Ulmet is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Kusel district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Kusel-Altenglan, whose seat is in Kusel. Ulmet has long been a recognized tourism community.
Geography
Location The municipality lies on the Glan in the Kusel Musikantenland in the Western Palatinate. The municipal area measures 710 ha, of which 94 ha is wooded. The village lies in the Glan valley overlooking the “Glan Knee”, where the river bends from its northward direction to a northeasterly course. The broad, fertile dale is framed by hills and mountains, which are mostly wooded. The highest elevations are the Steinerner Mann (459 m above sea level) to the west and the Sulzkopf (402 m above sea level) to the south. The floor of the dale lies some 190 m above sea level. In 1836, in his travel observations, Friedrich Blaul wrote of Ulmet: “…The location of the village of Ulmet I prefer to all others. It is characteristic of the whole Glan valley, with regard to both beauty and richness. On a small hill stands a little old Gothic church, surrounded by fertile fields and lovely meadows. Livestock breeding in this exquisite dale is in an excellent state and a Glan cow enjoys before the others of her kind the same advantage as Venus before the Graces.” All together, 164 ha of the municipal area is under Federal ownership as a border strip for the Baumholder troop drilling ground and for a pumping station on the NATO pipeline.
Neighbouring municipalities Ulmet borders in the north on the municipality of Rathsweiler, in the northeast on the municipality of Niederalben, in the east on the municipality of Sankt Julian, in the south on the municipalities of Bedesbach and Erdesbach, in the west on the municipality of Oberalben and in the northwest on the Baumholder troop drilling ground.
Constituent communities Also belonging to Ulmet are the outlying homesteads of Felschbachhof and Mühlwieshof.Statistisches Landesamt Rheinland-Pfalz – Amtliches Verzeichnis der Gemeinden und Gemeindeteile , Seite 97 (PDF)
Municipality’s layout Today's village is made up of the two formerly self-administering centres of Ulmet, which lay on the Glan's left bank, and Pielsbach on the right bank. Both were clump villages that huddled closely to the Glan and the latter village's namesake Pielsbach. The combined village has only begun to spread away from the Glan in the very latest times with the opening of five new building areas. Ulmet, once a rich farming village, was, before the Thirty Years' War, the biggest municipality in the middle Glan valley, and the governing one, being as it was the seat of an Unteramt. The municipal area reached most of the way to the actual village sites of Erdesbach, Oberalben-Mayweilerhof and Rathsweiler. Ulmet could claim to be the governing centre up until the 19th century. In P. A. Paule's Gemälden aus Rheinbaiern 1817 (“Tableaux from Rhenish Bavaria”), for instance, a population of 495 inhabitants is listed for Ulmet, whereas for the now considerably bigger Altenglan, the figure was only 403. The old overland routes, for the most part dating back to Celtic and Roman times, steered clear of the dales, which were threatened by floods and hostile encroachment, and also offered no clear view. Near Ulmet, two roads met: the army road coming from Kaiserslautern by way of Bosenbach and the Ulmet strip field “Pilgerhausen” and the Roman road coming down from Lichtenberg Castle by way of the Mayweilerhof (estate) to Rathsweiler and running from the Neuwirtshaus (“New Inn”, in Niederalben) by way of Ohlscheid and Schweinschied towards Kreuznach. This road had a branch at the Mayweilerhof leading to Ulmet and the Glan crossing, and farther on to a junction with yet another road that ran north–south.
The municipality offered farming, cropraising and livestock raising all the advantages in earlier times with its relatively vast municipal area, fertile cropland in the east and west and broad meadows in the open Glan valley. Thus, Ulmet grew until the 20th century as a respectable farming village. The extensive loss of lands in the west to the Baumholder troop drilling ground and in the southwest to NATO pipeline compromised agriculture, reducing the amount of land under the plough by 164 ha. This loss, as well as developments in industry and indeed in the era following the Second World War, led to an end for almost all agricultural operations, great and small. Nowadays, there is only one farming family left, mainly in cropraising, working their own land and also great areas of rented land. A few farming operations run as sidelines, but only serve the owners’ needs. One good thing for the land has been the establishment of a shepherds’ club, whose many part-time shepherds, with their small to midsize flocks, are keeping the municipal area's utter reversion to wilderness in checkMunicipality’s layout
History
Antiquity Two archaeological finds in or near the municipal area bear witness to early human habitation: A fragment of a small, four-sided stone axe with the poll missing made of black stone with a length of 2.7 cm was found in the strip field called “Seiters”. It is now kept at the Historisches Museum der Pfalz (Historic Museum of the Palatinate) in Speyer. After the Second World War (1948), a prehistoric grave was unearthed in the “Ruth” forest district right near the boundary with the Baumholder troop drilling ground, not far from the Roman road that goes by, below the Wartekopf. It has a diameter of more than 30 m, is round or oval, convex in the middle, and on the now heavily overgrown surface systematically studded with selected, big stones. According to Dr. Sprater, it is a Celtic grave. The Historic Museum in Speyer recorded the find in its register, but the grave complex has not been opened, but rather left in its original state. Many artefacts from Roman times have been found in neighbouring municipal areas. Spolia from Roman times are still preserved in the Evangelical church's masonryAncient history
