Wiesmoor is the youngest town in East Frisia. It received its town rights on 16 March 2006, and two days later celebrated the centenary of its founding — a 100-year-old settlement granted formal township only on its hundredth birthday. The chronology has a strange recursive quality. Almost all the quarters that make up modern Wiesmoor are older than the town center itself, because the planned 1906 settlement was dropped into the middle of a much older landscape of bog villages: Marcardsmoor, Hinrichsfehn, Voßbarg, Wilhelmsfehn, Wiesederfehn, Zwischenbergen. The new center grew up between them, then absorbed them. The bog underneath, the East Frisian raised bog, had once held peat layers up to eight meters deep, the product of post-glacial accumulation over thousands of years.

Around 1900 a Prussian agricultural ministry official named Dr. Eberhard Ramm proposed something audacious: harvest peat by industrial machine instead of by hand spade. The traditional Fehn colonies had cut peat one strip at a time for centuries, but Ramm imagined large-scale mechanical extraction feeding directly into a purpose-built power plant. He partnered with Carl Friedrich von Siemens. In 1906 the Nordgeorgsfehnkanal was cut through the bog to drain the area. Specialists and prison laborers arrived first. By 1907 ordinary residents began moving in. By 1909 the peat power plant was producing electricity, eventually distributing it from the Ems to the lower Elbe — a remarkable reach for a generator burning compressed bog. Siemens owned it until 1921, when North West German Power Plants took over. At its peak in 1952 the plant employed about 1,200 people and consumed roughly 120,000 tons of peat a year.

The waste-heat greenhouses, expanded after the war by the Ernst Benary flower company with twenty new houses and forty hectares of outdoor growing, turned Wiesmoor into a serious horticultural producer. About 200 people worked the greenhouses in the early 1950s, growing tomatoes and cucumbers that traveled to neighboring European countries and flowers in industrial volume. The first Blütenfest, the flower festival, was held in 1952, on the first weekend of September. It still runs that weekend every year. Each festival selects a new Blütenkönigin — a Blossom Queen — and the outgoing queen, by long tradition, parachutes over the sports field on Saturday evening to signal the start of the party. Monday closes with Kanal in Flammen, fireworks along and over the Nordgeorgsfehnkanal that drained the bog a century earlier.

Two harder dates sit in the town's chronology. During the Second World War, the Wiesmoor area held a forced-labor subcamp attached to the Nazi prison in Emden — part of the broader system of forced labor under German rule, and a piece of local history the town now acknowledges in its civic record. And on Friday 13 January 1989, a Royal Air Force Panavia Tornado from 14 Squadron flying low over the Hinrichsfehn district collided with a German Alpha Jet of Jagdbombergeschwader 43 at around 9:50 in the morning. Wreckage came down near a primary school. Both Tornado crew were killed: navigator Fl Lt Alan George Grieve, 28, of Forres in Moray, who left behind his wife and an 18-month-old daughter; and pilot Fl Lt Michael Peter Staveley Smith, 37, married with two sons. The German pilot, Hermann Späth, 38, ejected and survived. The 1995 demolition of the gas turbine power plant that had replaced the peat one closed the industrial chapter that had created the town. The Luftkurort designation Wiesmoor earned in 1977 — air-spa status for the quality of its air — closed it, in a sense, twice.