In the 16th (or 15th) century the family erected the Gothic Saint Mary Magdalene church, which became its official burial site, and it is the most distinctive historic landmark of the town.

Following the successful Greater Poland uprising of 1806, it was regained by Poles and included within the short-lived Duchy of Warsaw,[4] in 1815 it was re-annexed by Prussia, and was the centre of Kreis Czarnikau; from 1871 to 1919 it also formed part of the German Empire.

The western part of the town remained within Weimar Germany and was renamed Deutsch Czarnikau in 1920 and Scharnikau in 1937, while Polish Czarnków became a county seat within the Poznań Voivodeship.

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

[8] Czarnków was eventually liberated in January 1945,[4] and then restored to Poland, although with a Soviet-installed communist regime, which stayed in power until the Fall of Communism in the 1980s.

In August 1980, employees of local factories joined the nationwide anti-communist strikes,[10] which led to the foundation of the Solidarity organization, which played a central role at the end of communist rule in Poland.