After the first partition of Poland the town became part of the Kingdom of Prussia in 1772. The Prussians abolished the local government, which was restored in 1809. The cloth industry collapsed. The town was subject to anti-Polish policies, including Germanisation. At the local gymnasium, Polish was taught only two hours a week, in 1815-1820 and 1846-1912, and in 1889 the history of Polish literature was removed from the curriculum, while Polish history was not taught at all. Probably in 1830 a secret organization of Polish students was established in the local school. Some Polish students joined the Polish uprisings of 1830 and 1863 in the Russian Partition of Poland. The organisation probably ceased to exist in the 1860s, because in 1870, a new youth philomath organization "Mickiewicz" was founded, named after the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz. In 1901, due to the threat of repressions by the German authorities, the organization was dissolved to be reactivated after a few months. Among local philomats were prominent Polish-Kashubian activists and writers Aleksander Majkowski, Florian Ceynowa and Jan Karnowski, future minister and senator in independent Poland , priest, historian and co-founder of the Toruń Scientific Society , co-founder and president of the first Polish scientific society in the United States Dominik Szopiński, as well as priests and activists and , who were later murdered by the Germans in Nazi concentration camps in 1940. In 1911 the first Polish secret scout troop in the Prussian Partition of Poland was established in the town by , who as a military officer later fought in defense of Poland during the Polish–Soviet War (1920) and the German Siege of Warsaw (1939), and was murdered by the Germans during World War II.