Erzhausen is a village in southern 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...

. It is part of the district of Darmstadt-Dieburg

Darmstadt-Dieburg

Darmstadt-Dieburg is a Kreis in the south of Hesse, Germany. Neighboring districts are Offenbach, Aschaffenburg, Miltenberg, Odenwaldkreis, Bergstraße, Groß-Gerau, and the district-free city of Darmstadt, which it surrounds.-History:...

. It has about 7.000 inhabitants.

History

Settlement in the area dates back to about 1500 B.C., as shown by several cairn

Cairn

Cairn is a term used mainly in the English-speaking world for a man-made pile of stones. It comes from the or . Cairns are found all over the world in uplands, on moorland, on mountaintops, near waterways and on sea cliffs, and also in barren desert and tundra areas...

 burial sites found some kilometres west of the town.

The settlement itself is mentioned in documents from 900 A.D. onward under various names like 'Erardishusen', 'Erhartzhausen', 'Ebrichshusen' or 'Erndeshusen'. The oldest document of the Lorsch codex

Lorsch 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The Lorsch Codex is an important historical document created between about 1175 to 1195 AD in the Monastery of Saint Nazarius in Lorsch, Germany.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...

 names it as 'Erhartshausen' ('Houses of Erhart').

After remaining a mostly unimportant farming village until the early 20th century, it grew strongly after the railway line from Frankfurt

Frankfurt

Frankfurt am Main , commonly known simply as Frankfurt, is the largest city in the German state of Hesse and the fifth-largest city in Germany, with a 2010 population of 688,249. The urban area had an estimated population of 2,300,000 in 2010...

 to Darmstadt

Darmstadt

Darmstadt is a city in the Bundesland of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Rhine Main Area.The sandy soils in the Darmstadt area, ill-suited for agriculture in times before industrial fertilisation, prevented any larger settlement from developing, until the city became the seat...

 was built several kilometers to the east of it. The habitation spread out towards it, and workers employed in the nearby cities (which could now be reached a lot easier) settled here.

Today, it is still mostly a residential village, with some commerce and office activities. There is a small seminary of the German Pentecostalism

Pentecostalism

Pentecostalism is a diverse and complex movement within Christianity that places special emphasis on a direct personal experience of God through the baptism in the Holy Spirit, has an eschatological focus, and is an experiential religion. The term Pentecostal is derived from Pentecost, the Greek...

movement situated in the town.