Chodzież

The most important characteristics of this lakeland area are its typical postglacial landforms, forests of pines and mixed woodlands, and lakes.

Detailed data as of 31 December 2021:[1] Number of inhabitants by year: A burial mound, estimated to date from 2000 B.C., is located in the area of the town where today's Słoneczna street lies.

On 3 March 1434, King Władysław II Jagiello issued a privilege that vested Chodzież with Magdeburg town rights for Trojan of Łękno.

The arrival of a group of German clothmakers from Leszno, which had suffered a fire, around 1656, influenced the development of Chodzież.

A new town was erected in the mid 18th century, next to the old medieval site in the city, which contained the Market, as the home of weavers and clothmakers.

Today, this part of the city (Kościuszki Street) is marked by the characteristic gables of houses situated on narrow, rectangular plots of land.

As the result of the First Partition of Poland in 1772, the town was annexed by the Kingdom of Prussia and became a part of the newly established Netze River District.

The local weaving industry declined about 1812–1815, when a frontier customs post between the Duchy of Warsaw and the Kingdom of Prussia was demarcated.

The tariff priced the Posen weavers out of their major eastern markets, so they either migrated to other textile producing areas (e.g. Łódź) or turned to other types of work, like farming.

Over the years, it gained the character of a local administrative center, which it remained until 1975, when the division of Poland was reorganized into larger units.

Chodzież's important place in the ceramics industry began when two German businessmen, Ludwig Schnorr and Hermann Müller from Frankfurt an der Oder, purchased the ruins of the burned out manor house from Otto Königsmarck in 1855 and built the first faience factory.

This name was in honor of Axel von Colmar — Meyenburg, who was extremely influential in the building of the railway, which was beneficial to the town's economy.

In the 1930s, the years of the great world economic crisis, workers from Chodzież porcelain factory started a new series of protests.

In the period between the two world wars, Chodzież was considered as an important administrative center in the border area between Poland and Germany.

In one notable example, on 7 November 1939, 44 Polish men, including the town's mayor Tadeusz Koppe and the gmina's wójt Marian Weyhan,[6] were killed on the Morzewskie Hills near the village of Morzewo.

In August 1944, the Germans carried out mass arrests of local members of the Home Army, the leading Polish underground resistance organization.

[9] Bronisław Maron, his wife, daughter, and Marcel Krzycki were then imprisoned in the Nazi prison camp in Żabikowo (present-day district of Luboń).

The current construction of an urban purification plant will help transform Chodzież into an ecologically clean center for tourism and relaxation.

The town's sports facilities include an indoor swimming pool, a football stadium and tennis courts.

In the 1970s, the annual jazz workshops began, which allowed new talents to be discovered through encounters between young people and artists from Poland and abroad.

Strzeleckie Lake
Saint Florian church
Porcelain factory
Memorial to the Greater Poland insurgents of 1918–1919
Plate made in Kolmar 1941
District court
Ostrowski Park