Wöllstein

Geschichte

Wöllstein is an Ortsgemeinde – a municipality belonging to a Verbandsgemeinde, a kind of collective municipality – in the Alzey-Worms district in Rhineland-Palatinate, Germany.GeographyLocationThe municipality lies in Rhenish Hesse roughly 8 km southeast of Bad Kreuznach, and 30 km southwest of Mainz. It is the seat of the like-named Verbandsgemeinde.HistoryPostal station on the Dutch Post RouteFrom the latter half of the 16th century, there was a postal station in Wöllstein on the Dutch Post Route running from Brussels (nowadays in Belgium rather than the Netherlands) by way of Rheinhausen and Augsburg to Innsbruck, Trent and Italy. The postal station had its first documentary mention in Giovanni da l’Herba’s 1563 postal travel book as Bilstain ò Vilstain, villa (that is, village). Beginning in 1578, a branch of the Dutch Post Route led from Wöllstein to Cologne. During the time when the postal system was insolvent in the late 16th century and owing to the resulting postal station operators’ strike, both postal station operator Valentin Dill (Till) and his widow, the Postfrau zu Welstein Margarethen, played a decisive rôle as strike leaders, in which they refused to carry any mailbags anywhere beyond Wöllstein. After consolidation and the founding of the Imperial Post (Kaiserliche Reichspost) in 1597, the Wöllstein postal station was still open for business, but beginning in the late 17th century, owing to route changes and cities’ growing influence, it slowly lost its importance.