Eppertshausen
- REDIRECT Template:Infobox German place
Eppertshausen is a municipality in the Darmstadt-Dieburg Rural District in the state of Hesse, Germany.
Geography
Eppertshausen is located in the Rhine-Main area 15 km northeast of Darmstadt. The whole area of the village is 13.11 km2 large and it lies 130 – 190 m above sea level.[1] It is a plain area with a few hills.
About 35 to 20 million years ago in the age of tertiary the whole region was lying under sea level. At that time it was covered by an ocean which was warm and not very deep. Lots of sediments sank to its bottom. Then the region rose again and the water left, leaving soil which is mostly sandy and poor.
The neighbours of Eppertshausen are:
- Rödermark and Rodgau (North) (all Offenbach Rural District)
- Babenhausen (East)
- Münster (South)
- Messel (West)
Eppertshausen has 5,829 inhabitants (2008).[2]
The climate of the town is mild. There is less rain than in other parts of Germany.
Some local people are speaking a regional type (dialect) of the German language with a certain tone and special words. It is a Hessian dialect (German: Hessisch) spoken in the south of Hesse. This language type is related to other dialects in the south of Germany. In former times mostly every place had its own special dialect, sometimes hard to understand for people of other parts of Germany. Today the dialect speakers are a minority and the majority of them does not speak the real dialect. They rather speak a kind of regular German with a certain pronunciation.
History
Eppertshausen is an early place where people lived. In the time of the 7th to the 9th century new places to live got name endings like -hausen.
In 836 the name of Eppertshausen was written down in a document for the first time. It was owned by the monastery of the nearby city of Seligenstadt.
Formerly the people in Eppertshausen were mostly farmers and craftsmen but not tradesmen. Every family had land to grow their food. When the property was handed to the next generation it was divided within the children. Therefore, most families had only small farms and were poor. With the industrial revolution the Rhine-Main area got lots of factories and developed to a center for metal working, leather manufacturing and chemical processing. Many men became workmen and found a job in the factories and earned money. This increased living conditions partly.
Twinned cities
References
- ↑ Homepage of the city of Babenhausen, looked up on 19 January 2010, German.
- ↑ Official statistics of the state of Hesse Archived 2016-05-13 at the Wayback Machine, looked up on 19 January 2010, German.