Elfgen (Grevenbroich)

Elfgen City of Grevenbroich Coordinates: 51 ° 5 ′ 0 ″  N , 6 ° 32 ′ 24 ″  E
Incorporation :	August 1, 1964

Elfgen is a district of the city of Grevenbroich in the Rhine district of Neuss in North Rhine-Westphalia . Until 1964 Elfgen was a municipality in what was then the Grevenbroich district . As a result of lignite mining , the former municipal area is now uninhabited and largely natural.

Geography and history

Elfgen with Reisdorf and St. Leonard on a map from 1899

The area of ​​the former municipality of Elfgen in today's city of Grevenbroich

The first mention of Elfgen comes from the year 1059. The village was in the Elsbach valley west of Grevenbroich. Elfgen was parish church to Gustorf until 1663. In 1749, the St. Georg Church was built as its own parish church.

Politically, Elfgen originally belonged to the Amt Hülchrath of the Electorate of Cologne and in the French era at the beginning of the 19th century to Mairie Elsen in the Cologne arrondissement of the Rur department . After the Rhineland became Prussian, Elfgen formed a rural community in the Elsen mayor in the Grevenbroich district . From 1930 to 1937 the community belonged to the Grevenbroich office and since then to the Jüchen office . The old federal highway 1 ran past the southeastern edge of the village of Elfgen . The old federal highway 59 coming from Mönchengladbach led through the village center and then merged with the B1. In addition to the village of Elfgen, the hamlet of Reisdorf and the St. Leonard monastery also belonged to the municipality of Elfgen .

In the 1950s, the community was hit by lignite mining. The community area southeast of the old B1 with Reisdorf and St. Leonard was completely dredged between 1957 and 1963 by the Frimmersdorf-West opencast mine . During the subsequent backfilling and renaturation, today's Gustorfer Höhe was created . At the same time, preparations began for the resettlement of the village of Elfgen. Its population decided in 1959 to relocate to an area two kilometers to the east between the Grevenbroich districts of Elsen and Laach . The new Grevenbroich district of Neu-Elfgen was created there .

On August 1, 1964, the municipality of Elfgen was dissolved and most of its area was incorporated into the city of Grevenbroich. Smaller sub-areas fell to the neighboring communities of Garzweiler and Gustorf at the time . All of the old buildings in the village were devastated . Elfgen is still an official district today .

The excavation of the mining field northwest of the old B1 together with the former village area was carried out by the Garzweiler I opencast mine at the end of the 1980s and the beginning of the 1990s. Since then, the area has been backfilled and largely renatured, with the Elsbachtal in particular being restored to its original location. A reconstruction with residential buildings did not take place. In the southeast of the former municipal area was a driving safety center of the ADAC created.

Population development

year	Residents	source
1835	442
1864	678
1885	743
1910	790
1925	813
1939	786

Individual evidence

1. ^ § 1 main statute of the city of Grevenbroich
2. ↑ Jens Berthold: The Elsbachtal in the Middle Ages and the early modern period . Dissertation. Bonn 2003 ( digitized version [PDF]).
3. ↑ City portrait of Grevenbroich
4. ↑ ^{a b} Community encyclopedia for the Rhine Province 1930, p. 83
5. ^ Peter Zenker: Lignite mining in Frimmersdorf. (PDF) 2007, accessed December 12, 2017 . 
6. ↑ Law on the integration of the municipality of Elfgen of July 14, 1964
7. ^ Johann Georg von Viebahn: Statistics and topography of the government district of Düsseldorf. 1836, accessed on May 5, 2017 (digitized version). 
8. ^ Statistics of the government district of Düsseldorf 1867
9. ^ Community encyclopedia for the province of Rhineland 1885, p. 102
10. ↑ www.gemeindeververzeichnis.de: Grevenbroich district
11. ^ Michael Rademacher: German administrative history from the unification of the empire in 1871 to the reunification in 1990. neuss.html. (Online material for the dissertation, Osnabrück 2006).