Herschweiler-Pettersheim 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 Oberes Glantal.
Geography
Location Herschweiler-Pettersheim lies in the Western Palatinate in the upper Ohmbach valley, which forks to the northwest into the Langenbach valley and to the northeast into the Klingelbach hollow. At the fork, the Harzhöhe climbs from 275 m above sea level to a 372 m-high sloping terrace and onwards to an elevation of 412 m above sea level at the top. Because it is so windswept, four wind turbines were installed on the mountaintop in late 2001. The village's own elevation is 274 m above sea level.Herschweiler-Pettersheim's elevation As part of the North Palatine Uplands, the local natural environment is characterized by an extraordinarily intricately compartmentalized relief. It is marked by the constant alternation between jagged mountains and heights with sharply convex slopes west of the Ohmbach and less sharply convex slopes east thereof, along with relatively great topographic variance. Herschweiler-Pettersheim is the most populous municipality in the Verbandsgemeinde of Glan-Münchweiler. The municipal area measures 747 ha, of which 203 ha is wooded.Location
Geology Geologically, Herschweiler-Pettersheim lies on layers of lower rotliegend, in particular the Middle Kusel Group (ruk2), which is made up mainly of sandstones and arkoses along with siltstones, claystones and conglomerates. There are also limestone deposits, which were once quarried at a mine on the Bockhof as well as at the lime kiln on Landesstraße 350. The lower rotliegend soils are as a rule sandy-loamy to loamy-clayey with clayey-marly bits, as well as being deeply and amply aerated. Thus the plateaux and flat slopes are used as cropland (244 ha), the expanses in the dale and the damp as well as steeper and sunny slopes as hay meadows, grazing land or meadow orchards (all together 179 ha of grassland), and the stony mountain ridges, the pathless, steep slopes and gorges for forestry (95.7 ha municipal woodland and 99.4 ha private woodland). The 437 m-high Hühnerkopf, the predominant peak in the mountain ridge east of the village is a butte formed by a subvolcanic intrusion. The sill formed until 1972 the basis for the local hard-stone industry.Geology
Neighbouring municipalities Herschweiler-Pettersheim borders in the north on the municipality of Konken, in the east on the municipality of Wahnwegen, in the southeast on the municipality of Steinbach am Glan, in the south on the municipality of Ohmbach, in the west on the municipality of Krottelbach and in the northwest on the municipality of Langenbach.
Municipality's layout Until the end of the Second World War in 1945, Herschweiler-Pettersheim's built-up area stretched mainly along both sides of the thoroughfare, Landesstraße 350, west of the Ohmbach. From the village's north end (280 m above sea level) to the former fire station at the crossing of Landesstraßen 350 and 352 in the south (269 m above sea level), the village has a length of more than 1.75 km, and if the distance to the way out of the village at the Bockhof is counted, this rises to more than 2.5 km. Until the mid 20th century, Herschweiler-Pettersheim was a typical linear village (by some definitions, a "thorpe"), and one of the longest villages in the Kusel district. As early as then, however, the side dales branching off the Ohmbach to the west were already settled up to about 200 m in, the Kerb valley in "die Hohl", the "Gigum" in the Geilbach valley and the old Ducal road (Herzogstraße) in the Ehrsbach valley, which in feudal times led from Schloss Pettersheim over the heights towards the Oster valley to Zweibrücken. East of the Ohmbach, the built-up area reached thinly up the old Konker Straße ("Konken Road"). Good conditions for building houses and commercial buildings together with springs were found there in a sheltered location at the dale's edge, which was rich in groundwater, on both sides of the old road link through to today's Kreisstraße 20 towards Wahnwegen. Sewer-laying work about 1980 unearthed a layered log road about one metre deep under the roadway that had been used as a link between the residential areas "in der Hohl" and "Im Eck" in Herschweiler's old village core across the wet and marshy Ohmbach valley floor. There was even expansion not far from Schloss Pettersheim on a road link across the dale linking two roads running through the heights. This link led to a Waldecke ("forest corner") on the Hühnerkopf, and then onwards to the Roman road east of Wahnwegen. In this part of the village, formerly known as Walleck, and nowadays as Wallheck (both derived from Waldecke), with its houses set at odd angles to each other and its maze of lanes, one can still make out the original layout of the place despite all the conversions and modernization. The agricultural homesteads on the Bockhof were built at a U-shaped valley, the "Kirschen-Grund" ("Cherry Ground"), which ends here, and on today's Landesstraße 352. After the Second World War with its great loss of male inhabitants (67 had fallen in the war and 29 had gone missing from a village of 1,100 inhabitants; in the First World War, 24 had fallen), the economic downturn, the Allied occupation and currency depreciation came a time of general, lively building activity once the Wirtschaftswunder had begun and the prisoners of war had come home (the last one came home in 1950). Thus, the parts of the village had fully grown together and also grown in breadth. Parallel to Hauptstraße ("Main Street") after the war, a linking roadway within the municipality, later known as Kirchenstraße ("Church Street"), was built up as far as