Mengerschied

Mengerschied is among the oldest places in the district. About 1080, Mengerschied had its first documentary mention as Mengezerodt. The name changed over the 15th and 16th centuries from Mengersroit to Mengersrade (1502), Mengerschitt (1584) and then Mengerschied (1785). The church named in the document was consecrated to the Apostles Philip and James and the holy virgin Saint Walpurga and was under the care of the Ravengiersburg Monastery. It was a parish church with baptismal rights, as witnessed to this day by the 15th-century baptismal font at the graveyard. The church itself became both the Protestants’ and the Catholics’ graveyard church after the Reformation, when the Protestants built their own church in the village. The graveyard church fell into disrepair during the 18th century.

Many Hunsrück knights and noble families had holdings in Mengersrode that over the centuries, through donations and sales, were transferred to the Ravengiersburg Monastery and the Amt of Koppenstein. Mengerschied belonged administratively to the provost's parish (Probstei) of Ravengiersburg, to the Oberamt of Simmern and to the like-named duchy, within which it was the biggest settlement, having in 1785 a church, two schools, three mills and 50 families.

As elsewhere in the Hunsrück, the Thirty Years' War decimated the population. Beginning in 1794, Mengerschied lay under French rule. In 1815 it was assigned to the Kingdom of Prussia at the Congress of Vienna. A catastrophic fire in 1841 that destroyed 28 buildings and led to a year of widespread hunger had the effect of making 50 persons from the village emigrate to Brazil, the United States, the United Kingdom and South Africa. The two world wars claimed more than 80 victims from among the village's men.

A great number of handicrafts, agriculture, forestry and slate mining were long the villagers’ main livelihoods, although with growing industrialization, many men were seeking work in the Saarland and the Ruhr area to finance their homes. The Second World War brought Mengerschied not only casualties but great damage from artillery fire. Since 1946, Mengerschied has been part of the then newly founded state of Rhineland-Palatinate. After the war, a whole new way of life came to the village's economy. The 400-hectare forest, the Hochwald – heavily damaged by the storm Wiebke in 1990 – and the hunting associated with it have long yielded income to finance municipal work. The Feldmark (a common noun, not a proper name), the area of farmland comprising some 450 ha and traditionally marked with boundary stones, was once worked by some 70 small farmers (1950), a number that has now shrunk to 4 full-time farmers.[3]

The majority of workers in Mengerschied is employed in the service sector. In the municipality itself, only a few craft businesses can still be found, such as bakers, butchers, carpenters and painters.[8]

The Soonwald Schlößchen (“Soonwald Little Castle”) run by Soonwald Schlößchen Bildungsstätte GmbH on Mengerschied's outskirts is the setting of the television series Die Bräuteschule 1958 (“The Brides’ School 1958”), made in April and May 2006 and first broadcast on ARD in January 2007, in which ten home economics students, within the framework of a “time travel” scenario, spend six weeks living under simulated conditions of the 1950s.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Mengerschied.

• Municipality’s official webpage (in German)