History
The city was founded in 1970 out of the formerly independent villages of Willich, Anrath, Schiefbahn and Neersen, although the villages are much older. Anrath was mentioned for the first time in 1010, Willich in 1245, Neersen in 1262 and Schiefbahn in 1420.
The villages belonged to the Electorate of Cologne until the French Revolutionary Wars when they were occupied and annexed by France in 1794. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 the villages fell to the Kingdom of Prussia.
Read more about this topic: Willich
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“Most events recorded in history are more remarkable than important, like eclipses of the sun and moon, by which all are attracted, but whose effects no one takes the trouble to calculate.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“In history as in human life, regret does not bring back a lost moment and a thousand years will not recover something lost in a single hour.”
—Stefan Zweig (18811942)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)