History of the town and canton of Zug

Overview

The canton of Zug sits on the edge of the Pre-Alps: west and north of Lake Zug it belongs to the Swiss Plateau and extends to the river Reuss, while to the east the land rises over the Zugerberg and the Ägeri valley to 1,580 metres at the Wildspitz. Until 1798 this small state was known as «Stadt und Amt Zug» – the town on the lake together with the three rural communes of Ägeri, Menzingen (then called «am Berg») and Baar formed one member of the Swiss Confederation. Zug has been a canton of the Confederation since 1803, with the town of Zug as its capital. For centuries cattle farming, fruit growing and the town market shaped everyday life; in the 19th century factories on the river Lorze and in the town were added. Since the late 1950s Zug has grown into an internationally oriented business location with a rapidly increasing population.

Prehistory and early history

After the peak of the last ice age the area became free of ice from around 17,000 BC. The oldest known sites, such as Grindel near Cham, date back to about 14,000 BC.

From the Neolithic and the Bronze Age, archaeologists know of more than 50 lakeside settlements at 33 locations around Lake Zug, the so-called pile dwellings – among others in Risch, Hünenberg, Cham, Steinhausen and the town of Zug. Three sites in the town of Zug, Sumpf, Riedmatt and Oterswil-Inseli, have been part of a UNESCO World Heritage site since 2011.

In the early Iron Age the lowland part of the canton was probably settled throughout. Greek pottery and metal vessels from Etruria suggest that a Celtic princely seat stood on the Baarburg around 500 BC. Names such as Baar, Cham and Lorze also have Celtic roots. In Roman times several estates lay around Lake Zug; they have been found in Baar, Cham, Hünenberg and Risch, among other places. After Roman rule ended, Alemanni settled in the area. In Baar, the predecessor of today’s St. Martin’s Church was built in the 7th or 8th century.

Finds from these periods are on display at the cantonal Museum für Urgeschichte(n) (museum of prehistory) in Zug, which has existed since 1930.

Middle Ages

The oldest document concerning today’s canton dates from 858, when King Louis the German gave a farmstead in Cham to the Fraumünster abbey in Zurich. Zug itself is mentioned in 1092 as «Ziuge». Above the lake shore a castle was built in the 11th and 12th centuries, first of timber and earth, later with a stone curtain wall. Probably at the beginning of the 13th century a small town with three parallel streets was laid out on the shore; it is first explicitly called a town in 1242. Who founded it remains open: the Counts of Kyburg are often named, but the sources do not confirm this.

Only an entry in an archive register records that Count Rudolf IV of Habsburg, later King Rudolf I, acquired Zug in 1273. Around 1300 the Habsburg Amt Zug (bailiwick of Zug) becomes visible in the sources; besides the town it probably included the Ägeri valley, the Berg (Menzingen with Neuheim) and Baar – the first core of the later canton.

In 1352 Zurich besieged the town and forced the town and Amt of Zug into an alliance with Zurich and the members of the Confederation in central Switzerland. At first this did not change the Habsburg rights; from 1370 to 1404 Schwyz supplied the Ammann, Zug’s chief magistrate. In 1415 King Sigismund granted Zug imperial immediacy. The Habsburg rights lapsed, and from then on Zug was a member of the Confederation with full rights. The canton’s timeline also lists the Battle of Morgarten of 1315 as a key date of this period.

Between 1379 and 1498 the town acquired its own subject territories around the lake: first the bailiwick of Walchwil, then Cham, Steinhausen and Risch as well as Oberrüti, which today belongs to Aargau; Hünenberg was tied to the town by a citizenship treaty. By around 1500 the territory of the town and Amt roughly matched today’s canton.

On 4 March 1435 the lake shore gave way and the street of the old town nearest the lake sank into the water. The canton’s timeline gives 60 deaths; the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland speaks of perhaps a fifth of the inhabitants. From 1478 to 1528 the town built a new ring wall in stages, with six round towers and three gate towers; the walled area grew about sixfold. When the fortifications were removed in the 19th century, four of the six round towers were kept.

Early modern period

Zug remained Catholic during the Reformation. Around 1520 a few clergymen were in contact with Zwingli, but in 1526 the town and the three communes of the outer Amt decided to keep the old faith and stay on the side of central Switzerland. Zug thus became a border area facing Protestant Zurich and served as a staging ground in the Confederation’s wars of religion. The canton’s timeline lists the «Kappeler Milchsuppe» (the milk soup of Kappel) for 1529 and the battles of Kappel and on the Gubel for 1531; there was fighting on the Gubel, today part of Menzingen, during the Second War of Kappel.

