Schüttorf (; ) is a town in the district of Grafschaft Bentheim in southwesternmost Lower Saxony near the Dutch border and the boundary with Westphalia (North Rhine-Westphalia). The town of Schüttorf forms with the surrounding communities the Joint Community (Samtgemeinde) of Schüttorf. It is the district's oldest town. It lies on the river Vechte, roughly 5 km east of Bad Bentheim, and 20 km southeast of Nordhorn.
Geography
Location and landscape description The town of Schüttorf lies in southwesternmost Lower Saxony and in the westernmost part of the Federal Republic of Germany. It is roughly 10 km to the Dutch border. With regards to the cultural makeup and to the natural environment, it lies in a transitional zone between the Emsland and Westphalia. The surroundings may be characterized as settled countryside. Middle centres in the area are, among others, Nordhorn and Rheine.
The town is crossed through the middle southeast to northwest by the river Vechte, which farther downstream flows into the Netherlands. The town's highest point rises to 48 m above sea level. Schüttorf lies in the foothills of the Bentheimer Berg, a great sandstone formation from the Cretaceous rising to 80 m and a wooded western outlier of the Teutoburg Forest. Only a small piece of the Bentheim Forest is in the town. All together, roughly 89 ha of woodland is found within the town, making up 8% of the town's total land area.
North of the town is found a former heathland, which sees mainly agronomic use nowadays. There were still broad heathlands in the town just before the First World War. The last heath was converted to agricultural land in 1993. A peculiarity was the dune area in Schüttorf, which consisted of windblown sand, but this was quarried and exploited in the mid-20th century. The outlying centre where these dunes were is, however, still popularly called “Marokko” or, in Low German, Witten Over (“White Shore”), referring to the area's “desertlike” appearance.
There are quite a number of open areas around the town, mainly used for agriculture. Residential areas are characterized by one-family dwellings. There are no genuine highrises in town. With the completion of the Schüttorfer Kreuz (“Schüttorf Cross”), an Autobahn cloverleaf formed by the A 30 and the A 31, greater commercial and industrial areas were laid out in the town's northeast near this interchange in 2004 and 2005.
A beautiful floodplain landscape is the Große Maate northwest of town. In this lowland area by the Vechte are many pools replenished over and over again by flooding. Many butterfly and other insect species are found here, and also the rare kingfisher. The Holmer Maate is another of Schüttorf's floodplain landscapes, where lapwings and great crested grebes may be spotted. Near the centre is the Vechteniederung Recreation Area, which is a floodplain and contains stormwater basins.
Land use Use Area in ha residential 242 commercial-industrial 100 recreation 52 transport 135 agriculture 382
Neighbouring communities The town of Schüttorf mainly borders on other members of the Joint Community, namely Samern in the southeast, Quendorf in the northwest and Engden in the north. Within the district of Grafschaft Bentheim, Schüttorf borders on the town of Bad Bentheim in the west. In the east, the town limit is also part of the boundary with the neighbouring district of Emsland, bordering there on Ahlde, an outlying centre of the community of Emsbüren. There is found – only 2 km from Schüttorf – a noteworthy, small conservation area with a heath pond.
Environmental classification Environmental areas, or units, within the municipal area can be broken down thus according to mainly geomorphological and geological criteria, and soil science (see 1):
D30 Dümm Geest Lowland and Ems-Hunte-Geest Nordhorn-Bentheim Sand Area – with subunits: Nordhorn-Engden Moor- and Sand Landscape (Middle) Vechte Lowland/Nordhorn Lowland D34 Münsterland (Westphalian) Depression Westmünsterland – with subunit: Bentheim Forest
The town of Schüttorf lies mainly on valley sand plates which are crossed by the Vechte Lowland, which is almost flush with them along this stretch. The lowland lies roughly 30 m above sea level and is from 200 to 500 m wide. Bordering its edges are river terraces with a height of roughly 35 m above sea level. Owing to the slight difference in elevation even within the river valley, the middle Vechte meandered in the past, leading to the formation of many backwaters. Since then, however, the river has been straightened and is kept at Schüttorf level.
Geology and local soil science conditions
The Vechte Lowland is part of the Nordhorn glacial terminal basin, which was filled during the Saalian Stage by a glacier. This same glacier also pushed up the terminal moraine that is now the Uelsen Hills and the Lingen Heights in today's Grafschaft Bentheim and Emsland. In the south, the glacier found its abutment at the Mesozoic Bentheim Cretaceous Sandstone Mountain Chain. During the last ice age, the terminal basin was filled with fluvial sand, and locally, sand dunes were blown up by the wind. Within the Vechte Valley, the river deposited Holocene – that is, post-ice-age – sands and floodplain loam.
The mainly sandy, partly loamy or moory soils of the valley sand plates and the narrow river floodplain are relatively sparse in soil quality, ranking between 11 and 30 on the scale used in Germany (which goes up to 100). The outliers of the Bentheim Hill are made up of Bentheim sandstone, a sandstone from the Early Cretaceous. These heights are the northwesternmost outposts of the Central European Uplands. Towards the surface are, as a general rule, clayey soils and till loam. The clay is also used by industry, such as at the brickyard in Suddendorf.