the location of the Evangelical church. The church itself was built in 1953 and 1954 at an exposed spot east of the Ohmbach in the highest part of the village core. Moreover, a new building zone filled in the gap between Bockhof and Pettersheim. On the riverside flats in 1973, the company Chalou GmbH built a clothing factory. Gaps on Bockhofstraße were also filled. A new building zone called Buchrech opened east of the church as the beginning of a new residential neighbourhood along a second street running parallel to Hauptstraße, at mid-slope up the Hühnerkopf's west flank. Yet another new building zone called "Am Hühnerrech" reaching to Seitersstraße, followed, which has since 2003 been growing to the east into the countryside. For urban growth, this is a very questionable development both because of the spillover into residential land, the demographic development and the high land consumption on the one hand and because of the threatening degradation of the village core on the other. The people who originally lived on the village thoroughfare move away from the core and settle towards the edge of the village in a pleasant neighbourhood, just as happens in other villages, leaving the houses along the thoroughfare empty and unused. In 2003, six houses in the Upper Village (Oberdorf) alone stood empty. Further houses will follow owing to the population's age structure. An older, empty pair of semi-detached houses next door to the inn "Zum Hirschen" were torn down in 2003. Even in the village centre, a former big department store that had sold clothing and food had to give way to today's village square. Despite stagnating and declining population growth, the built-up area's outer edge, and the village's street, watermain and sewer networks are all being expanded, which could have major consequences for later generations. For this reason, renewal of the inner village might be more important than opening new building zones on former meadows. As early as the time between 1960 and 1980, many houses in Herschweiler-Pettersheim had floors added and thereby were made more suitable to the demand for more living space. Even the graveyard laid out in the Geilbach valley in 1839 has had to be repeatedly expanded. Since the sporting ground built in 1928 in the "Wallheck" also served the municipality as a fairground in the years after the war, a new one was built specially for the village's sport club in the years 1955-1957 in the "Wallhecksdell". A new clubhouse with changing cubicles and a room for business was dedicated in 1967. Work on a new grass playing field was begun in 1975. Owing to improper grading, the project met with great and long-lasting problems with landslides, such that the grass playing field could only be dedicated in 1984. The masses of earth that had slid down the slope, which had even shoved the forest floor, complete with trees, ahead of them, had to be removed to the edge of the village.Municipality's layout
History
Antiquity According to Dr. Karlwerner Kaiser, formerly of Speyer Archaeological Monument Care (Archäologische Denkmalpflege Speyer), knowledge and archaeological finds thus far gathered for the area within Herschweiler-Pettersheim's limits give no clue to any time before the 3rd or 4th century BC. The oldest find witnessed to date has been a bronze disk neckring. The still unknown recovery site is presumably a worn-down barrow from the 4th century BC. The find may well point to a Celtic estate, perhaps a "knightly estate", in the Ohmbach valley. Somewhat more than 200 years less old is a find consisting of a Celtic coin, which came from an unknown spot within municipal limits. It could bear witness, as a buried artifact from a settlement in the "later, pre-Christian Bronze Age" of the 1st or 2nd century BC, to a source in the floor of the dale or on the Ohmbach valley's slopes. It could somehow be linked to an ancient road that ran through the dale. Eventually, the digs at the Roman-era villa rustica on Seitersstraße in 1961 led to the unearthing of ceramics from a settlement of the "later, pre-Christian Iron Age" right near the Roman site. This points to a yet-to-be-unearthed Celtic estate at this spot dating from the 1st century BC, a forerunner to the already known Roman estate, which was built of stone. A Celtic settlement in the Ohmbach valley around today's Herschweiler-Pettersheim from the 3rd or 4th century BC melding into Roman times in the Palatinate is the picture that emerges from this. Even the name "Hühnerkopf", borne by the peak that looms over the village to the east, can be traced to the description Hünenkopf (or in Middle High German, Hunnenkopf – that is, "Hun's Head", whereas the modern form means "Chicken's Head") and is therefore a linguistic clue as to an ancient population and its particular connection with the mountain. The building of the villa rustica from Roman times after the beginning of the Christian Era on a graded layer of débris, unearthed in the years 1959-1961, in which building remnants and potsherds were found, proves that in the 2nd century AD, a great wooden building with clay-filled timber framing once stood at the spot, but later burnt down before being replaced by the Roman complex. The ceramics unearthed 30 m behind the villa rustica show that there was a Celtic settlement tradition from the "later, pre-Christian Iron Age" into what was locally Roman times, lasting into the latter half of the 3rd century AD. After the Germanic invasions and the villa's destruction in the late 3rd century, it is believed that the local area was not settled, and that virgin forest once again sprouted up on the site.Antiquity
Middle Ages