page_title: Kappel, Rhineland-Palatinate
section_title: History
hierarchical_section_title: Kappel, Rhineland-Palatinate / History
caption_attribution_description: Kappel im Hunsrück
context_page_description: Kappel is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Rhein-Hunsrück-Kreis in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Kirchberg, whose seat is in the like-named town.
context_section_description: In 1091, Kappel had its first documentary mention in a document from Henry IV, Holy Roman Emperor in which he donated holdings in the Hunsrück to the High Foundation in Speyer. The placename, the location and Roman archaeological finds in and around Kappel, however, make it clear that the village must be much older, even if there is no proof of continuous habitation through all that time. In the Middle Ages, the village belonged to the “Further” County of Sponheim. Beginning in 1794, Kappel lay under French rule. In 1814 it was assigned to the Kingdom of Prussia at the Congress of Vienna. Since 1946, it has been part of the then newly founded state of Rhineland-Palatinate.
  Right near the staggered intersection of Kastellauner Straße and Kirchberger Straße – a spot known as the Dreispitz (“three-point” or “tricorne”) – lies the village centre with the old Evangelical church from 1747 (as it says on the iron brackets on the tower) with mediaeval wall components, the bakehouse (called the Backes, a variant of the usual German word Backhaus) with its upper floor that housed the Catholic school's school room and teacher's dwelling until 1849, and two of the village's biggest homesteads with a guest parlour and guestrooms to let.
  On into the 1950s, the innkeeper was one of the few who still owned horses. Baptist, the farmhand (possibly the only one in the village in those days) at the homestead zur Krone, now given up as an agricultural concern but now restored as the municipality's Heimathaus (local museum), rode and worked with a horse and a draught ox, while most small farmers did the same with their dairy cows.
  An Evangelical one-room school was built in 1913, after the Gothic Revival Catholic church had been built nearby in 1898 and 1899. The last Catholic school in the village dated only from the time after the First World War, indeed from 1928, well into Weimar times. Today there are no longer any schools in Kappel. The last one, which was run as an interdenominational primary school, was dissolved on 1 August 1971. The church, which today is Evangelical, served from 1688 to 1898 both Evangelicals and Catholics under a simultaneum. Before this time, it had long been the preserve of the Evangelicals. When the simultaneum was instituted by higher authorities, the minister moved to Würrich, which was wholly Evangelical, and ministered to his congregation from there.
  The relations between denominations were and still are good. When the Catholic Church was being built, many Evangelicals donated money for the bells, for which favour they were also “rung out” by the Catholic Church when they died. The Evangelical congregation, nowadays numbering 232, was autonomous and parochially tied to Leideneck beginning in 1852, which had its own church, but no rectory. The Evangelical minister, who had taken up residence in Kappel once again in 1854, was responsible not only for his local parish, but also for Evangelicals in the “diaspora” – the overwhelmingly Catholic centres stretching down to the Moselle. Since 1976, Kappel has had no Evangelical minister and is now parochially tied to Kirchberg. The post of Catholic priest has been vacant since 1981, and the parish was in at first Biebern’s hands, and is now in Kirchberg’s.
  Until the 1960s, Kappel was still wholly characterized by agriculture. Out of the 111 households here in 1949, 80 were farming households, of which only 8 held lands greater in area than 10 ha. Kappel had then 281 Protestant and 194 Catholic inhabitants. There were also then still a Kolonialwarengeschäft (a shop that sold “colonial” – that is, from outside Europe – goods such as sugar and coffee) in the village centre, and another small grocer's shop on what is now called Kirchberger Straße. The stationer's shop was next to the Catholic school. As well, there were a postal coach station in the Lower Village on what is now called Zeller Straße and a third inn on Waldgasse (“Forest Lane”).
  Given the appreciable earnings from forest holdings, a new municipal centre, considered quite modern at the time, could be built
caption: Kappel seen from the south
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