Van Raalte's Holland Colony and Its Connections to Grand Rapids

Dr. Robert P. Swierenga, Research Professor, A.C. Van Raalte Institute, Hope College, Holland, Michigan

Address to the West Michigan Historical Society Dinner Meeting, Grand Rapids, May 14, 1998

Albertus Van Raalte, the clergyman who founded the colony of Holland in the state of Michigan in 1847, was a leader in creating an ethnic island, a "little Holland," in the American Midwest. Professor Albert Hyma's 1947 centennial biography of Van Raalte begins the story of his scouting trip to West Michigan in these words: "One of the most remarkable episodes in the history of Michigan and perhaps also of the United States as a whole is the execution of a plan formed by the Rev. Van Raalte before he left the city of Arnhem in the Netherlands. His aim was to obtain absolute control of a region in western Michigan where he might shape a whole community in accordance with his own concept of a perfect society."

Van Raalte did not have Michigan in mind when he left the Netherlands. His intent was to take his initial band of 100 immigrants by lake steamer to Milwaukee and settle near Lake Winnebago in southeastern Fond Du Lac County, where some of his followers had gone the previous year. Only at the last minute, and after heavy pressure from Michigan boosters, was the Dutch dominie dissuaded from his Wisconsin plans. In Detroit, where his party was forced to winter because the icing over of the Mackinac Straits had just ended shipping season, leading men such as attorney Theodore Romeyn, formerly of the Dutch Reformed Church in New York, and Presbyterian pastor George Duffield urged Van Raalte to consider Michigan. On his intended scouting trip to Wisconsin, Van Raalte stopped in Kalamazoo and stayed with Presbyterian pastor Ova P. Hoyt, whom Duffield and Romeyn had recommended. Hoyt likewise touted the advantages of Michigan and introduced Van Raalte to Allegan judge John Kellogg, who happened to be in the city on business.

Kellogg won Van Raalte's trust and became his land guide and valued adviser. Kellogg wanted to show the Dutch dominie the largely uninhabited watersheds drained by the Kalamazoo, Black, Pigeon, and Grand rivers. "He wants me to see the place called Ada," Van Raalte wrote his wife in Detroit, where large blocks of land can be bought at government prices. "Further, he wishes to study with me the country along the Ionia and Grand rivers.... Through this providential guidance of God, I will have to spend a few weeks here in this region." On Christmas day Kellogg, Van Raalte, and an Indian guide set out on foot from Allegan, moving northward into Ottawa County, and they looked no farther than the Black River watershed. Van Raalte found the area so much to his liking that he never did explore Ionia or Ada, let alone Wisconsin.

After Van Raalte decided tentatively on the mouth of the Black River as the site for his colony, he made a point of visiting Grand Haven and Grand Rapids to talk with community leaders there about his choice. At Grand Haven he consulted with Presbyterian minister William M. Ferry, who hosted him and

introduced him to county officials.

In his first visit to Grand Rapids, Van Raalte sought out the Reverend Andrew Taylor of First Reformed Church and land dealer John Ball, who had surveyed much of Ottawa County and knew the terrain well. The Dutch Reformed Church, which had been part of the American branch of the Reformed Church of the Netherlands until 1792, had sent Taylor to Allegan in 1842 and to Grand Rapids in 1843, where he pastored a small congregation of New York transplants for five years. Judge Kellogg knew Taylor from his two years in Allegan and doubtless encouraged Van Raalte to talk with the fellow Dutch Calvinist.

Taylor confirmed Van Raalte choice of West Michigan, stressing the region's rich forests full of hardwoods suitable for the manufacture of fine furniture. Van Raalte also realized the importance of the nearby cities to the success of his venture. His friends had warned him "what it means to settle in a district with no population, and how unbelievably much it means if one can get help from neighboring settlements."

