Wolfstein, Rhineland-Palatinate
Wolfstein was founded in 1275 on Habsburg King Rudolph I's orders, which called for a “fortified and free” town near his castle, “Woluisstein”, now known as the "Alt-Wolfstein" (“Old Wolfstein”) ruin. Rudolph forthwith granted the new town the same town rights and freedoms as the town of Speyer. As an “everlasting marketplace”, it was to be a sanctuary for commerce, trade and dealing. The first townsmen and -women came from the surrounding, much older villages.
Wolfstein, Rhineland-Palatinate
In 1905, the Bavarian State Government – the Palatinate had belonged to the Kingdom of Bavaria since the Congress of Vienna – ordered the cession of the Kuhbrücker Hübel, with its railway station, seven houses on the slope side of Bahnhofsstraße (“Station Street”), seven others on Hefersweilerstraße, a few storage sheds next to the railway and the storehouse of the "Consumvereine" (“coöperatives”), to the town of Wolfstein. The decisive factor in favour of the amalgamation of this strip of land on both sides of the railway line, which had been opened in 1883, was economic considerations. For the goal of expanding the town's residential area, however, it was quite useless, for the slopes east of the ceded area on the valley floor still belonged to Roßbach. Thus, until the village of Roßbach in der Pfalz along with all its "Ortsteile" was merged into the town of Wolfstein in 1969, the town's foremost new building area remained the steep slope stretching up the Königsberg west of Hauptstraße ("Bundesstraße" 270), even after the Second World War (Röther Weg, Steinwiesen, Am Hang, Am Gericht, In der Trift, Bergstraße, Am Kirchpfad). Even this was hemmed in somewhat by the galleries at the chalk mine.