Holland
To be continued...
More and more emigrants
More and more "Afgescheidenen" emigrated in 1847. They build simple houses in the neighborhood of Holland. Reverend C. van der Meulen left the province of Zeeland and founded the village Zeeland in Michigan. Also from the province of Overijssel came immigrants led by Reverend S. Bolks, who founded Hellendoorn, which later became Overisel. Many more immigrants came from the Netherlands, with the evidence still visible today in many of the names of their settlements (see Dutch place names). All these villages together made up what was called "the Colony". All villages in the Colony were founded within a period of 50 years.Why all near each other?
Why did the new Dutch immigrants go to the places where Dutchmen were all ready established, or why did they found a new village all together? Many times they were going to join friends or family. They felt more secure around people who were speaking the same language and had the same customs. Those two things, the language and the customs, were the things the Dutch wanted to maintain. If the village was settled, immigrants kept on coming until there wasn't any land left or it became too expensive.Big cities with Dutch neighborhoods
There also were Dutch immigrants who emigrated to all ready existing cities. In Grand Rapids there was a large Dutch neighborhood. There were also large sections of Dutch in other big cities. In Chicago, there went two Dutch settlements up: "Lage Prairie" ("Low Prairie") and "Hooge Prairie" ("High Prairie"). There's still a piece of Chicago with lots of people from the province of Groningen called "Groninger hoek" ("Gronings piece").Map of the Netherlands
At the end of the nineteenth century, the Dutch lived in big parts of different places of West and Middle Michigan. They were the largest part of the population, and their settlements were like a map of the Netherlands: Drenthe, Harlem, Zutphen, Groningen, etc. (For more information about these villages)All these villages were, Holland not included, small settlements with churches, schools, a few shops, and farms. Most of them stayed small. A letter of Reverend A. Zwemer describes this, which he wrote in his home in Vriesland where he became reverend of the "Nederlands-Gereformeerde Kerk" ("Dutch-Reformed Church") in 1860:
"We don't live anymore in Holland (the capital of the colony), but in Vriesland 10 miles (3 hours walking) east of Holland.
The municipality Vriesland is at the eastside of the colony, (..) almost 90 families are going to the church and the whole municipality excist from 95 or 96 families, a total of 500 people. Only a few don't live in a farm, there isn't a village like you expect in the Netherlands (..).
The vicarage has 10 acres land. 1 is the church, 2 is our home, 3 is the house of the schoolmaster, 4 is a grocer's, 5 is the school, the rest are farms. The thick lines are big roads which are made by the government and the light lines are roads which are made, arbitrary, by the inhabitants - all roads are straight and cross each other at one mile distance, a piece of land of one square mile (20 minutes walking long and width), so it has a border of roads, is called one section and contains 8 times 80 acres (an acre has almost the same size as measured with a 'zeeuwstok' [there's no translation for it...]). Vriesland contains from 8 to 9 sections, so measured between 5 and 6000, more than 50% is forest and the rest are fields and meadow -here contains the ground heavy clay- something like 50% of the inhabitants are Frisian, who found this place and named it after their homeland, Vriesland, the others are from the provinces of Gelderland, Zuid-Holland and Zeeland -only a few-. The school is a half mile from our house, (..) behind our house we have eight or nine acres new meadows, in which we have a cow, which we bought a couple of weeks ago for 27 dollars (67,50 guilders) -The homes and lands are from the municipality.- (..) We saw that a snake was crawling in the garden (here they call it walking) (..) and some humming-birds (the smallest and most beautiful bird) were flying around to suck honey from the flowers, it's not special."
The lands and homes were from the municipality and the language was different.