Ehweiler
Ehweiler is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Kusel-Altenglan, whose seat is in Kusel.
Geography
Location
The municipality lies 5 km southwest of Kusel some 330 m above sea level in a hollow of the Korbach, which rises in the municipality's west from several springs, and empties in the municipality's southeast into the Albessbach. In the municipal area's north, another stream flows parallel to the Korbach in the Ehweiler Grund, which also forms the municipal limit. The heights around the village climb up to almost 400 m above sea level, and beyond the municipal limit reach higher than 400 m. In the southwest and south, Autobahn A 62 touches the municipal limit. The municipal area measures 360 ha, of which 33 ha is wooded.Neighbouring municipalities
Ehweiler borders in the north on the town of Kusel, in the east on the municipality of Schellweiler, in the south on the municipality of Konken, in the west on the municipality of Albessen and in the northwest on the municipality of Pfeffelbach.Municipality’s layout
The village of Ehweiler is made up of two parts of roughly the same size, one north of the Korbach and one south. These may once have been two settled areas on a road running through this spot, but nowadays, the village's structure is rather more like a clump village.History
Antiquity
Bearing witness to Stone Age human habitation in the Ehweiler area are various archaeological finds. Unearthed on the Ameshübel northwest of Ehweiler – actually beyond the municipal limit and into Albessen’s municipal area – on land that was later settled by Gallo-Romans was an agate borer, which is now kept by the Office for the Study of Archaeological Monuments in Speyer. Within Ehweiler's own municipal area lie four barrows in the forest and on meadowland northeast of the village, laid out from east to west, whose origins are thus far undetermined. As early as the 19th century, there was apparently a Roman find, namely a stone with a Latin inscription, whose whereabouts are, however, unknown today. In 1957, forestry workers discovered foundations that likely stem from a Roman settlement. The same site yielded nails, potsherds and bits of brick, which were given to the Kusel local history museum.Middle Ages
Ehweiler lay in the so-called Remigiusland. The local chronicler, Rainer Dick, tried to link the village's founding to its founder's name, as the name Agio or Ago was already customary by the 5th century. Researchers Dolch and Greule, on the other hand, note that the great majority of the villages with names ending in —weiler arose no earlier than the 12th century. In 1316, Ehweiler had its first documentary mention, at a time by which it had certainly already existed for quite some time. According to the document in question, the pastor Luccemann from Kusel forwent his tithes from a whole series of villages, among them Ehweiler, choosing instead to grant them to the monastery on the Remigiusberg. The village's name otherwise does not appear at all throughout the time in which the Counts of Veldenz held sway, but only once again after 1444, when that comital house died out and the new rulers, the Counts Palatine of Zweibrücken, took over as successors to the Veldenzes.Modern times
The village of Ehweiler now shared a history with the Duchy of Palatinate-Zweibrücken, right up until that state was swept away by the events of the French Revolution. Like all villages in the Kusel region, Ehweiler, too, suffered heavily under the hardships and woe wrought by the Thirty Years' War and the Plague. In the late 16th century, there may have been well under one hundred people living in the village. While one or two deaths in the village were usual in most years, in the Plague Year 1583 alone, 34 people in Ehweiler died. In 1597, there were 12 Plague deaths, and in 1613, there were a further 13. Thus, by 1583, half the village's population must have died. Nevertheless, newcomers must have quickly settled in Ehweiler. In 1609, according to an Oberamt of Baumholder ecclesiastical visitation protocol, there were 56 inhabitants in 12 families with the following family heads: Censor Bastian Peters, David Strohschneider, farmers Hans Peter, Johannes Kickel, Hans Hannesen, Johannes Tury and Clas Veltin, linen weaver Abraham Heilmann, day labourers Hans Hinterer, Bartel Hans and Johannes Hansen and shepherd Hans Schwarz. Also listed were David Martin's widow and the widower Bartel Klein. In the years after 1613 until the worst devastation during the Thirty Years' War, a remarkable number of children were born in Ehweiler. In 1614 alone, it was seven. This owed itself to the young families among the newcomers who had settled. After 1635, the village had been laid waste, like almost all villages in the Kuseler Land, and then once again, new settlers came. Beginning in 1640, life returned to normalcy, but then came French King Louis XIV's wars of conquest, during which Ehweiler was once again burnt down, and there were the attendant considerable population losses. In the 18th century, life returned to normalcy once again, and this is when emigration began.Recent times
