Mackenrodt

Mackenrodt is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Birkenfeld district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany. It belongs to the Verbandsgemeinde of Herrstein, whose seat is in the like-named municipality.GeographyLocationThe municipality lies west of the river Nahe in the Hunsrück. The municipal area is 64.6% wooded. To the southeast lies the town of Idar-Oberstein.HistoryMackenrodt has not always been the smallest municipality between the Idarbach and the Siesbach. In the 17th and 18th centuries, the village had more inhabitants than, for instance, Hettenrodt or Kirschweiler.Unearthed within Mackenrodt’s limits have been a few archaeological finds from Treverian (the Treveri were a people of mixed Celtic and Germanic stock, from whom the Latin name for the city of Trier, Augusta Treverorum, is also derived) and Roman times. However, this does not mean that today’s village is as much as 2,000 years old. Beginning about AD 500, the old settlements in the area were forsaken owing to the throngs of warlike Germanic peoples who were flooding in from the east. Only relatively late did people – as it happens, the Franks – once again settle on the upper Nahe. Before anyone could settle, though, land had to be cleared. This can even be seen in placenames like Mackenrodt, Hettenrodt and Algenrodt. The ending —rodt refers to clearing woodland (German still has a verb roden that means “clear” in the sense of removing trees).