and the turnover came in at 132,000 hundredweight. Preferred goods were coffee, sugar, oil, spices, tobacco, woollen goods, wine, honey and fish. It was at this time that the stately trade houses arose on the market street, great townsmen's houses, inns, hostels, a stock exchange and a brewery. In the latter half of the 19th century, shipping on the Werra shrank ever more in importance as inland goods transport shifted to the railways. Wanfried was linked to the rail network in 1902 by the Werratalbahn. In the 19th century, the trading town of Wanfried saw a boom in its wealth. The walls and towers were razed and the old town hall was torn down. The town's former glamour has been outlasted by the stately timber-frame houses, which form an almost unbroken set. The inhabitants have been overwhelmingly Protestant since the Reformation. The small Catholic parish (founded in 1908) grew greatly after the Second World War from all the Ethnic German refugees from Eastern Europe . The time from March through June 1945 in nazi-administered and American liberated Wanfried is described by Agnes Humbert from her viewpoint as a former French political prisoner and badly mistreated slave-labourer in her diary Notre guerre, souvenirs de Resistance (Résistance, Memoirs of Occupied France). In 1945, at the Wanfried lordly seat, the Kalkhof, the Wanfried agreement, a territorial swap between the American and Soviet zones of occupation along the so-called Whisky-Vodka Line (a local railway, not the border), was signed. Under the pseudonym “Friedheim”, the small town on the zonal border cropped up in producer Niklaus Schilling's feature films The Willi Busch Report and , produced respectively a few years before and in the year after German reunification. Wanfried – or Friedheim – stood for a very quiet place about which not much was ever heard, but into which a local newspaper editor sought to bring some life by himself secretly initiating incidents on the border so that he could then report them in his paper. The town of Wanfried celebrated its 400-year jubilee of the granting of town rights in 2008. Politics Town council The municipal election held on 26 March 2006 yielded the following results: Heading the town council is Frank Susebach (SPD). Mayors Since October 2007, Wilhelm Gebhard (CDU) has been the mayor. He beat his opponent, Otto Frank (SPD), who held office from 1989 to 2007, with 51.7% of the vote.