Editing Piła (section)

===19th century: industrialization and railway hub===
[[File:Album widokow przedstawiajacych miejsca historyczne Ksiestwa Poznanskiego i Prus Zachodnich 1880 (5414442) (cropped).jpg|thumb|left|19th-century lithograph of the city]]
After the [[Congress of Vienna]] of 1815, Prussia regained the town once again. Under the Prussian administrative reforms of 1816–18, the town became part of the [[Kreis Kolmar in Posen|Kolmar District]] within the [[Bromberg (region)|Bromberg Region]] of the [[Grand Duchy of Posen]]. On 1 January 1818 Kreis Kolmar was established, with its seat in Piła / Schneidemühl, which in 1821 was moved to [[Chodzież]]. One of the main escape routes for insurgents of the unsuccessful Polish [[November Uprising]] from partitioned Poland to the [[Great Emigration]] led through the city.<ref>{{cite magazine|last=Umiński|first=Janusz|year=1998|title=Losy internowanych na Pomorzu żołnierzy powstania listopadowego|magazine=Jantarowe Szlaki|volume=4 |language=pl|issue=250|page=16}}</ref>

The Polish language was restricted from offices and education and the city saw a significant influx of German settlers. By 1834 Schneidemühl had barely recovered from the worst outbreak of [[cholera]] of 1831, an epidemic that affected the town's burghers to such an extent that a special Protestant cholera cemetery had to be laid out in the town's suburb Berliner Vorstadt. In the summer of 1834 the city was again struck by a fire that destroyed a large part of the city centre and the city archives. The city was rebuilt shortly afterwards.

In 1851 the city was connected to [[Berlin]] and [[Bydgoszcz]] (Bromberg) by the [[Prussian Eastern Railway]]. An architectural artifact which remains from the railway development period is a [[Okrąglak roundhouse in Piła|historical roundhouse]].

The [[Germanisation of Poles during the Partitions|Germanisation]] policy of the Prussian and Imperial German government replaced its Polish identity with a German one. By the end of the 19th century the city had become one of the most important railway centers of the region and one of the biggest towns in the [[Province of Posen]]. It was turned into a Prussian military [[garrison]] town. Schneidemühl was revisited by a catastrophe, known as the ''Brunnenunglück'', or the 'calamity of the well' that made national headlines. The drilling of an artesian well in August 1892 went horribly wrong and led to unexpected widespread flooding of many of the streets laid out in 1834, causing numerous houses to simply collapse and leaving more than eighty families without shelter. The worst was that this disaster came only a few years on the heels of unexpected flooding caused by the spring thaw of March 1888 that had turned the Küddow into a raging river, when many people were forced to use rowboats to navigate the streets.

====First World War and Imperial German military aviation technology====
[[File:Schneidemuehl Fliegerkaserne.jpg|thumb|Barracks in Piła in 1915]]
On 1 April 1914 Schneidemühl was disentangled from the [[Kreis Kolmar in Posen|Kolmar District]] and became an [[Independent city#Germany|independent city]] (or urban district; Stadtkreis) within the Bromberg Region. In the months before the outbreak of [[World War I]], in April 1914 the [[Albatros Flugzeugwerke]] established the so-called ''Ostdeutsche Albatros-Werke'' (East German Albatros Works, abbreviated "O.A.W.") in Schneidemühl for construction of military aircraft for the [[Luftstreitkräfte|Fliegertruppe]] air service of the [[German Army (German Empire)|German Army]] throughout the war — it later undertook license production of Fokker's famous [[Fokker D.VII]] fighter during the last year of World War I.

During the First World War, the Germans operated a [[German prisoner-of-war camps in World War I|prisoner-of-war camp]] in the city, initially taking mainly Russian POWs (including Poles and Latvians conscripted into the Russian Army) but later including prisoners from most [[Allies of World War I|Allied]] nations including Britain and Australia. A telling account of life in the town during that period survives in the form of the diary of [[Jo Mihaly|Piete Kuhr]], then a young girl whose grandmother worked at the Red Cross canteen at the railway station.