Marpent

Marpent is a common French, located in the department of the Northern (59) and the area Nord-Pas-de-Calais.

Situation

District of Avesnes zip code: 59164

origin of the name mar: marble, pent: slope one to find inclined marble career with Marpent

Communications

Administration

History

a Gallo-Roman origin

Under antiquity, the marshy banks of the Sambre offer only few possibilities of crossing the course of them. The way of Bavay - Trier borrows a passage from ford with Marpent, near the current street of the Boat, name which testifies to the secular vocation of the site. As leaves think the discovery Gallo-Roman vestiges, it is this strategic factor who justifies the establishment of the first human settlements. It is also probable, in comparison with the etymology of Marpent (of the Celt Mar PEN, the Marble slope) that the exploitation of this resource is not foreign with the foundation of the village. At the time feudal, the control of the ford constitutes an important source of revenue for the capacity seigneurial which establishes a castle there. It is also made mention in the documents of time of a water mill as well as religious establishment intended for the young girls located on left bank.

Constructions are relatively scattered. The center-borough is organized around a vault built with XVe century, our-lady of Ayde, object of an important pilgrimage. This vault is located with the current site of the church.

the industrial period

For orée of the XIXe century, coke and the vapor replace gradually for the charcoal and the hydraulic power. The traditional metallurgy is not long in adapting to these technological advances and starts its migration of the forest areas of the Thiérache and the Fagnes towards the coal basin of Charleroi. The imperative need to modernize navigation on Sambre by channeling it to facilitate the flow of the productions towards Paris led to an agreement between the Netherlands and the France. In reaction to the heavy customs taxation, the transborder diffusion of industrial plants brings a fast metamorphosis of the Valley of French Sambre, from which Marpent does not escape. Set up in 1855, the railroad Jeumont Saint-Quentin, mark a new stage in this process of socio-economic change of the village. In Marpent, industries marbrières and ceramics are the first to take their rise. Under the push of the capital, artisanal manufactures and companies yield the step to the industrial plants: Pirmez Moucheur becomes Marmor in 1894, the public limit company of the plastic grounds, products refractory and ceramic is created in 1908, the company Royez brothers in 1914… They are quickly accompanied by the metallurgy. In 1882, the steel-works “Marpent Balsam” are established on the commune. Manufacturing material of railroad which it exports universally (rail-car Baume Marpent), it employs with most extremely of its activity 1400 people and is at the origin of the creation of the 50 residences of the city of railwaymen. The village urbanizes unrelentingly under the injunctions of industry. To the rural core divided by the railway comes to associate a filament development, parallel in Sambre and the Railway and practically uninterrupted of Rocq with Jeumont. The Delbreil city, the street Pasteur or the street of May 8th, 1945 testify well to this concerned industrial urbanization of profitability. Rue de la République, continuum built gum communal limits. This adjacency with the commune of Jeumont makes profit Marpent from a reflection on its installation within the framework of the law Cornudet of 1919 obliging the communes important to conceive a plan of installation, embellishment and extension beyond even of their communal limit, exercise preceding the later steps of planning. The school of the girls built in 1932 as well as the town hall and the village hall carried out between 1952 and 1964 per Danis and Gaillard are good examples of public architecture testifying to the prosperity of Marpent for the industrial period.

the contemporary period

In the Seventies, the realization of the Maubeuge-Jeumont fast track reinforces the effect of cut between the North and the South of the communal territory which already Sambre and the railway constitute. In same time, the direct service road of the commune contributes to the urbanization of the slopes (street Jean-Baptiste Lebas, quoted Léo Lagrange; Street Victor Hugo, quoted the key of the fields….) and to Marpent its statute of perish-urban commune gives. Contemporary constructions come to fill the interstices along the transportation routes.

source: Development agency and of Town planning of Sambre - to also see http://valdesambre.org

Inheritance

Internet site of the Beauregard project http://www.valdesambre.org

Base Merimée http://www.culture.gouv.fr/documentation/memoire/LISTES/bases/AG_com-000.htm

External bonds

Site of the friends of the mill http://home.nordnet.fr/~fbisiaux/ Site of the communal harmony http://pagesperso.aol.fr/harmoniemarpent/ Site of the Municipality of MARPENT http://www.marpent.org/

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