The town's name probably comes from a horn - the Nothorn, the emergency horn, blown by watchmen on Vechteinsel, the Vechte Island, to warn the inhabitants of attack. Other theories invoke fog horns used by boatmen, a 'pointed end' of land in the Vechte Valley, or the old word for a northward outpost. The records reach back to around 900, when the place is called Northhornon in the heberegister of Werden Monastery. Around 1180 the Counts of Bentheim took over the local court, built a castle on the island, and the settlement began to thicken into a real trading hub. The Vechte was navigable as far as Schüttorf and, before the Dutch reclaimed it, flowed directly into the sea via the Zuider Zee - a route along which sandstone from Bentheim's quarries travelled north to become Amsterdam's Royal Palace, and along which spices, textiles, paper, coffee, tea, cocoa and tobacco travelled south.

Town rights came on the ninth day after Whitsunday in 1379 from Count Bernhard I. Municipal privileges followed in 1416. The Augustinian canons of Marienwolde founded their monastery at Frenswegen in 1394, and it was later called 'Westphalia's Paradise.' Then came the wars. During the Eighty Years' War Spanish troops used Nordhorn as a waypoint; in the Thirty Years' War, Swedish, Hessian, Lüneburg and Imperial forces all marched through. Bishop Christoph Bernhard von Galen waged his own border war against the Dutch and ended it with the Peace of Nordhorn in 1666. Napoleon's Continental Blockade turned the town into a smugglers' haven. After the Congress of Vienna the silting Vechte and new customs borders nearly killed local commerce - until Willem Stroink came over from Enschede in 1839 and founded Nordhorn's first mechanised weaving mill. The textile era had begun.

Industrialisation rewrote the town. From 2,540 inhabitants in 1903, Nordhorn climbed to 18,104 by 1930 and 23,457 by 1939. Mayor Ernst Firnhaber - a pharmacist and chemist - had even managed to establish Germany's first quinine plant here, processing more than sixteen tons of cinchona bark in 1843. After the Second World War the population leapt again, swollen by some ten thousand displaced people from former eastern German territories, and a whole new district called die Blanke was built to house thirteen thousand of them. The town's small Jewish community had been destroyed in the Holocaust; the synagogue on Synagogenstraße was burned during Kristallnacht in 1938, and resistance figures like Adolf Pazdera and Ferdinand Kobitzki were murdered in the camps. British troops of XXX Corps occupied an undefended Nordhorn on Easter Monday, 2 April 1945. NINO collaborated with Karl Lagerfeld and Helmut Newton in the post-war decades, and stayed one of Europe's leading textile producers until the 1980s. Then the whole industry collapsed.

What followed surprised people. Nordhorn did not hollow out the way other one-industry towns did. The local employment agency now reports the lowest unemployment rate in Lower Saxony. Midsized service and production firms moved in to fill the vacuum, and the rebrand to Die Wasserstadt has reopened the Vechte canals to pleasure boats. There is a real cycling culture too: locals call the bicycle the Fietse - from the Dutch fiets - and the dense network of Fietsenpads radiates out from the town through the broader Grafschaft Bentheim, signposted with little Paddestolen, the mushroom-shaped markers Dutch cyclists know well. Trains began running passengers to Nordhorn again only on 7 July 2019, after a forty-five-year gap during which it had been the second-largest German town without passenger rail service. The Tierpark Nordhorn shows off wolves and harbour seals; HSG Nordhorn-Lingen still plays top-flight handball at the Euregium. Above it all the dome of the Augustinuskirche - finished in 1913 on the old island where the Bentheim castle once stood - holds the skyline together, just as the Alte Kirche from the 15th century has done for over half a millennium.