Schneppenbach

Coat of arms

Schneppenbach

Location of Schneppenbach within Bad Kreuznach district

Coordinates: 49°50′40″N 7°24′20″E / 49.84444°N 7.40556°ECoordinates: 49°50′40″N 7°24′20″E / 49.84444°N 7.40556°E

Country

Government

• Mayor

Thomas Geib

Area

• Total

3.30 km² (1.27 sq mi)

Elevation

424 m (1,391 ft)

Population (2015-12-31)

• Total

232

• Density

70/km² (180/sq mi)

CET/CEST (UTC+1/+2)

55608

06544

Website

Schneppenbach is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Bad Kreuznach district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Kirn-Land, whose seat is in the town of Kirn, although this lies outside the Verbandsgemeinde.

Schneppenbach lies in the southern Hunsrück on the western edge of the Lützelsoon ridge and east of (above) the Hahnenbach valley. The nearest major towns are Idar-Oberstein (17 km to the southsouthwest) and Simmern (17 km to the northnortheast). Schneppenbach sits at an elevation of 424 m above sea level.

Clockwise from the north, Schneppenbach’s neighbours are the municipalities of Woppenroth, which lies in the neighbouring Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis, Bruschied, which lies in the Bad Kreuznach district, and Bundenbach, which lies in the neighbouring Birkenfeld district.

From the Early Middle Ages, Schneppenbach belonged to a major landhold of Saint Maximin’s Imperial Abbey at Trier. The 2,742-hectare landhold comprised, besides the centres of Blickersau and Kaffeld, which later vanished, the villages of Woppenroth, Bundenbach, Schneppenbach, Bruschied and the main centre and parish seat of Hausen bei Rhaunen. Until the 18th century, Schneppenbach was administratively tightly bound with the Schmidtburg (castle), which nowadays stands within the village’s municipal limits. The castle, whose beginnings go back at least as far as 929, and possibly as far as 926, is one of the oldest in the Nahe-Hunsrück region and is believed to have been the family seat of the Counts in the Nahegau, the Emichones. Their coheirs and rightful successors, the Waldgraves, owned the castle in the 12th and 13th centuries. Internal Waldgravial family disputes, however, resulted in ownership being transferred about 1330 to Archbishop and Elector of Trier Baldwin of Luxembourg. Under Baldwin, the castle was expanded, and in the time that followed, it became the seat of the Electoral-Trier Amt of Schmidtburg. While Bundenbach was the only village in the Amt that stood wholly under Electoral-Trier sovereignty, Bruschied and Schneppenbach formed a condominium and belonged jointly to the Electorate of Trier and the Knights of Wildberg. When the Amt of Schmidtburg was pledged to the Electoral-Trier Amtmann Nikolaus von Schmidtburg sometime before 1554, he temporarily introduced Calvinism. By 1626, though, the villages had reverted to Catholicism. In 1563, there were nine households in Schneppenbach, five in 1684 and eleven in 1715 that belonged to the Electoral-Trier Amt of Schmidtburg. About 1650, records show that the local lord was the knight Sir Cratz von Scharffenstein. Schneppenbach formed together with Bruschied an Ingericht (local court district). The two villages’ inhabitants only owned one chapel, and attended the main services in Bundenbach. In 1794, during the War of the First Coalition, the German lands on the Rhine’s left bank were occupied by the French, and in 1798, the region was reorganized on the French administrative model by the French Directory. With this French administrative reform, the Amt of Schmidtburg was dissolved. Schneppenbach passed to the then newly founded Mairie (“Mayoralty”) of Kirn in the Arrondissement of Simmern and the Department of Rhin-et-Moselle, remaining there for the rest of French Revolutionary and Napoleonic times. Then, in 1817, it passed to the Bürgermeisterei (“Mayoralty”) of Gemünden in the Prussian Simmern district. In the course of administrative restructuring in Rhineland-Palatinate after the Second World War, Schneppenbach was assigned to the Verbandsgemeinde of Kirn-Land.

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Wikipedia