Van Raalte's name was magic and had an allure in the Netherlands among his fellow Seceders who soon crossed the ocean to join him. The Michigan boosters in Detroit realized that he was the vanguard of a multitude and they were determined to snag as many Dutch as possible. At a meeting in the First Presbyterian Church in Detroit, a group of leading state politicians, clerics, and businessmen pledged to cooperate with Van Raalte, "the agent and promoter of this movement, and whom we cheerfully recommend as a gentleman of energy, talent, piety, and disinterested zeal." They named a Committee of Seven to function in Detroit, "whose duty it shall be to aid, in every practicable way, the [Dutch] emigrants who may reach our limits, and to correspond with such associations or committees as may be found elsewhere [the reference is to Dutch emigrant aid societies in New York City and Albany]; and in other ways, to invite, encourage and direct the settlement of these emigrants within our state."

The Committee of Seven established subcommittees to provide local assistance in six cities selected by Van Raalte--Marshall, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, Grand Haven, Allegan, and Saugatuck. The Grand Rapids committee included Andrew Taylor, John Ball, and George Young (an elder in Taylor's congregation). Van Raalte was overwhelmed by the red-carpet treatment, and "in a most touching and impressive manner, expressed his gratitude for the sympathy and aid proffered to his countrymen." As the Kalamazoo Gazette reported: "He had been met with sympathy, countenance and aid, and was disposed to commence his colonization here."

Van Raalte and Ball hit it off personally, and their mutual self-interests intersected nicely. Van Raalte needed expertise in buying land and Ball had plenty to deal. From Ball, Van Raalte bought Mexican War military bounty land warrants at steep discounts up to 50 percent, and which the federal government accepted for payment at the land offices. These warrants allowed the Dutch to buy government land for as little as 75 cents to a dollar per acre. Fellow colonists also went to Grand Rapids to buy land, presumably from Ball and other dealers and investors in raw land.

The immigrants arrived in the Holland colony with visions of a town of stately tree-lined streets and spacious gardens. What they found in the summer of 1847 was little but dense forests with a few clearings full of stumps, and not enough log huts to house the newcomers. Nevertheless, Van Raalte held out the dream of a flourishing colony that would spread out eastward until Hollanders would fill Grand Rapids "with thousands of industrious workmen." Grand Rapids was a "model city in many respects," said Van Raalte, and was destined to become for the Dutch their "chief headquarters, . . . the Calvinist Jerusalem of America."

Van Raalte was a true prophet. By 1900 the Dutch had become the largest ethnic group in the city, with 23,000 of 87,000 inhabitants (27 percent). Today several hundred thousand inhabitants in the city claim some Dutch ancestry.

The Dutch presence in Grand Rapids began within months of Holland's founding, when parents in the colony began sending their young people to nearby cities to seek employment "among the English" (the Dutch term for Americans). A desperate need for cash wages forced families to turn out their youth to work, mainly as domestics and hired hands. This not only cut down on mouths to feed at home, but the young could more readily learn a smattering of English. Wages were small but every little bit helped. "If the youths had not helped by taking service with Americans living in Allegan, Kalamazoo, Grand Rapids, and with farmers around the colony, and then returning with money, living necessities, saws, oxen, and other much needed things," Bernardus Grootenhuis reminisced later, "I do not know how a number of families could have survived."

Examples abound. The oldest sons of Jan Steketee, a leader of the Zeeland colony, "sought employment in Grand Rapids. They had the advantage of a good education in the Netherlands and on this account made a favorable impression upon the people for whom they worked," recalled a friend Jacob Den Herder. Soon Steketee with the rest of his family moved to Grand Rapids, "because of better prospects for work." Reijer Van Zwaluwenburg remembered the desperate early days when his oldest sister Lubbigje "went to Grand Rapids to earn some money as a maid. Now there were four children left in our household." Frans Van Driele moved to the city in 1848 after his physical disability made it too difficult to chop down trees in Zeeland. He obtained work at $16 per month on the canal project to bypass the rapids, funded by the state legislature, but soon he got a less physically demanding job at a flour mill at $10 per month, which he held for the next fifteen years. Eighteen year old Jan Vogel, a carpenter in Zeeland, "left for Grand Rapids where I intended to continue my carpentering and in the meantime to improve my knowledge of English."

