rittershausen's age, one must look at historical evidence stretching across the whole time period from the 8th to 13th centuries. The old form of the name, Rudershusz, the favoured location in the Dietzhölze Valley, and the village's persistence even during the period of abandonments (due to an agrarian depression) in the Late Middle Ages all suggest that Rittershausen was founded in the 9th century, or at the latest, the 10th.There were, however, people living in the area much longer ago. About 1912, the Reverend Karl Nebe, with sponsorship from councillor of commerce and local landowner Gustav Jung, and under the leadership of the State Museum in Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden
Wiesbaden is a city in southwest Germany and the capital of the federal state of Hesse. It has about 275,400 inhabitants, plus approximately 10,000 United States citizens...
, carried out a number of digs around the Ley (≈ cliff or crag). Ceramic
Ceramic
A ceramic is an inorganic, nonmetallic solid prepared by the action of heat and subsequent cooling. Ceramic materials may have a crystalline or partly crystalline structure, or may be amorphous...
objects, tool
Tool
A tool is a device that can be used to produce an item or achieve a task, but that is not consumed in the process. Informally the word is also used to describe a procedure or process with a specific purpose. Tools that are used in particular fields or activities may have different designations such...
s and jewellery
Jewellery
Jewellery or jewelry is a form of personal adornment, such as brooches, rings, necklaces, earrings, and bracelets.With some exceptions, such as medical alert bracelets or military dog tags, jewellery normally differs from other items of personal adornment in that it has no other purpose than to...
were unearthed from what turned out to be a ringwall, as these structures are known, from Celt
Celt
The Celts were a diverse group of tribal societies in Iron Age and Roman-era Europe who spoke Celtic languages.The earliest archaeological culture commonly accepted as Celtic, or rather Proto-Celtic, was the central European Hallstatt culture , named for the rich grave finds in Hallstatt, Austria....
ic times, between 450 and 250 BC, in the time of the La Tène culture
La Tène culture
The La Tène culture was a European Iron Age culture named after the archaeological site of La Tène on the north side of Lake Neuchâtel in Switzerland, where a rich cache of artifacts was discovered by Hansli Kopp in 1857....
.
Rittershausen's first documentary mention came in 1344 when the Mann- und Zinsbuch der Herren von Bicken ("Man and Interest Book of the Lords of Bicken") mentioned that in Ruderszhausen disz seyt der Bach (ie "this side of the brook"), the Lords were entitled to Groß- und Kleinzehnt (great and small tithe
Tithe
A tithe is a one-tenth part of something, paid as a contribution to a religious organization or compulsory tax to government. Today, tithes are normally voluntary and paid in cash, cheques, or stocks, whereas historically tithes were required and paid in kind, such as agricultural products...
s).
Within the fields attached to Rittershausen once lay the villages of Langenbach, Dunnenbach, Hilgeshausen, and possibly also Kirsebach. Nobody quite knows when these places were abandoned, but according to the aforesaid Reverend Karl Nebe, who was reporting local oral history, Langenbach was destroyed by the Plague, and the last few survivors moved to Rittershausen. Langenbach is mentioned in a list of nobles from about 1400, but in the record of the sale of the court district of Ewersbach by the Lords of Bicken to the Counts of Nassau, Langenbach is not mentioned, and there has been no further mention of it. To this day, there is a field called Dorfwiese – "Village Meadow" – even though the village disappeared centuries ago. These former villages' rural areas are now attached to Rittershausen.
Institutions
Aside from the EvangelicalEvangelical Church in Germany
The Evangelical Church in Germany is a federation of 22 Lutheran, Unified and Reformed Protestant regional church bodies in Germany. The EKD is not a church in a theological understanding because of the denominational differences. However, the member churches share full pulpit and altar...
and Catholic
Catholic
The word catholic comes from the Greek phrase , meaning "on the whole," "according to the whole" or "in general", and is a combination of the Greek words meaning "about" and meaning "whole"...
church parishes, the Theological Seminary and the Allianz-Mission (Evangelical missionary society), part of the Bund Freier evangelischer Gemeinden in Deutschland (League of Free Evangelical Communities in Germany) have their head offices in Ewersbach. Moreover, there are many clubs.