Middle Ages Ulmet is one of the oldest places in the Glan area. The first documentary mention came as early as 932 or 952 in the addendum to the Polyptych of St. Remi, in which a place called Kapellen is named. What was meant by this was the Flurskapelle, a chapel that still stands today, then the hub of a great parish. In the early 12th century, the village passed to the County of Veldenz, whose counts exercised the Schutzvogtei over the so-called Remigiusland. In 1444, Count Palatine Stephan of the Palatinate merged Veldenz, some of his own holdings and the County of Zweibrücken to found the new County of Palatinate-Zweibrücken, which was later generally known as a duchy. Ulmet lay within this duchy up until French Revolutionary troops occupied the lands on the Rhine’s left bank, during which time Ulmet, sometimes by itself and sometimes together with Pilsbach across the Glan, was the chief centre of a Zweibrücken Unteramt.Mediaeval history
Modern times The lordship of the Duchy of Palatinate-Zweibrücken lasted through the Thirty Years' War until the duchy came to an end in the course of the French Revolution. In 1633, during the Thirty Years’ War, there was an engagement at the earthworks in which the Imperial Army's Spanish troops suffered a great onslaught from troops of the Union under command of Rhinegrave Otto, and were thereby forced to withdraw from the Palatinate, and the whole left bank of the Rhine. The Spaniards lost all their baggage in the ordeal, and perhaps worse, 1,500 mercenaries were taken prisoner. In 1635, Ulmet was burnt down by the Imperial Army's Croatian mercenaries. Some of the inhabitants got to safety, along with their clergyman Suevas, at Lichtenberg Castle. All the inhabitants who did not make it to safety inside Lichtenberg Castle were murdered. By the time the war was over, the village was almost empty of people. The population then grew again, but only slowly, mainly by the arrival of newcomers, but also because of the good agricultural conditions. Fate delivered further blows in the late 17th century with King Louis XIV's wars of conquest. Only in the 18th century did an epoch of growth and strength set in, and it was then that the first emigrations were noted. In 1761, a town hall was built. In the wake of the French Revolution and the French annexation of the lands on the Rhine's left bank, the region's administrative structure was altered on 23 January 1798. Most of the Unteramt of Ulmet was assigned to the Department of Sarre, the Arrondissement of Birkenfeld and the Canton of Kusel. Ulmet became the seat of the mairie (“mayoralty”) for the villages of Ulmet, Erdesbach, Oberalben, Rathsweiler, Altenglan, Patersbach, Dennweiler-Frohnbach, Eschenau and Sankt Julian with Obereisenbach.
Recent times After Waterloo and the Congress of Vienna, the Palatinate was awarded to the Kingdom of Bavaria. In 1818, two limetrees were planted at the way into the graveyard to mark the occasion of the unification of the Reformed and Lutheran churches. Yet another town hall was built in 1823. In the years 1873 to 1875, Sacred Heart Church (Herz-Jesu-Kirche) was built. The railway came in 1904 with the building of the Glantalbahn. Electricity reached Ulmet in 1923. Flurbereinigung was undertaken between 1968 and 1979. On 1 January 1972, the Bürgermeisterei (“Mayoralty”) of Ulmet was dissolved and in its stead, the Verbandsgemeinde of Altenglan was established.Modern history
Population development A census from the year 1490 survives and it lists 51 taxpayers for Ulmet (but not the other inhabitants). In 1609, 259 inhabitants were counted. Exact population figures for the time from 1638 to the early 19th century are unavailable. Only in 1802 was another population count and this time there were 362 inhabitants. The rise became continuous, but by the mid 19th century, the effects of emigration to the United States and Southeastern Europe had taken their toll on the population figures, which were now shrinking. Between the end of the Franco-Prussian War and the turn of the 20th century, population growth stagnated as a result of inhabitants moving away to Germany's industrial regions; it was likewise after the First World War. At the last census before the Second World War, Ulmet had 754 inhabitants, and once again, there was an upward trend. Beginning in 1978, there was a temporary drop in population, but this was a bureaucratic illusion, for commuters were counted at their workplaces, not at their homes. This was, however, followed by slight growth in population. With regard to religious affiliation, Protestants were the overwhelming majority in Ulmet. Over time, though, the Catholics managed to increase their percentage of the population slightly. For a time, almost 10% of the inhabitants were Jewish. The Jews’ share of the population, however, had already begun to shrink steadily by the 19th century, mostly owing to migration to the industrial regions.
Before the Thirty Years’ War, Ulmet was the biggest municipality in the middle Glan valley, and it held this distinction into the middle of the 19th century. This can be ascribed exclusively to a sound agricultural economy. Thus, with industry's rise came a loss of status for Ulmet. After the Second World War came a drop in population, due not least of all to young people “fleeing the countryside” (Landflucht in German) and going to the cities. Counting commuters at their workplaces disadvantaged their home communities and weekend commuters’ families’ homes, too, when it came to allocating funds from investment stock and income tax assessment.