Since the 1950s, plastics have been the backbone of the local economy. Eight named manufacturers cluster within the city limits: ATKA, delo Dettmer-Verpackungen, Franz Henke, Kronen-Hansa-Werk, Nowack, Polytec Rießelmann, Pöppelmann, and RPC Bramlage. None of them are household names. Most of them supply parts to companies whose names you do know — the moulded clips and bottle caps and component housings that hold consumer goods together. Pöppelmann alone makes everything from horticultural pots to medical packaging. The cluster developed organically out of an earlier specialty in injection moulding that Lohne already had by 1900, decades before plastics meant much to anyone, and the town simply rode the material's twentieth-century rise into the present.

Look at Lohne's coat of arms and you will find a wing — a heraldic feather perched above a crown. It is there because Lohne, improbably, was once a center of the German feather industry in the early nineteenth century. Feathers for hats, for pillows, for fans. The trade is gone, but the wing remains, paired with a Catholic church on white ground that the town added to acknowledge its religious character. The grand duke of Oldenburg granted the arms on 3 January 1912, by which time the feathers were already in decline and the brushes, brickworks, and weaving mills had taken over. The coat of arms is a fossil of one local industry surrounded by the symbols of others, and it tells the story of how this town has always reinvented itself just before the previous trade collapsed.

On the edge of town, in a small chapel called St. Anna Klus, there is a healing spring. Pilgrims have been coming here for centuries to draw water from it — the chapel is one of five Catholic churches and filial chapels in Lohne, but the only one that pulls people from outside the parish. In a region where Catholicism survived the Reformation only because the bishop of Münster sent soldiers to enforce it, the persistence of a small pilgrimage tradition feels less like superstition than like cultural memory. The water still flows. People still come. The 67 percent Catholic share of the population that the 2011 census recorded has slipped to 53 percent in 2023, but on the days the chapel fills, you would not know the numbers were dropping at all.

Drive the highway between Vechta and Damme, just inside Lohne, and you will pass a 1943 narrow-gauge diesel locomotive parked on a traffic roundabout, with a peat car hooked to its back. It has been there since 19 May 2011. The machine was built by Schöma in nearby Diepholz, and for decades it hauled peat from the Südlohner Moor on the foothills of the Dammer mountains, back when peat was a fuel people burned in their stoves and an industry serious enough to need its own railway. The bog is mostly drained now. The locomotive runs nowhere. But the town put it in the middle of a roundabout because it would have been wrong to throw it away.

From the 1920s onward, German engineers seriously discussed a canal called the Hansakanal that would have run right through the middle of Lohne, connecting the Rhine-Ruhr industrial heartland to the seaports of Bremen and Hamburg. Drawings were made. Routes were surveyed. In 1950, after a quarter-century of intermittent planning, the project was finally abandoned. Lohne never became a canal town, and the Mühlenbach stream that runs through the city park stayed the small, useful watercourse it had always been. Now there is a Tesla Supercharger near the freeway exit and an industrial museum opened in 2000, both of them in their own way taking the place of the great unbuilt waterway.