nate, the Electorates of Mainz and Trier, Lorraine, Tyrol and Switzerland settled in the town. Between 1676 and 1699, Hirschhorn was mortgaged to Westphalian baron Johann Wilhelm von der Reck, but in 1700 direct rule by the Electorate of Mainz was established. Hirschhorn was now the seat of an Amtskellerei (an administrative unit) within the higher administrative unit (Oberamt) of Starkenburg with its centre in Heppenheim.
In 1803, Hirschhorn came into the possession of the Grand Duchy of Hesse-Darmstadt, and the monastery was dissolved once again. From 1821 to 1832 Hirschhorn was an administrative district of its own, then it became part of the district of Heppenheim, and from 1848 to 1852 it belonged to the district of Erbach. There were skirmishes between revolutionaries and Federal troops in and around Hirschhorn in 1849 in connection with the revolution of 1848/49 in Baden. In 1852 Hirschhorn was joined to the district of Lindenfels, and in 1856 it returned to the district of Heppenheim, which later became the district of Bergstra�e.
Steam navigation on the Neckar was introduced in 1841 and meant a moderate economic upturn. Horse-drawn barges finally disappeared from the river in 1878, when a seventy-mile-long chain was put on the river bed on which tugs could pull themselves upstream or downstream. A lot of bargemen became redundant and lost their jobs. The Neckar Valley Railway started to operate, connecting Hirschhorn with Heidelberg and Mosbach. The railway station was built outside the historical precinct of the town in the direction of Neckarsteinach, thus providing an incentive for further expansion of the town in this direction. On the Neckar, a weir with a lock and a bridge were completed in 1933. A second lock was added in 1959. The bridge linked Hirschhorn and Ersheim, which had been practically deserted centuries before; so as early as in the 1930s a few houses and a new school for Hirschhorn (which was enlarged in 1970) were built on
