City partnership Verl – Delphos

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On November 2, 1998, the council of the municipality of Verl , Gütersloh district decided to enter into a town twinning with the city of Delphos (Ohio) in the USA . Ferdinand Bredeick, brother of the pastor Johannes Otto Bredeick, who was born in Verl in 1789, founded the city of Delphos in 1845. Because of the bitter hardship prevailing at the time, many emigrants left Verl and the surrounding communities and settled in Delphos and the surrounding area.

history

In the 19th century the Verler emigrant Ferdinand Bredeick (alternative spelling: Bredeik) founded two neighboring cities in Ohio , USA: Delphos and Ottoville. The initially lively ties to Verl thinned out more and more and finally tore off completely - especially as a result of the First World War . It was not until the 1990s that new contacts were made, which ultimately led to the establishment of an official town twinning.

Johannes Otto Bredeick

In 1789 Johannes Otto was born on the Bredeick'schen Hof (today Meermeier, Lindenstrasse 157) in Verl- Bornholte and grew up there, but came into the care of clergymen at an early age. He attended high school in Rietberg and eventually became a pastor. He later advanced to the position of cathedral chapter in Osnabrück and could have lived there in peace and quiet. But Johannes Otto Bredeik could not overlook the misery of the people in Westphalia and the Osnabrück area . Thousands of people all over Europe were starving to death due to bad harvests. He was unwilling to accept the bitter poverty of the people as God given and looked for a way to help them.

Tombstone of Johannes Otto Bredeick

Together with his brother Ferdinand, who at that time was still a farmer in Bornholte, he organized an emigration movement to the USA. The brothers bought land in Ohio from the US government and selected families to go to the US. These people, about half from the Osnabrück area and half from the Verler Land, had nothing to lose and were ready to leave their poor cottages and emigrate to the USA.

The Bishop of Osnabrück did not let Johannes Otto go, but only allowed him many years later to follow his brother, who in the meantime had founded two towns under his guidance in 1845: Delphos and Ottoville, two cities in the so-called Midwest , their inhabitants are still proud of their German roots and cultivate German traditions. They have also retained some of the Westphalian mentality, because in contrast to the general mobility trend in the USA, the people in Delphos and the surrounding area are sometimes very down-to-earth.

When Father Bredeick died in 1858, he not only left his relatives in Verl a large sum of money, but with his estate he laid the foundation for the construction of St. John's Church, which still towers over Delphos today.

None of this was known in Verl until 1993. But then a group of visitors from Delphos came to Verl, knowing that their city founder was born there. After initial contact with the Meermeier family called Bredeik, closer ties resulted, which led to regular visits in both directions. The Verl Heimatverein set up a “Verl-Delphos Partnership Working Group” under the direction of Frithjof Meißner, a son-in-law of the Bredeik family, which organized the contacts.

During the first visit of a Verler travel group to Delphos during the Easter break in 1995, John Sheeter, the then mayor of Delphos, first mentioned the idea of ​​a town twinning, but since no official representative of the community had traveled, the participants of the Mayor Sheeter group could only promise, to bring this idea to the competent authority in Verl.

In the fall of 1997, flags were officially exchanged for the first time and in March 1998, the Delphos, Ohio, community submitted an application to the Verl community, in which they officially requested a twinning through Mayor John Sheeter. On November 2, 1998, the decision was made in a council meeting to accept the application from Ohio and to enter into a town twinning with Delphos. The official signature of the partnership documents took place on March 31, 1999 on the occasion of a visit by a German delegation to Delphos.

Partnership activities

When the municipal council in Verl decided to officially establish the partnership between Verl and Delphos, it was agreed that the municipality is the bearer of this partnership, but that the “Friendship Link” is maintained by the “Verl-Delphos Partnership” working group in the Verl home association. The activities in the partnership are divided into the two main areas of activity “Travel” and “ School exchange ”.

Contacts and travel activities

Since the first trip in 1995, mutual visits have taken place at regular intervals, both in the form of individual trips and group trips under the direction of the working group in the Heimatverein. There is no annual visitor traffic when it comes to the distance between the twin cities, but there are official trips every two to three years as part of the partnership.

Student stays in the USA

Since the partnership is inextricably linked to the Bredeik family for historical reasons (see above) and the chairman of the "Partnership" working group in the Heimatverein is a teacher, the possibility was quickly considered after the first contact in 1995 to give German students a stay at a high school in Delphos. The partners in the USA were open to this kind of contact, so that in the following period up to the present time some German students travel to Delphos every year and live there with host families for three or more months and attend one of the two high schools:

  • St. John's Catholic High School
  • Jefferson High School

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. Official website of the city of Verl - Verl's city partnerships
  2. ^ Federal Writers' Project (Editor): The Ohio Guide . Oxford University Press, New York 1940, pp. 425-426.
  3. Frithjof Meißner: Origin and history of the Verl - Delphos partnership ( memento from September 19, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) . In :ameretz.de, Network of Westphalian emigration to America since the 19th century. (Accessed January 1, 2010.)

Coordinates: 40 ° 50 ′ 48.1 ″  N , 84 ° 19 ′ 46 ″  W.