Send Gift Baskets to Dorsten, Germany

The area was already populated during the Neolithic and Bronze Ages, from about 4000 BC onward. On his way to the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest, Varus passed through Dorsten-Holsterhausen in 9 B.C., where the Romans had established a military camp in 11 B.C.

The Archbishopric of Cologne began evangelizing the area around Dorsten around 700 AD. The Count of Cleves and Archbishop Konrad von Hochstaden granted Dorsten the city rights in 1251. The town became the wealthiest in the Vest Recklinghausen due to its location on the river Lippe and its membership in the Hanseatic League of international trading cities.

As the oldest permanently existing cloister of this order, the friary of the Franciscans was founded in 1488. Gymnasium Petrinum was founded by monks in 1642, and an Ursuline boarding school was established in 1699. As a result of the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48), the Hessian War, and the continuous occupation by various forces, Dorsten’s medieval wealth suffered severely. Hesse-Cassel took Dorsten from the Electorate of Cologne and the Vest of Recklinghausen on 9 February 1633, making it the region’s strongest fortress in the years that followed. Therefore, it was attempted to be recaptured. A second siege of Dorsten in 1641 resulted in considerable town destruction and the garrison’s eventual surrender after the first siege failed in 1636.

Dorsten only regained its former prosperity in the nineteenth century due to the Industrial Revolution. During the early 1900s, spinning, weaving, and metal casting industries flourished in town, and 1912, the town’s first coal mine was opened. From 1929 to 1975, surrounding villages became districts of the gradually expanding city of Dorsten. An Allied air raid almost destroyed the historical old town days before the end of the Second World War. During the airstrikes on Dorsten, 319 people died, and 700 families were displaced. As a result, the center of the town, which resembles its medieval shape today, has been rebuilt on its historical foundations after 1945.