Climate Schüttorf lies in the Mid-European Temperate Zone. The average yearly temperature is 8.5 °C, the mean air pressure is 1015.2 hPa and the mean yearly precipitation amounts to between 700 and 800 mm. The climate is Subatlantic with rather mild winters and fairly warm summers. In Schüttorf itself, there is no weather station run by the German Weather Service (Deutscher Wetterdienst). The nearest weather station is Nordhorn, whose weather is not notably different from Schüttorf's.
Lower Saxony's state hydrological service maintains a water quality monitoring station in Samern where the Vechte's water levels and water quality are measured and documented.
Population
Schüttorf has 11,711 inhabitants (as of 18 April 2005) in an area of 11.23 km2, 51.3% of whom are female. The town's population density is 1027/km2.
Evangelical-Reformed Christians account for 40.7% of the town's population, whereas 22.1% are Catholic, 14.9% are Lutheran and 22% either hold no religious beliefs or belong to other faiths. There are 942 foreigners (8%) living in Schüttorf, among whom the biggest group is Turkish nationals (448), and the second-biggest Dutch nationals (187). There are 1,894 people (16.2%) living in Schüttorf who are German nationals, but whose background is foreign (as of 1 January 2006).
Population development The first population count for Schüttorf is yielded by a document from Claus von Tecklenburg from the year 1399, which clearly speaks of a total of 350 persons. What is known from this is that in 1399, Schüttorf had at least 52 townsmen, as they are named in the document. However, it seems unlikely that there were considerably more. Going by average family size, it seems likelier that at this time, the population was actually somewhere between 200 and 250 inhabitants in the town. Thereafter, the town's population climbed continuously, a trend interrupted only by the Second World War.
There were three great surges in the population growth. The first came in the late 19th century, especially in the 1890s while the textile industry boom due to the Industrial Revolution was luring workers to Schüttorf. After the Second World War came the second wave of immigration when roughly 2,600 refugees driven out of Germany's former eastern territories reached Schüttorf. Towards the end of the 1990s, the population once again rose sharply owing mainly to locally favourable building land prices.
Year Inhabitants 1399 ~250 1788 963 1820 1,041 1830 1,373 1841 1,453 1860 1,703 1871 1,682 1890 1,994 1900 4,110
Year Inhabitants 1939 5548 1945 4953 1946 6769 1957 7982 1972 9479 1987 9,550 1997 11,222 2005 11,711 2007 11,753
History Schüttorf's town hall was struck by an aerial bomb in 1945 in the Second World War's last days and was completely gutted. The fire also destroyed the town archive and many valuable historical documents, making research into Schüttorf's history very difficult. Many things, however, have been reconstructed since then.
Etymology The etymology of the name Schüttorf is not exactly known and various folk explanations have been put forth, the most widespread of which is the legend that tells of the river Vechte being diverted around the town as early as 1295 by building a dam. The workers on this project are said to have dumped out the contents of their pushcarts on the command Schütt’t d’r up. This legend, however, only explains the sound of one of the town's modern names (the Low German name Schüttrupp).
The earliest forms of the name Schüttorf were Scuhtthorp, Scutorpe, Scuttorpe and Scotdorpe in documents from 1154. On a coin issue from the first half of the 13th century is the form SCOTOR(p)E.
Hermann Abels (see 2) is of the opinion that the name's origin is the Dutch word schut (limber wall, dam, sluice), which comes close to the folk meaning. Historically, however, it comes up short, as it assumes that the Vechte was already dammed at the time the placename arose, and it leaves unexplained all forms in Scot-, which must be derived from the Low German Schott (“dividing wall in a stall”).
Another explanation has the name coming from the Vechteschuten, barges (Schuten) being the flat-bottomed boats with a very small draught that were used for shipping Bentheim sandstone. The Vechte is navigable by barge as far up as Schüttorf, and it is known that the stone was loaded here. This explanation, however, presupposes intensive river shipping at the time of the town's founding.
Quite another explanation is that the name Schüttorf stems from Scutthorpe or Scuttrop, which means “Protection Village” (this would be Schutzdorf in Modern High German), referring to Altena Castle in the town. Historically, however, this explanation also does not bear up under scrutiny, for the castle was not built until well after the town's founding.
A modern explanation says that the placename comes from the Low German Scuit (“Irishman”). Ireland’s mediaeval name was Scoti or Scotti. In Gaelic there are many dialects containing and illustrating the vowel variants o and u. Furthermore, finds at digs around Schüttorf of Celtic crosses and fan crosses show that there were once Irish monks in the area.
Early history During excavation work for a railway line, a woman’s thighbone was unearthed in Schüttorf reckoned to date from roughly 2000 BC. Schüttorf must therefore have already been settled by that time. The cromlechs in nearby Emsbüren were also built at about this time. Also, a clay pot found in 1927 comes from this same era.
Already very early on, there was an important crossing of two trade routes on the site that is now Schüttorf, as the river Vechte could be crossed here at a ford. At this hub was an “original yard” around which the settlement developed and which existed until 1792 as the Alter Hof (“Old Yard”).
In the 6th or 7th century missionaries from the British Isles came to Schüttorf. At archaeological digs, Irish Celtic crosses, for instance, have been found. The naming of Schüttorf's outlying centre of Schottbrink, whose existence can be proved by the 15th century, bears further witness to an Irish presence in the area.