Frankenweide

In a high hollow southeast of the Mosisberg summit there was once a raised bog, the Mosisbruch, which was fed by a two-kilometre-long (1.2 mi) stream that emptied into the upper Wellbach shortly thereafter.

Although the House of Wittelsbach from Palatinate-Zweibrücken also had estates and titles in the Frankenweide for a time, the Leiningen head office (Oberamt) at the castle of Falkenburg near Wilgartswiesen remained administratively responsible until France conquered the Electoral Palatine territories west of the Rhine after the French Revolution in the 1790s and annexed them in 1801.

But the authorities in Wilgartswiesen, whose territory today include large parts of the Frankenweide, was too far away to be able to successfully plan and development the area.

As a result of the Thirty Years' War even the few populated places were abandoned in the first half of the 17th century and it was not until around 1785 that the foresters' village of Waldleiningen was laid out at the instigation of Prince Carl Frederick William of Leiningen-Hardenburg, which remained the only independent municipality in the Frankenweide.

With its central communication hub at Johanniskreuz, Frankenweide was a transit route between the Upper Rhine Valley and what is now Lorraine from the earliest times.

At that time, when roads followed the ridges wherever possible, ways branched off the main route towards the monasteries of Wissembourg Abbey and Hornbach as well as the Imperial Palace at Kaiserslautern.

[4] However, the Frankenweide is no longer mainly approached in an east-west direction, but on the winding B 48, which climbs up from the B 10 federal highway to the south through the Wellbach valley to Johanniskreuz, the only settlement on the whole route, and then runs on to join the B 37 near Hochspeyer to the north.

The Palatine Catholics Day and woodland services take place here and, on Sundays, especially in good weather, hundreds of bikers meet here.

One tourist attraction is the landmark built in the 1860s on the 459-metre-high Roßrück near Waldleiningen by the Kingdom of Bavaria which became known locally as the Palatine World Axis (Pälzer Weltachs).