Besides learning English, working for Americans afforded the opportunity to benefit from new skills and knowledge. For example, the Holland colonists knew little about making leather goods until Isaac Cappon went to Grand Rapids to learn the trade. In 1857 Cappon and partner John Bertsch formed the Cappon and Bertsch Leather Company in Holland with capital accumulated by working in tanneries in Grand Rapids and Grand Haven. By 1875 the company employed fifty men and dressed 30,000 hides a year. August Jansen, a Holland colony shoemaker, similarly mastered tanning techniques by working in factories in Saugatuck and Grand Rapids.

&#The Dutch youths in Grand Rapids dutifully carried their pay, either in cash or provisions, back to their parents in the colony when they returned for brief visits. Many of the youths settled permanently in Grand Rapids; they married and established homes there, and without them, the Reformed Church in Grand Rapids would have died out.

Frans Van Driele, the religious leader of the Dutch in Grand Rapids, received crucial aid in 1848 from Reverend Taylor of First Reformed Church. Taylor granted Van Driele the free use of the church basement for several months for Sunday afternoon services. Taylor's own Yankee congregation of 33 members was dying and he soon departed, leaving the building for the newly arriving Hollanders. By the summer of 1848 they included more than one hundred young women, a lesser number of young men, and several families. A year later the fledgling group was so large that they asked Dominie Van Raalte to come and organize them as the Second Reformed Church.

The Dutch church depended on ministers coming from the colony to preach, baptize, and celebrate the Lord's Supper. Van Raalte and his associates, Marten Ypma of Vriesland, Cornelius Vander Meulen of Zeeland, and Seine Bolks of Overisel, willingly made arduous weekend trips on foot, oxcart, or horseback to conduct services. This also was a way to bring cash back to the settlement. Ypma recounted that when he returned home on Sunday evening with his $4 fee, "what gladness there was on account of this unheard of sum--in those days."

Sending the youth out of the Holland colony to work for Americans had a number of unintended consequences. While it did reduce the number of mouths to feed, bring essential foodstuffs and some cash into the colony, and lead to technical innovations, it also caused religious problems. There was risk in sending the young people to live and work in American cities. By leaving the nest and the social controls that operated in a tight-knit, closed community, they might "fall into sin" and lose their faith or at least weaken it by neglect. Premarital sex apparently was a big problem in Grand Rapids, prompting the church elders to ask the Classis of Holland for advice: May couples "who have fallen into [a] premature carnal relationship" marry in the congregation?" Yes, answered the higher body, "so long as they have not been excommunicated."

Reformed Church leaders in the East, during a formal visit to the Holland colony in 1852, were equally dismayed to learn of the immorality among the young people, "who, to make a living or for other reasons, are scattering themselves among the neighboring Americans; for which reason the Visitors judge it necessary emphatically to exhort overseers [elders] and parents to pay attention more earnestly to these matters."

This some parents did by moving to the cities themselves, although their primary motive was economic. Hearing from their children about the favorable conditions, they "were no longer willing to suffer from hunger." This "hunger migration" in 1847 and 1848 to Grand Rapids (and to a lesser extent Kalamazoo and Grand Haven) coincided with the "starving times" in Holland's first year. Evert Zagers remembered that the few dozen first settlers had to eat the bran (ground oat husks) of the oxen to survive, and even that was hard to get. "So long as it was possible to come to the settlement by sleigh we had bran from which to make pancakes and bread and also shelled corn, but when the snow thawed, our supplies gave out."

Cornelius Van Loo best described the hardships driving many to abandon the Holland colony, which numbered about 4,000 inhabitants in 1853, and head for the cities:

By the spring of 1851, there were 400 Hollanders living in Grand Rapids, and the failure of the crops that year in the settlement induced many more to follow.

Almost every issue of the colony newspaper, De Hollander, founded by Van Raalte, carried news about Grand Rapids or items clipped from the Grand Rapids Enquirer, Grand River Eagle, and the Grand River Times. By 1860 Grand Rapids counted over 2,000 Hollanders.

The magnet of trade in Grand Rapids had a greater pull than the push from hard times in Holland. Grand Rapids was the chief source of supplies and a valuable market for the Dutch. In 1849 a Grand Rapids newspaper commented:

One of the conveyors was the Zeeland firm of J. van de Luijster, who regularly advertised that he had a ready supply of the "best Grand Rapids flour" on hand. The city prospered greatly from the Dutch trade, according to the newspapers.

