Construction of the Fokko Ukena Dyke began in 1425 as part of an ambitious campaign to enclose the so-called Westermarsch Neulande - the new lands - and convert tidal flats into cultivable polder. Before that work, families in the area had survived on warften, the artificial mounds scattered through the marsh that kept houses above storm-tide level. The dyke changed everything. It locked the sea out, dried the soil, and turned a precarious mud landscape into farms with names and boundaries. The village that grew on the protected land was, almost by definition, a community of dyke-builders. They maintained what they had built, and the work has never stopped.

Around 1771, according to the school chronicle, a major cattle epidemic swept through Westermarsch. The village's population at the time was approximately six hundred, and the agricultural economy ran almost entirely on dairy and beef. Losing the herd meant losing the income that paid rents, bought seed, repaired roofs. The chronicle entries describing the aftermath are spare but devastating - a record of hardship that took years to recover from. The episode is part of a wider European pattern: rinderpest and other epizootic diseases cycled repeatedly through eighteenth-century herds, and rural communities like this one absorbed the losses without insurance or relief.

In 1774 a brickyard was built on the road that today carries the number Kreisstraße 214, with a furnace capacity of roughly twenty thousand bricks. It operated until the 1970s - two centuries of locally fired brick that built much of the surrounding architecture. Three years after the brickyard opened, a sugar feeder was added. In 1825, however, the dyke broke. Large parts of the village were devastated by a tidal surge that overran the protective ring, drowning fields and damaging houses. Westermarsch rebuilt - the chronicle records the work - and the breach taught a lesson that has stayed in the regional engineering memory. Dyke heights along this stretch of coast were raised repeatedly in the decades that followed.

Until the 1870s the most reliable way to get from Westermarsch to the town of Norden was by water. The various Tiefs and drainage canals that threaded the marsh doubled as transport routes; the road network was unreliable, often impassable in winter, and not maintained to any consistent standard. Between 1873 and 1875 the first regular overland transport link was built. The change was less romantic than the canal traffic but transformative: market produce could now reach Norden faster and in worse weather, and the village began its slow integration into the surrounding urban economy. Today Landesstraße 27 carries the descendants of that route, connecting Westermarsch I to Norden and onward to the harbour at Greetsiel.

Westermarsch I has no church building. The roughly 450 inhabitants who belong to the Evangelical-Lutheran congregation are looked after by St. Andrew's in Norden, and services have for several years been held in the village halls when needed. About three per cent of the village is Evangelical free-church; around one per cent is Roman Catholic. There is an AWO playschool in an old school next to the village hall, and an even older school that became, after closure, a nationally known bar - now dilapidated. The village is essentially a working agricultural landscape: large-scale farms, isolated Gulf farmhouses, settlements at Mittelmarsch, Altendeich, and Westermarscherloog. On 1 July 1972 the municipality was absorbed into Norden, ending its independence and folding it into the borough's ten subdistricts.