Papenburg began in the 1630s as a Fehnkolonie - a peat colony - one of a chain of settlements stretched across the bogs of the Dutch-German borderland. The model came from across the border, in the Veenkoloniën of Groningen: cut a canal into the moor, drain the surrounding bog, harvest the peat for fuel, and use the canal to ship the dried turf to market. The canal becomes the village's main street. The houses face the water. Centuries later the peat is mostly gone but the canals remain, threading through the districts of Untenende, Obenende, and Aschendorf - the last of which was already an old settlement when Papenburg itself was founded. Each district kept its own character. Walking from one to another, you can feel the town's history broken into chapters.

Out of the peat trade came shipping. Out of shipping came shipbuilding. By the nineteenth century Papenburg had more than twenty shipyards along the Ems and its branches, building wooden brigs and schooners for North Sea trade. Many of those yards are gone now, but the town keeps the memory afloat. Tied up in the canals are sailing-ship replicas - the Thekla von Papenburg among them - working museums of what the place used to make. The water around the old center is shallower than it looks. It was never about depth. It was about getting a hull launched, floating it to the Ems, and pushing it out toward the open coast.

The Meyer Werft shipyard, founded here in 1795 by Willm Rolf Meyer to build small wooden vessels, never left. Seven generations of Meyers later it is one of the most modern shipyards in the world, employing more than 3,450 people in halls so large that the cruise ships are essentially built indoors, weather-proofed against the long North German winter. The biggest of those halls is among the largest enclosed buildings on Earth by usable volume. From a distance the structures look like flat-roofed warehouses; only when you compare them to the small town around them does the scale register. The shipyard is now an anchor site on the European Route of Industrial Heritage - an admission, in effect, that Papenburg's industrial present is already a historic monument.

When a finished ship leaves Papenburg, the whole region pays attention. The hull has to travel about thirty-six kilometers down the Ems, stern-first, towed and nudged through a river that is narrower than the ship is long. People line the banks. Cars park along the dikes for hours. The conveyance can take more than a day depending on tides and on the Ems barrage - a movable barrier completed in 2002 that lets the water be dammed up to float the hulls free. Before the barrage, the trip had to be timed to natural high water and the available window was brutally short. Now the engineering is a little kinder, but the spectacle has not faded. The ships are too big for the river, and that is part of why people come.

Beyond the shipyard, Papenburg keeps its everyday rhythms. There are bike routes in every direction - the Ems-Radweg, the Deutsche Fehnroute, the Dollard Route - that thread through the canal-lined neighborhoods and out into the peat-and-pasture countryside. Cyclists from the Netherlands cross the border so casually that mobile phones drift onto Dutch networks before anyone notices. South of town, in the village of Heede, stands the so-called dicke Linde, a linden tree estimated at six to eight hundred years old, its trunk close to seventeen and a half meters around - a single living thing that has stood through Papenburg's entire transformation from peat moor to cruise-ship capital.