Power was spread across several places. The Landsgemeinde, the open-air assembly, met once a year, first near and later in the town, and mainly elected the officials, including the Ammann. Important matters – up to war and peace – were decided by the assemblies of Zug, Ägeri, Menzingen and Baar, which met at the same time; the town had two votes and each rural commune one. Day-to-day business was run by the council of town and Amt with 40 members, 13 of them from the town. Because all joint bodies met in the town and the Ammann had to live there, Zug was the capital of the state.

Town and Amt repeatedly quarrelled over their rights. In the so-called Libellhandel of 1603/04 both sides even demanded separation, and in 1702 the outer Amt actually governed itself for a few months. The population grew only slowly: in the last great plague of 1629 up to a third of the people died. In 1743 the whole territory had 10,618 inhabitants, in 1798 12,749. Zug’s last witch trial, in 1737/38, cost eight women their lives.

Upheaval, 1798 to 1848

The French invasion of 1798 ended the old order. On 11 February 1798 the town released its bailiwicks; at the end of April it surrendered without a fight, and French troops occupied the entire territory. In the Helvetic Republic, Zug was a district of the canton of Waldstätten from 1798 to 1801, with the town as that canton’s capital from 1799, and from 1801 to 1803 a Helvetic canton of its own.

Since the Act of Mediation of 1803, Zug has been a canton of the Confederation. The former bailiwicks of Cham, Hünenberg, Steinhausen, Risch and Walchwil now became communes with equal rights; Unterägeri had already separated politically from Oberägeri in 1798. In 1815 the canton consisted of ten communes.

In 1845 Zug joined the Sonderbund. In the Sonderbund War the canton surrendered without fighting on 22 November 1847, and on 5 December a liberal popular assembly overthrew the conservative government. The constitution of 16 January 1848 abolished the Landsgemeinde; at the same time Neuheim separated from Menzingen. Since then the canton has had eleven municipalities. In the same year the Swiss federal state was founded. In 1849 the first cantonal school law followed, with the division into primary school, secondary school and cantonal school that can still be recognised today.

Industrialisation and transport

Until the middle of the 19th century Zug was a poor, rural canton. Industrialisation came late and first followed the water power of the Lorze: in 1834 the canton’s first factory, a spinning mill, started work in Unterägeri. Further spinning mills followed in Neuägeri in 1846, in Baar in 1854 and in Hagendorn near Cham in 1863. In 1866 the Anglo-Swiss Condensed Milk Company opened a large plant in Cham, which by 1907 was processing milk from 1,000 suppliers in 44 places every day.

In a second phase the town of Zug became an industrial location once pressurised water and electricity networks made up for the lack of water power. In 1880 the Metallwarenfabrik Zug was founded, in 1896 the electrotechnical institute Theiler & Co., which grew into the Landis & Gyr group, and in 1913 the Verzinkerei Zug, later V-Zug AG.

The railway reached Zug in 1864 with the Northeastern Railway line from Zurich through the Knonauer Amt to Lucerne. In 1897 the line from Zurich through the Sihl valley via Zug towards the Gotthard was added. Steamboats had been sailing on Lake Zug since 1852; in 1907 the Zugerbergbahn funicular opened up the Zugerberg, and from 1913 an electric tramway ran up into the hills.

On 5 July 1887 the shore at the Vorstadt collapsed after it had been loaded with fill for a new lakeside promenade. Two rows of houses slid into the lake and eleven people died. Afterwards building on the shore was prohibited; in this period the town expanded mainly to the north.

The constitution of 31 January 1894 introduced proportional representation for elections to the cantonal parliament, the government and the courts. Amended many times, it remains the basis of the canton to this day.

20th century and today

After the First World War the canton needed more revenue. With the tax laws of 1921 and 1930 it favoured holding and domiciliary companies as well as so-called mixed companies; in 1946 the tax system was modernised. From the late 1950s these rules, together with the proximity to Zurich, attracted many firms: between 1955 and 1970 their number quadrupled to 5,554. Zug became an important trading centre for commodities and the seat of international groups. According to the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland, the canton rose from the middle of the field to become the richest canton in Switzerland. Its tax policy remained controversial but was confirmed in several popular votes.

