Blankenrath

The name “Blankenrath” means bare, white clearing. It is called, after a former daily reality in the municipality, “The clearing at the white stone” (meant here is the former quarry on the mill path).[2]

Blankenrath's history reaches back to the 9th and 10th centuries, to a time when sickness and wars gave rise to a need for people to seek homes away from the crowded river valleys, such as the nearby Moselle valley. According to local lore, the village arose out of three estates, named the Metzenhof, the Geiershof and the Rumershof.

Witnessed in history, however, is Gerlach von Braunshorn's enfeoffment with the Blankenrath court in 1347 by Count Johann von Kleve. In 1362, upon Gerlach's death, it passed by marriage into the Winneburg Counts’ ownership. Later, the landlordship was shared by the Electorate of Trier, the Counts of Sponheim and the Counts of Beilstein. This arrangement began when two of Gerlach's grandsons, namely Gerlach and Cuno von Winneburg, acquired their grandfather's old rights. They could not keep them, however, nor meet their obligations owing to a crushing debt load. Thus, they pledged their holdings to the Electorate of Trier in 1375 for 17,000 Gulden. Their descendants did not pay off their pledge debt to the Electorate of Trier – which was 17,400 Gulden with the interest added – until 164 years after the original transaction, by which time there was no hope of their family's ever regaining its former standing in the community. The Electorate's and the Sponheim comital family's influence had grown so great, that it had become impossible for the now supposedly debt-free Winneburg-Beilstein family (as it was now known) to wield any power.

In 1690, the whole village was destroyed in the ravages of war. Only three farms on the village's outskirts were spared this calamity.

Meanwhile, disputes over who had the lordly rights in Blankenrath continued as time wore on. All together, the disagreement lasted more than two and a half centuries, even reaching the Imperial Chamber Court in Wetzlar, which failed to resolve the matter. The dispute was finally made moot when the Holy Roman Empire and all its governing institutions, including all the lordly families and the Imperial Chamber Court, were swept away in the late 18th and early 19th centuries in the wake of the French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic intervention.

Beginning in 1794, Blankenrath lay under French rule. The neighbouring village of Reidenhausen, which hitherto had formed together with Blankenrath a single municipality, was separated. In 1814 Blankenrath was assigned to the Kingdom of Prussia at the Congress of Vienna, and the Amt of Blankenrath was founded. Since 1946, Blankenrath has been part of the then newly founded state of Rhineland-Palatinate. Under the Verwaltungsvereinfachungsgesetz (“Administration Simplification Law”) of 18 July 1970, with effect from 7 November 1970, the municipality was grouped into the Verbandsgemeinde of Zell, losing its Amt status in the process once the municipality of Mastershausen had been transferred to the Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis, precluding any grounds for Blankenrath to have its own Verbandsgemeinde.[3]

• Municipality’s official webpage (in German)