Dieppe
First recorded as a small fishing settlement in 1030, Dieppe was an important prize fought over during the Hundred Years' War.
Dieppe housed the most advanced French school of cartography in the 16th century. Two of France's best navigators, Michel le Vasseur and his brother Thomas le Vasseur, lived in Dieppe when they were recruited to join the expedition of René Goulaine de Laudonnière which departed Le Havre for Florida on April 20, 1564. The expedition resulted in the construction of Fort Caroline, the first French colony in the New World. Another expedition two years before where Goulaine de Laudonnière was under command of Jean Ribault, a local Huguenot captain, had resulted in the foundation of Charlesfort, now in South Carolina. Dieppe was the premier port of the kingdom in the 17th century.
On July 23, 1632, 300 colonists heading to New France departed from Dieppe.
At the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes in 1685, Dieppe lost 3,000 of its Huguenot citizens, who fled abroad.
Dörrebach
In the late 18th century, the French Revolution broke out, and the leaders of the new republic sent their Jacobin armies to the long-coveted Rhine, although they did not come into possession of the lands on the Rhine’s left bank until the 1801 Treaty of Lunéville. The Ingelheim lordship was thus swept away. The country was newly subdivided administratively and French administration was introduced once again. The French Revolutionary Calendar was introduced, too, as were French Revolutionary innovations, which swept aside all that was remembered from earlier times. Dörrebach found itself at this time in the "Mairie" (“Mayoralty”) of Stromberg, the Arrondissement of Simmern and the Department of Rhin-et-Moselle. Serfdom came to an end, as did likewise compulsory labour for the state. Under the French conqueror’s flag, local people had to take up arms against foreigners and Germans alike. After the Napoleonic Wars, the region passed back to German control under the terms of the Congress of Vienna. The Counts of Ingelheim, though, who had sold their holdings at fire sale prices at the onset of the French advance in the 1790s found themselves in a similar position to the one in which so many smaller and clerical lords had found themselves earlier in the wake of the 1803 "Reichsdeputationshauptschluss": they lost their lands and thereby also the lordship over Dörrebach, which passed to the Kingdom of Prussia, within which it was grouped into the new Rhine Province. Once this had been administratively subdivided, Dörrebach found itself in the "Regierungsbezirk" of Koblenz and the Kreuznach district. Since this time, Dörrebach has been a self-administering municipality. In 1833, an Evangelical school was set up in a rented room in a house, so that the village’s Evangelical schoolchildren would not have to go all the way to Seibersbach to go to school. The first schoolteacher there was a student named Götz. By 1873, however, this school was gone, as indeed was the whole building in which the schoolroom had been, with a carpentry shop there instead. As far back as 1837, Dörrebach’s first watermain was built, drawing water from the Hemgen-Born, a spring in the Royal Forest and carrying it through cast-iron pipes to the village. Its total length was 9,470 Prussian feet, or 2 972.16 m (a Prussian foot was slightly longer than its English counterpart, measuring 31.385 cm). The then mayor of Dörrebach, named Dheil, had laid out the great need for such a thing in a statement on 14 February of that year. Not only was plentiful drinking water needed for people (the local wells sometimes would not yield up enough water in the summertime), but water was also needed for livestock in this agrarian village, and the mayor complained in his statement that villagers were having to fetch water from “quite a small brook” that flowed by some “three thousand paces” (thus roughly 3 km) from the village. Water for cooking also had to be drawn here. Dheil believed that boring more wells was not the solution to this problem, and added that the need was greatest when fire broke out. On 12 March 1876, a frightful windstorm struck Dörrebach and wrought widespread devastation, tearing roofs off and snapping or uprooting countless trees. On 17 November 1881, the local press reported on a murder trial in which the accused and the victims were people from Dörrebach, which was also the scene of the crimes. A blacksmith named Philipp Orben, born on 1 April 1854 at Wallhausen and living in Dörrebach, was charged with murdering his mother-in-law, the widow Gerhard "née" Altmeyer, and his 14-year-old sister-in-law, Franziska Gerhard, with malice aforethought by poisoning them both with arsenic. The accused had married the late Mr. and Mrs. Gerhard’s eldest daughter on 24 May 1879 and had come to live with them. Mr. Gerhard was still alive at that time, but that lasted less than a year when Orben’s father-in-law suddenly died on 11 April 1880, and this after many months of upset and misery in the household, which had apparently begun with Orben’s arrival. On 26 December the same year, Mrs. Gerhard likewise suddenly died, leaving all her daughters living with Orben. Then, on 29 March 1881, Franziska Gerhard suddenly died, but this time suspicions of poisoning led to Mr. and Mrs. Gerhard’s and Franziska’s bodies being exhumed and autopsied. Mr. Gerhard’s body was too badly decayed for any meaningful conclusions to be drawn, but 50 mg of arsenic was found in Mrs. Gerhard’s stomach, as was an even greater amount in Franziska’s. Philipp Orben had found ways to procure arsenic from the apothecary repeatedly, but he denied everything, and his behaviour in court was described as impudent. The jury found him guilty, and the prosecutor asked the court to impose the death penalty and to strip Orben of his civil rights.