Marienberg (sometimes misspelled as Marienburg) is a town located near the mouth of the Sepik River in Marienberg Rural LLG, East Sepik Province, Papua New Guinea. [1]
In 1913, in what was then German New Guinea, missionaries of the Catholic Society of the Divine Word established a settlement here. [2] It was the first European settlement on the Sepik. The settlement's main industry was milling timber. [3] To facilitate this, one the first railways in the country was built to transport timber from the river to the sawmill. It was drawn by buffalo. [4]
The town was occupied during the Japanese invasion of Papua New Guinea in 1942. [5] Bombing and subsequent re-occupation of the town by Allied forces led to the destruction of the sawmill, houses and church constructed there. [6] These were rebuilt and, by the 1960s the area had a thriving milling business again. Shortly before independence in 1975, labor disputes led to the mismanagement and decline of the business and ultimately all industry ceased there.