Two people from Zug were elected to the Federal Council: Philipp Etter from Menzingen in 1934 and Hans Hürlimann from Walchwil in 1973.

On 7 February 1971 the voters in the canton – at that time exclusively men – approved cantonal voting and election rights for women with 62.5 per cent; on the same day they approved women’s suffrage at federal level with 59.9 per cent. Twelve years earlier, in 1959, 76 per cent of those voting in the canton had still said no.

In the attack on the cantonal parliament of Zug on 27 September 2001, eleven members of the cantonal parliament and three members of the cantonal government were killed.

Electoral law has changed too: the courts have been elected by majority vote again since 2001 and the executives since 2013. Since 2013 the cantonal parliament has been elected using the biproportional method («double Pukelsheim»), after the Federal Supreme Court had found the previous method unconstitutional in 2010.

The population grew strongly in the 20th century. Between 1900 and 1960 it doubled to about 52,500 people, and around the year 2000 it passed the 100,000 mark. The latest figures are in the section Figures over time.

The eleven municipalities

The canton has consisted of eleven municipalities since 1848. One historical note on each, with links to the municipality page and to the article in the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland (HDS, in German):

• Baar – On the site of a Roman estate, the predecessor of St. Martin’s Church was built in the 7th or 8th century; the large spinning mill was founded here in 1854. HDS: Baar
• Cham – A farmstead in Cham is, in 858, the earliest property in the canton recorded in writing; from 1866 the Anglo-Swiss condensed milk factory processed the region’s milk here. HDS: Cham
• Hünenberg – The Lords of Hünenberg were the most important family of ministerial nobility in the area; later the municipality was linked to the town of Zug by a citizenship treaty. HDS: Hünenberg
• Menzingen – The former «commune am Berg» gained its own centre with a parish and church in 1479/80; the teaching sisters’ institute was founded here in 1844. HDS: Menzingen
• Neuheim – Neuheim is one of the earliest Alemannic settlements, was long part of the commune am Berg and has been independent since 1848. HDS: Neuheim
• Oberägeri – The Church of St. Peter and Paul probably goes back to an early medieval foundation; Ägeri was one of the three rural communes of the outer Amt. HDS: Oberägeri
• Risch – The Church of St. Verena is an early medieval foundation confirmed by archaeology; the location of the railway station shaped the development of the village of Rotkreuz. HDS: Risch
• Steinhausen – Until 1798 the high court jurisdiction of the city of Zurich reached into the village; Steinhausen became a parish of its own in 1611. HDS: Steinhausen
• Unterägeri – The canton’s first factory started work here in 1834; politically, Unterägeri has been separate from Oberägeri since 1798. HDS: Unterägeri
• Walchwil – In 1379 Walchwil became the first bailiwick of the town of Zug, and in 1804 an independent parish. HDS: Walchwil
• Zug – The town on the lake, first mentioned in 1092, is the cantonal capital and the centre of an agglomeration that covers almost the entire canton. HDS: Zug

Figures over time

The canton publishes the population of its municipalities since 1850 as open data. The reference date is 31 December of each year. Because the counting method and the definition of the population have changed several times, the figures are only roughly comparable. Up to 1960 they come from the censuses; since then they are available every year.

The figures are the sum of the eleven municipalities. The complete series up to the latest year is available in the dataset «Bevölkerungsstand nach Gemeinde seit 1850» (population by municipality since 1850) on opendata.swiss.

Further reading

All of the following offerings are in German.

• Historical Dictionary of Switzerland: Zug (canton) and Zug (municipality)
• State Archives of the Canton of Zug: research on the history of Zug
• Project «Moderne Zuger Kantonsgeschichte» (a modern history of the canton, 2026 to 2032/33) – with a planned digital outreach platform
• Town of Zug: history of the town of Zug
• Town Archives of Zug: «18 Grad», a digital publication series on the town’s history
• ZugDigital – a gateway to digitised books, journals, photos and maps
• Tugium, the yearbook of Zug’s heritage institutions, on e-periodica
• Zuger Neujahrsblatt (GGZ) with articles on the history of the region
• Zuger-Gschicht – minutes of the town council and assembly of Zug, 1471 to 1798
• Hinter den Fassaden – the history of selected houses in the town of Zug
• Museum Burg Zug and Museum für Urgeschichte(n)
• Kulturpunkte Zug – history and stories about Catholic cultural heritage