Before the dikes and the windmills did their work, Purmerend sat at the meeting point of three large lakes: the Purmer, the Beemster, and the Wormer. The town was built on a small terp, an artificial mound, on the bank of the river De Where, which connected two of the lakes. Fishing made the early economy. Then the Dutch decided to make more land. The Beemster Lake was pumped dry in 1612, the Purmer in 1622 - two of the most ambitious land-reclamation projects in European history, accomplished with windmills, dikes, and immense patience. Purmerend lost its fishing grounds overnight. It gained, all around it, some of the most fertile soil in the Netherlands. Cows and sheep replaced nets and boats. The town settled into a quieter role as the market hub of the polders, and stayed that way for three centuries.

Between 1819 and 1824 the Dutch dug the Noordhollandsch Kanaal, a long ship channel running north from Amsterdam all the way to the open sea at Den Helder. The route ran past Purmerend. Suddenly the small market town had a deepwater connection to the world. The Schutsluis Purmerend - the Purmerend Lock - opened in 1821. Within a decade, timber merchants were filling the basin. By the 1860s, ships from Norway, Sweden, Russia, and America were tying up at Purmerend's docks, sometimes a dozen at a time. Local merchants outfitted whalers. A tug company called Gebroeders Goedkoop ran seven steam tugs out of the harbour by 1866. The boom lasted barely fifty years. In the 1870s a far larger waterway, the North Sea Canal, opened a more direct route to Amsterdam, and the trade migrated away. Purmerend went back to selling cows.

For four hundred years the cattle market - the koemarkt - filled the centre of town. Cows and sheep came in by truck, by trailer, and once by boat; buyers walked the rows, slapped flanks, and bargained until palms met. A series of cattle disease outbreaks between 1995 and 2001 forced the market to close. It reopened on a smaller scale in 2002 and finally moved out of the old town in 2008, settling into a new auction site on the city's northern edge. Purmerend kept one other claim to fame: in 2003 the Netherlands officially named it Kermisstad van Nederland, the Funfair City. The town's annual fair was big enough, and old enough, to win the title outright. On the right week in summer the squares fill with rides, candied almonds, and the smell of frying oliebollen. The cows have moved out. The Ferris wheels still come every year.

In 1960 Purmerend had about 10,000 residents. By 2020 it had over 80,000. The transformation has no single cause and a familiar pattern - postwar housing pressure on Amsterdam, the arrival of fast trains and motorways, the Dutch decision to channel growth into satellite towns rather than swell the capital further. Three train stations now serve the city. The bus station downtown is still called Tramplein, Tram Square, after a vanished tram line that once rattled in from Amsterdam Centraal - immortalized in a 1951 hit single called 't Boemeltje van Purmerend, the Little Train to Purmerend, performed by The Ramblers. In 2019 the province announced plans to extend Amsterdam's Noord-Zuidlijn metro line to the city. The little train, finally, is being replaced by a big one. In 2022 the old Beemster polder municipality merged into Purmerend, bringing the combined population to about 96,000.

Quiet places produce their share of the famous. Purmerend gave the Netherlands the architect J.J.P. Oud, a founding member of the De Stijl movement that shaped modernism worldwide. It gave the world Mart Stam, the architect and chair designer whose 1926 cantilevered tubular-steel chair became one of the most-copied pieces of furniture of the twentieth century. It produced the politician Jan van Zanen, who served as Mayor of Utrecht from 2014 to 2020, and the magician and illusionist Hans Klok, whose Las Vegas residencies turned a Dutch small-town kid into a stage-magic celebrity. Drag performer Janey Jacké, who competed on Drag Race Holland, also grew up here. The town that started as a banker's castle continues, eight centuries later, to send people out into the world.