Ginsheim The placename is believed to go back to the
Frankish Gimmo family and had its first documentary mention in 1211 as "Ginnensheim" in the "Oculus Memorie" (Eberbach Monastery's goods directory). After the former
Imperial village was pledged to Count Dieter von
Katzenelnbogen in 1248, history yields other noble families' names such as Falkenstein, Sayen and Isenburg as the village's overlords changed. In 1600, the village ended up in the
Hesse-Darmstadt Landgrave Ludwig V's hands. In the
Thirty Years' War, the community was so badly battered that from 1634 to 1642, hardly anyone lived there. Typical trades in Ginsheim in bygone ages are said to have been
farmer,
fisherman and
miller. Milling developed itself into a proper line of industry. At any one time, up to 15 floating watermills were anchored at Ginsheim, with the last one being withdrawn from service in 1929. It was towed to Mainz Harbour where it was placed under protection as a monument until it was destroyed in an
air-raid late in the
Second World War. This and some other interesting chapters in the local history are on display at the
Heimatmuseum.
Gustavsburg The constituent community of Gustavsburg owes its name to the
Swedish King
Gustav Adolf, who in 1632, during the Thirty Years' War had a
fort built on the Mainspitze. Found during work on this was, among other things, a
Roman horseman's gravestone, a copy of which now graces the Town Hall's lobby. In 1635, the Swedes quit the Gustavsburg, as the fort was known ("Gustavsburg" literally means "Gustav's castle" in
German), which after changing hands several times in the war at last fell into
French hands. In 1673, Mainz Elector
Johann Philipp von Schönborn had the complex razed. Until 1740, according to one municipal map, the only resident business in what is now Gustavsburg was a tiler's workshop. When the
railway was opened in 1858, so was the
Hafenbahnhof Gustavsburg (Gustavsburg Harbour Railway Station). A year later, the Nuremberg firm Klett & Co. (which later became MAN-Werk Gustavsburg branch of nowadays
Maschinenfabrik Augsburg-Nürnberg, or MAN) began building work on a
bridge across the Rhine. An assembly area was set up in Gustavsburg as part of the project, and workers and their families moved into this area. Quickly there arose an industrial community.
Creation of the community of Ginsheim-Gustavsburg In 1806,
Napoleon placed
Kastel,
Kostheim, the
Maarau (
floodplain) and the islands just offshore under French administration.
Left Bank of the Rhine had been brought under French sovereignty in 1801. The Frenches had no interest in that part of Kostheim's municipal area that lay south of the river Main, and so the area where Gustavsburg lies today passed to the Grand Duke of Hesse-Darmstadt who in turn gave it to Ginsheim. On 30 December 1808, the Ginsheim
Schultheiß (roughly "
sheriff"), confirmed this new acquisition. In the years that followed, Kostheim townsfolk who still owned land south of the Main sold their fields to Ginsheim farmers, thus making 1808 Ginsheim-Gustavsburg's actual time of birth. On 28 September 1929, the double community's councils voted to be amalgamated with the city of Mainz. In November 1929, the Hessian
Landtag approved the separation of the Ginsheim municipal area and the Ginsheim Rhine floodplains from Groß-Gerau district and Starkenburg province so that they could be assigned to Mainz district and
Rheinhessen province. In the cause of the
bombing of Mainz in World War II Ginsheim was subject to air raids. Thus it remained until the end of
World War II in 1945, when the Rhine became a boundary between two zones of occupation, the French and the
American, splitting the communities on the
Mainspitze triangle away from Mainz and grouping Ginsheim-Gustavsburg and Bischofsheim once again with Groß-Gerau district. They have never been reincorporated into Mainz, and indeed the two municipalities nowadays lie in two different
Bundesländer, with Ginsheim-Gustavsburg in Hesse and Mainz in
Rhineland-Palatinate. ==Politics==