Traveling to Grand Rapids from the colony in the early years was arduous. Roads did not exist and people had to walk along Indian trails guided by blazes on trees and carry the flour and potatoes back home on their backs. The fortunate few, such as Dominie Van der Meulen of Zeeland, owned a two-wheeled oxcart to bump over the logs and push through the underbrush to Grand Rapids to buy supplies.

Egbert Frederiks, one of the pioneers in Holland, remembered the first years when the walk to Grand Rapids through the woods took eight hours each way. "Many a person made such a journey carrying on his back a bag of flour needed to keep his flock alive," said Frederiks. Hendrik Frerik needed a chimney pipe for his log cabin in Vriesland and had "to go afoot" to Grand Rapids to find one. "More than once I made the trip afoot to that place," he recalled. Huibert Keppel, at an Old Timers meeting, recalled a trip between Zeeland and Grand Rapids when he returned with two barrels of cornmeal from Sweet's Mill, which Van Driele had given him for Dominie Vander Meulen. Keppel's wagon broke down running over stumps and ruts, and the trip took four days. A party set out from Zeeland to look for him.

The only alternative way to Grand Rapids was to go by rowboat or under sail to Grand Haven and then by flatboat up the Grand River. But the mouth of the Black River at Holland constantly silted closed, and goods had to be offloaded from smaller vessels that loaded upriver at Holland's depot, the "Water-House" (Waterhuisje) located at the neck of Lake Macatawa just east of the city.

Grand Rapids merchants brought provisions to Holland as well. An enterprising Grand Rapids livestock dealer in 1849 drove a herd of "fat pigs" to Zeeland for sale and set up in front of Rev. Van Der Meulen's home at the town center. A poor immigrant, James Moerdyke, reported what happened next.

The Grand Rapids pig drover's venture in Zeeland ran up against the immigrants' lack of cash money. They typically bartered for provisions and supplies, and exchanged their labor.

Tede Ulberg, a pioneer shoemaker in Vriesland who had more customers than shoes to sell, went to Grand Rapids for leather. He had no money and did not realize that merchants would sell supplies on credit. As he later told his wife:

The overly cautious Ulberg refused to be indebted to a Yankee supplier, but he did accept help from a fellow Hollander.

Until the railroad era, the market orientation of the various Dutch villages was toward the closest city. Settlers on the east side of the settlement--in Zeeland, Groningen, Drenthe, Staphorst, Zutphen, and Vriesland, traded in Grand Rapids. Those on the south fringe--in Graafschaap, Overisel, Fillmore, and Saugatuck--did more business in Allegan (the county seat) and Kalamazoo. The northsiders--in North Holland, Borculo, Noordeloos, Harlem, and Olive--mostly went to Grand Haven.

The market centers competed with each other to capture the regional trade. Promoters in Grand Rapids pushed roads and railroads to make the city a hub for Holland. Grand Rapids is the "natural outlet to the Holland Colony . . . , its natural depot and business center," declared the Grand Rapids Enquirer in early 1851. "This City will furnish its best market and, with proper facilities, the best mode of access to the section selected by the Hollanders."

The editor also predicted that once the federal government allocated funds for improving the Black River harbor's shipping facilities,

Twenty five miles of the plank road was already laid out of Detroit toward Lansing, and the editor called on Grand Rapids capitalists to push its construction from the city to Lansing and Holland, rather than allow it to run from Lansing to Kalamazoo, as planned. If leaders in this city do not seize the day, the editor warned, Grand Rapids "will be left an isolated and lonesome place; a petty County Seat," rather than "the Queen City of western Michigan."

To claim that the Dutch would prefer a plank road to a railroad link was disingenuous, because Grand Rapids had no railroad prospects as yet. And the plank road never did materialize. It took several years and considerable state funding for the merchants of Grand Rapids to complete a road to Holland, known as the Grand Rapids Road, which allowed for a crude stage service and regular mail service. Twice a week a lumber wagon ran as a stage and mail service between Holland and the "Rapids" via Zeeland and Grandville. Pieter Pfanstiehl began the business in July 1854.

