Kirn
Kirn is a town in the Bad Kreuznach district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It is the seat of the Verbandsgemeinde Kirner Land. Kirn is a middle centre serving an area on the Nahe and in the Hunsrück.
Geography
Location
Kirn lies in a landscape characterized by the Nahe valley and the valley of the Hahnenbach, cut deeply into the Lützelsoon, roughly 10 km northeast of Idar-Oberstein and 30 km west of Bad Kreuznach. The valley floors are heavily settled in places, whereas the steep slopes in the higher areas are mostly bare of buildings and decked with forest. Rising up above the woodland canopy in many places are freestanding quartzite crags. Particularly striking among these are the Oberhauser Felsen, the Kallenfels and the Wehlenfelsen north of the town. Flowing through the unhurried inner town is the Hahnenbach, which rises in the Hunsrück, and not too much farther downstream empties into the Nahe. Also characterizing the town's appearance is the quarry up from the town centre, which stretches eastwards all the way to the town limit.Land use
Kirn's municipal area measures 16.53 km2, and by percentages, the uses of this land break down thus:- Agriculture — 15.1
- Woodland — 51.9
- Open water — 2.4
- Residential and transport — 28.6
- Other — 2.0
Neighbouring municipalities
Constituent communities
Kirn's Stadtteile are the main centre, also called Kirn, and the two outlying centres of Kallenfels and Kirn-Sulzbach. Also belonging to Kirn are the outlying homesteads of Akvas Papiermühle, Cramersmühle, Füllmannsmühle, Hasenfels, Kallenfelser Hof, Kyrburg, Ölmühle Spielmann and Schleif-Mühle.Climate
Yearly precipitation in Kirn amounts to some 540 mm, which is rather low, falling below average for the precipitation chart for all Germany. Kirn lies alee of the surrounding uplands. The driest months are January and February. The most rainfall comes in August. Rainfall is, however, rather evenly spread across the whole year. Fog is very common for the colder season.History
The town of Kirn can look back on a very long history. It was founded at a river crossing near which several roads met. On 20 May 841, Kirn had its first documentary mention in a document from Fulda Abbey. Archaeological finds from Celtic and Roman times, however, point to a considerably greater age than that. The name Kirn is believed to be of Celtic origin. In the Fulda document mentioned above, the town was named as Chira. The name likely derives from the Celtic kyr, meaning 'water'. Meant here, of course, would be the Nahe and the Hahnenbach, which empties into it here, whose water apparently gave the town its name. The Nahe served then as an important transport route as well as supplying water for livestock and fish for people.The first settlement is believed to have lain on the bank of the Kyrbach, in an area today bordered by Gerbergasse and Langgasse, with the marketplace in the middle. In other words, at the crossroads, a market grew up. This was the seed from which the town's history sprouted. The roads leading over the heights brought the people of the Nahegau to this market town. The Marktmeile, within whose tightly defined boundaries no other market was allowed to be held, protected the markets and those who fed them in a tightly bordered area around the town. Great parts of the market town were held during the High Middle Ages by Saint Maximin's Abbey in Trier, which also held the market rights.
In 926, the Abbey gave three Frankish noblemen by way of exchange a hill suitable for use as a fortification, and they proceeded to build a castle there to defend their holdings against the Magyars. It came to be known as the Kyrburg. It seems that these noblemen's castle had passed by 966 to the rising family of the Emichones/Waldgraves. In the time that followed, these new owners bit by bit did the Abbey out of its rights, leaving it only with the market rights. In the 11th or 12th century, the rights to the market were transferred to the Lords of Stein, whose seat was on the "stones" in the Hahnenbach valley above what is now Kirn's outlying centre of Kallenfels. The Lords of Stein-Kallenfels were able to assert these rights until the 18th century, defending them first against the Waldgraves and later against their successors.
West of the market centre arose another settlement in the years that followed, obviously founded by the Waldgraves, which was called Altstadt, and for which town rights were being sought, as it were, to take the bread out of the market town's mouth. Town rights, though, were forthcoming to neither the Kyr settlement nor the Altstadt, even though the settlement on the Hahnenbach, beginning in 1335, was time and again in documents being called Stadt. Both the market centre and the Old Town were at least partly fortified. The names of the gates that stood at the ends of the thoroughfares are known. The last town gate was torn down in 1880 in the Old Town to make way for growing traffic. The Kyrbach's left bank was also built up. Standing here was the church, which if anything was part of an old royal estate. As a landhold of the Archbishopric of Mainz it became an outlying centre of a great rural chapter that comprised the rural clergy all the way over to the Simmern area.
Even after various divisions of inheritance, Kirn remained between 1258 and 1790 a joint holding of the Houses of Dhaun and Kyrburg. Despite its economic and ecclesiastical importance, Kirn had at its disposal since earliest times only a small municipal area, which even today has not changed. The vineyards strewn over the hills all about the town surely only provided for local demand. The scant, stony soils allowed no more than limited yields when farmed. Livestock raising, on the other hand, seems to have played a certain role. These circumstances favoured the growth of various handicrafts in the town.
Livestock raising, the low-lying oak forest right nearby and the water from the Nahe and the Kyr consequently led to the establishment of tanning and wool processing. Reports of a woollen weavers' guild crop up as early as 1359. The tanners' and tailors' guilds seem to have arisen about this time, too. The tanners, and the dyers, too, settled along the flat bank of the Hahnenbach. The later tanners' quarter between Gerbergasse and the Nahe only arose in modern times. Their products were marketed by both local people and those from farther afield, mainly at the four great yearly markets and the weekly markets. The houses around the marketplace had on their ground floors recesses in which local handicraftsmen would offer their wares for sale in their “shops”.
On the marketplace itself were, besides the two fountains, also lockable market stalls that could be hired by bakers, butchers and potters. On the Hahnenbach side of the square stood the 1508 town hall, which was torn down in 1849 to make way for what was even then a growing amount of traffic. The prison there once held the thirteen-year-old Johannes Bückler – better known as Schinderhannes – in 1796, but not for very long, for he quickly escaped. The townsfolk's self-assurance in those days showed itself in the establishment of civic institutions such as a bathing parlour and an infirmary. The great many donations to the Church bear witness to the people's wealth.
Around the church over on the Kyr's left bank stood clerics' houses as well as the Latin school, which was first mentioned in 1402, and which in the course of its history sent dozens of students to every university in Germany. Because the local lordships were somewhat less than decisive in their governance, the Reformation was introduced into the Waldgravial-Rhinegravial lands only in 1544 or 1545. Outwardly, the Kirn townsfolk's new self-assurance showed itself in the way they ended their own serfdom in 1600 by buying their freedom for 4,000 Rhenish guilders. It was many years, though, before the debt burden arising from this no longer weighed on the town's economy.
Kirn's and its economy's favourable growth came to a dead stop with the Thirty Years' War. Foreign fighters along with two Plague epidemics wrought havoc with the town, reducing its 230 families in 1616 to only 74 afterwards. These losses were somewhat offset by the arrival of newcomers from Lombardy, the Tyrol and the Engadin. These immigrants and their offspring quickly became a force not only in the town's economy but also in its cultural life. From the Family Englisch, who had come from the Davos area, sprang the painter Johann Georg Englisch, who did paintings in many churches over a broad area, and Johann Bernhard Englisch, who as a much sought-after ébéniste plied his trade as far away as Lake Geneva.
The latter half of the 17th century, though, brought Kirn many occupations in connection with French King Louis XIV's wars of conquest. The town sometimes had to put up with years-long occupations. This period ended with the Kyrburg's destruction in 1734, an event that the townsfolk surely also welcomed. After the House of Salm died out, the lordship over the Amt of Kirn and the half share of the town itself passed in 1743 to the line of Salm-Leuze. Together with his brother Phillip Joseph, Prince Johann Dominik Albert took over the lordship.
Johann Dominik was an enlightened, affable prince, who through future-oriented measures, such as building streets and boulevards, boosted the economy. Many of his master builder Thomas Petri's buildings still characterize Kirn's appearance, and the same is true for a number of the outlying villages that then belonged to the Oberamt. Particularly worthy of mention here are the winery on Kallenfelser Straße, the Piarist monastery and many official and private buildings throughout the town. Meanwhile, in 1767, Kirn received a town charter. Johann Dominik's nephew and successor Friedrich III ruined the country's finances with his impecunious ways of conducting his life, to the point at which the Reichskammergericht even imposed a bankruptcy régime on the town. In 1794, he met his end in Paris at the guillotine.
Beginning in 1797, the little state that was Kirn belonged, like all the German lands on the Rhine's left bank, to the French state. It formed together with a few outlying villages a mairie in the Arrondissements of France of Simmern in the Department of Rhin-et-Moselle. Kirn now became a town lying in the southwesternmost part of its department, thus cleaving it asunder from many of the formerly Salm-held areas that had once fed its economy. When the decisions made at the Congress of Vienna in 1814 and 1815 began to be implemented locally in 1817, things got even worse for Kirn as it was assigned to the Kreuznach district. To the west the town now bordered on the Birkenfeld district in the Grand Duchy of Oldenburg and to the south on the Meisenheim district in the Landgraviate of Hesse-Homburg. Thus, just beyond the last houses in town began foreign territory. The economic downfall arising from this situation could not be stopped.
Together with seven villages, Kirn now formed the Bürgermeisterei of Kirn, an arrangement that lasted until 1857 when, by Royal Cabinet Order, Kirn was granted the rank of town. Now, however, there was only one leader, the mayor, who held the reins of both the town and the now supposedly separate outlying villages. This "personal union" lasted until 1896.
Only after the fall of the customs barriers and the building of the Rhine-Nahe Railway was there once again an appreciable economic upswing. Leathermaking began to recover once the tanners, both those using bark tanning and those using mineral tanning, set up shop – sometimes jointly – in the area between the Nahe, the Hahnenbach and the millpond, after traditionally keeping their tanneries along the bank of the Hahnenbach.
After 1850, a few tanning families moved on and rose with new businesses in new locations, sometimes to worldwide importance. After the Rhine-Nahe Railway had been completed, not only leather products could be shipped to market, but so could the melaphyre being quarried at Kirn's quarries. With the rise of the brewery near the winery in 1863, the town eventually earned itself the title "Town of Leather, Stones and Beer". As industry grew, so too did the demand for manpower, and thus between 1850 and 1910, the town's population swelled from roughly 1,500 to 7,000.
This positive development was, however, interrupted by the upshot from the First World War, the runaway inflation and the Great Depression. Already in the 1920s and 1930s, many enterprises felt forced to restructure their production. New businesses came that contributed once again to a rise in Kirn's economic importance, and in the field of finishing small leather goods, to a rise in the town's prestige.
After the Second World War, there was another economic upswing, which brought along with it more population growth. Beginning in the 1960s, it was clear that another restructuring was needed. Since that time, no more tanning has been done in Kirn and even the small leather goods industry found itself undergoing changes. Instead of leather, plastic goods are now produced. With the amalgamation of the villages of Kallenfels and Kirnsulzbach in 1969, the population rose for a time above 10,000, only to shrink later on. Today, somewhat more than 8,000 people call Kirn home.