In the time of French rule between 1801 and 1814, Ehweiler lay in the Department of Sarre, the Arrondissement of Birkenfeld, the Canton of Kusel and the Mairie of Kusel. In 1814, the French withdrew from the German lands on the Rhine's left bank, and after Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo, the Congress of Vienna in 1816, after a transitional period, awarded the Baierische Rheinkreis, which was later known as the Bayerische Rheinpfalz, to the Kingdom of Bavaria, whose kings were descended from Charles II August, Zweibrücken's last duke. Ehweiler thus became Bavarian and there was yet another administrative arrangement. Ehweiler now lay in the Landkommissariat of Kusel and at the same time in the canton of Kusel. Cantons later had little meaning, and Bürgermeistereien were more important. Ehweiler now belonged to the Bürgermeisterei of Kusel. In the early 1930s, the Nazi Party was quite popular in Ehweiler. In the 1930 Reichstag elections, 22.4% of the local votes went to Adolf Hitler’s party. By the time of the 1933 Reichstag elections, after Hitler had already seized power, local support for the Nazis had swollen to 90%. Hitler’s success in these elections paved the way for his Enabling Act of 1933, thus starting the Third Reich in earnest. In the course of the 1968 administrative restructuring in Rhineland-Palatinate, the village was grouped into the Verbandsgemeinde of Kusel in 1972.Population development
Ehweiler was until quite recently a farming village with relatively few workers. Agriculture has since lost its dominant role, and most people now must seek their livelihoods outside the village. Ehweiler is thus said to be a rural residential community. The population rose steeply in the 18th century and earlier half of the 19th century, and thereafter remained relatively stable.The following table shows population development over the centuries for Ehweiler, with some figures broken down by religious denomination:
Municipality’s name
According to researchers Dolch and Greule, the form that the village's name took in the 1316 first documentary mention, Eygewilre, was a combination of the common placename ending —weiler, meaning “hamlet” or, originally, “homestead”, with the personal name Ago, which in the genitive case became Egin. This would mean that the name's original meaning was “Ago’s Homestead”. Other forms of the name over the ages have been as follows: Ewilre, Ewillr, Eheweiler.Vanished villages
A former village named Grehweiler, which appeared in a document as early as 1296, likely lay northwest of today's village of Ehweiler. The name Obergrewilre suggests that for a while at least, the village had two centres. Already by 1588, Greweiler no longer existed. Johannes Hoffmann mentioned that such a village had once lain in the Grehweiler Grund, likely the hollow now marked on the survey map as the Ehweiler Grund. Hoffmann, though, unambiguously described the land on both sides of the Korbach as Ehweiler Grund. This would yield a few hints as to just where the vanished village of Grehweiler lay. The former village of Stauderhof, whose name can still be seen in rural cadastral names in both Ehweiler and Albessen, quite likely lay within what are now Pfeffelbach’s limits. The vanished villages of Heupweiler and Dimschweiler likewise lay outside what are now Ehweiler's limits.Religion
Ehweiler lay in the Remigiusland and thereby was subject from its founding to the lordship of the Bishopric of Reims or the Abbey of Saint-Remi in Reims, although it belonged under ecclesiastical organization to the Archbishopric of Mainz. Under the principle of cuius regio, eius religio, all the inhabitants converted in the time of the Reformation, about 1537, to Lutheran beliefs. On Count Palatine Johannes I's orders in 1588, there was yet another conversion, this one to Calvinism. Thus the population was until the 1818 Palatine Union – which saw the merger of the Lutheran and Calvinist faiths – overwhelmingly Reformed. Other denominations, foremost among these Lutheranism and Catholicism, had been allowed since the end of the Thirty Years' War, but their numbers of followers were not very significant. Even before the Reformation, Ehweiler inhabitants had been attending church in Kusel. Today, the village's Protestants belong to the Evangelical parish and deaconry of Kusel, while the Catholics belong to the Catholic parish and deaconry of Kusel.Politics
Municipal council
The council is made up of 6 council members, who were elected by majority vote at the municipal election held on 7 June 2009, and the honorary mayor as chairman.Mayor
Ehweiler's mayor is Stefan Reusemann and his deputy is Walter Rech.Coat of arms
The German blazon reads: In Grün eine goldene Egge.The municipality's arms might in English heraldic language be described thus: Vert a harrow Or.
A harrow was shown on an Ehweiler municipal seal as early as 1753. It is meant as a canting charge, which arose from the mistaken belief that the village was named after a harrow, known in the local speech as an Ee or Ehe. As discussed above, the name much more likely comes from an early settler named Ago. Nevertheless, the harrow can be held to stand for the relatively fertile cropland around the village. The arms have been borne since 1983 when they were approved by the now defunct Rheinhessen-Pfalz Regierungsbezirk administration in Neustadt an der Weinstraße.