Not until 1872 did the first railroad (the Chicago & Michigan Lake Shore) link the two cities and cut the travel time between them to only one hour. Two years earlier, Holland had also been connected by the Michigan & Lake Shore Railroad to Allegan, 24 miles distant, and Grand Haven, 22 miles away. Reverend Cornelius Van Der Meulen, in an address in 1872 in Zeeland, boasted about the progress of the colony.

Grand Rapids' commercial markets and industries were essential to Holland's survival, and to a lesser extent so were those of Grand Haven and Kalamazoo. Grand Rapids merchants advertised in De Hollander, and several specialized in the Holland trade. P.J.G. Hodenpijl ran a "Hollandsche land- en commissie-kantoor" [Dutch land and commission house], with offices above the National Bank in 1852. This was also the Grand Rapids terminus of the Holland post wagon service that served the two cities. In 1854 Leendert D'Ooge opened a "Nieuwe Hollandsche Winkel" [New Dutch Store] located near the Congregational Church; he carried the usual array of supplies along with the "highly famed" Dr. Chipman's patent medicines, which reputedly cured almost every illness known to man.

By the 1840s Grand Rapids mines produced salt and gypsum, its flour mills ground grain and sawmills supplied lumber, and its iron works and metal shops made machines of all kinds, including woodworking tools, hand saws, and steam boilers. Grand Rapids factories turned out wagons, carriages, and ships for the Great Lakes and inland waterways, and all kinds of building products. Later, in the 1880s, the furniture industry added another large product line derived from the abundant woodlands. The Dutch provided a ready market for these wares.

The Grand Rapids and Grand Haven Dutch prospered more than did their compatriots in the Holland colony. In 1854, when Classis Holland asked all the churches to establish emigrant aid societies, the congregations in Grand Rapids and Grand Haven were the first to do so. The purpose of the societies was to create a revolving loan fund to pay the ocean passage of Dutch families desiring to immigrate to West Michigan. The Grand Rapids church collected more than one hundred dollars for its society and was held up as an example. Perhaps the greater prosperity in Grand Rapids induced the Christian Reformed Church to locate its seminary there in 1876. This decision eventually made Grand Rapids the CRC intellectual center, complete with college, seminary, and denominational headquarters. The major Dutch publishing houses also located in Grand Rapids after 1900, much to the detriment of Holland.

During the first 25 years before the railroad linked Holland and Grand Rapids, Chicago was the most important market outlet for the Dutch. Chicago was the major transshipment point for immigrants to Holland, and the lake schooners that regularly plied the southern lake ports returned from Holland with cargoes of forest products, potash, and lumber for the rapidly growing city. Van Raalte and Henry Post, a local American entrepreneur, started an ashery to make black salt for the Chicago market from the ashes colonists collected from burned trees. It was the first source of cash for the farmers in 1847. Huibert Keppel of Zeeland similarly made a business of manufacturing oak barrel staves; his factory provided much needed work in the colony at wages of fifty cents per day.

In 1852 Holland shipped out on lake vessels to Chicago 900,000 staves, 200,000 shingles, 2,400 cords of wood, 350,000 board feet of milled lumber, and 51 barrels of potash, for a total value of $28,000. The next year shipments from the harbor of Black Lake totaled $38,000, a 45 percent increase, and in 1854 the total value topped $61,000, a 62 percent annual increase. A sign of Chicago's market reach was its weekly foodstuffs commodity report and space ads by its merchants in De Hollander, as well as announcements of schooner schedules to Chicago.

After the completion of the rail link between Grand Rapids and Holland in 1872, and the emergence of Grand Rapids as the industrial center of West Michigan, the orientation of Holland trade and commerce turned toward it and away from Chicago.

Holland grew from the outset as a satellite of Grand Rapids. In the early days its very survival depended on foodstuffs and provisions from the larger city. Grand Rapids provided jobs for Dutch young people, especially women, and the city was a source of cash and know how. The two cities existed in a symbiotic relationship that benefitted both. In trade and culture the two have always been linked. Perhaps it is fitting that the filling in of the farm lands between Grandville and Holland in recent years has tied the cities together geographically. Development is just now catching up with history.