<div style="float:right">Image:Posen kr Wirsitz.jpg</div>
Kreis Wirsitz was one of 14 or 15 Kreise (English: counties) in the northern administrative district of Bromberg, in the Prussian province of Posen. The county existed with essentially the same boundaries beginning in 1815 as a German Kreise then from 1919 as a Polish Powiat until 1975. Its administrative center was the town of Wyrzysk (Wirsitz). The county contained additional municipalities such as Bialosliwie, Lobzenica (Lobsens), Miasteczko Krajeńskie (Friedheim), Mrocza (Mrotschen), Nakło nad Notecią (Nakel), Sadki and Wysoka (Wissek) plus over 100 villages. Many villages that had Germanic names were changed to completely different Polish names following World War II, such as Radzicz (formerly Hermannsdorf). In 1954 the central government abolished the commune (Polish: gmina) as the smallest unit of government, dividing the county into 28 clusters. In 1973 municipalities were restored. After the administrative reform of 1975, the territory of the county was divided between the new (lower) region of Bydgoszcz and the region Piła. The territory of the defunct county was annexed by Naklo County, Kujavian-Pomeranian Voivodeship and Pila County, Greater Poland Voivodeship. Wyrzysk was incorporated into Piła County.
History
The area around the town of Wyrzysk, then part of the Duchy of Warsaw, became part of the Grand Duchy of Posen on May 15, 1815, as accorded at the Congress of Vienna. The rather titulary Grand Duchy of Posen, held by the Hohenzollern, the ruling family in the Kingdom of Prussia, was in fact an autonomous province within Prussia, but not belonging to those territories covered by the loose league called the German Confederation. Its constitutional peculiarity had been abolished on December 5, 1848, when it was converted into the Prussian Province of Posen, by way of which it was transformed into one of Prussia's regional subdivisions, but still no part of the German Confederation.
thumb|right|The Rittergut in Brostowo
On July 1, 1816, the county of Wyrzysk (German: Kreis Wirsitz) was formed. After a territorial reorganisation within the Kingdom of Prussia the borders of the Kreis Wirsitz were partly redrawn so that by January 1, 1818, the municipality of Kcynia (German: Exin) became a part of the neighbouring county of Schubin (Polish: Szubin). The town of Wyrzysk (German: Wirsitz) domiciled the county administration.
Being an administrative unit of the Kingdom of Prussia the Kreis Wirsitz joined the newly founded North German Confederation in July 1867, becoming thereby for the first time part of a German commonwealth. By way of unification of German states the North German Confederation had been enlarged by southern German states and constitutionally reinforced to become a united Germany on January 18, 1871, with Kreis Wirsitz being part of it.
The members of the German parliament (German: Reichstag) forming the Polish National Democratic Party (Polish: Stronnictwo Narodowo-Demokratyczne), led by Władysław Taczanowski (1825–1893), protested on April 1, 1871, in the parliament of the newly founded united Germany against Prussia joining with all her provinces united Germany.
On December 27, 1918, the Greater Poland uprising started and involved most of the Prussian Province of Posen, where Poles formed the majority. While the Uprising, terminated by a German-Polish ceasefire agreed on February 16, 1919, led to an end of German rule in most of the territory of the province of Posen, its northern outskirts including the Kreis Wirsitz remained calm and under German control. This may be because it had a German majority population. According to the Prussian census of 1858, Kreis Wirsitz had a population of 54,044, of which 29,339 (54.3%) were Germans and 24,705 (45.7%) were Poles.
Demographics
{| class="wikitable"
|+Ethnolinguistic structure of Kreis Wirsitz