History
Pelm is notable for its connection with ancient history.
Unearthed to the west of the village was a Gallo-Roman sanctuary. It had already been widely destroyed by graverobbers by the time a systematic investigation was done in 1928. More recently, newer information was brought to light by a dig undertaken in 1986 by the Trier Rhenish State Museum (Rheinisches Landesmuseum Trier). The trapezoidal wall that once bounded the hallowed grounds, whose greatest length is 65 m and whose greatest breadth is 42 m, was built of limestone. Inside is a Gallo-Roman temple with a cella and a passageway in which a limestone tablet was found as early as 1833 inscribed with a dedication to the goddess Caiva. The tablet mentions that a man named Marcus Victorius Polentius granted an endowment of 100,000 sestertii for the temple to Caiva to be built. This inscription has been dated to AD 124.
There were two other temples on the grounds. At one, a fragmentary red sandstone club, likely from a statue of Hercules, was found in 1986. A torso from such a statue was unearthed in 1834, but has since been lost. Other statuary has been found representing Mercury and Venus, for instance.
Coins, too, have been found, from a quinarius minted in Africa in 47 or 46 BC to various coins struck about AD 400. One find, a fibula, dates from early La Tène times.
In the Middle Ages, the village was held by the House of Kasselburg, whose castle seat was in the village. It gave the noble family its name, and is still known today as the Kasselburg.
On 18 May 1897, Pelm was the site of a railway disaster when a troop train crashed into some uncoupled rolling stock causing seven of the train’s coaches to derail. In the accident, ensuing chaos and fire, ten men – nine military personnel and one civilian – were killed. Many more were wounded.
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Famous quotes containing the word history:
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
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—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Let us not underrate the value of a fact; it will one day flower in a truth. It is astonishing how few facts of importance are added in a century to the natural history of any animal. The natural history of man himself is still being gradually written.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)