The municipality of Hegra was established on 1 January 1874 when the old municipality of Øvre Stjørdal was divided into Meråker (population: 1,861) in the east and Hegra (population: 3,409) in the west. During the 1960s, there were many municipal mergers across Norway due to the work of the Schei Committee. On 1 January 1962, the neighboring municipalities of Hegra (population: 2,704), Lånke (population: 1,967), Skatval (population: 1,944), and Stjørdal (population: 6,204) were all merged to form a new, larger municipality of Stjørdal.[4]
Name
The municipality (originally the parish) is named after the old Hegre farm (Old Norse: Hegrin) since the first Hegra Church was built there. The name was originally a compound of two words. The first element is named after the local river Hegra. The river name is based on the word hegri which means "heron". The last element is vin which means "meadow" or "pasture". Thus the name means something like "heron meadow".[5] Historically, the name of the municipality was spelled Hegre. On 3 November 1917, a royal resolution changed the spelling of the name of the municipality to Hegra.[6]
The municipal council(Herredsstyre) of Hegra was made up of 21 representatives that were elected to four year terms. The party breakdown of the final municipal council was as follows: