Dutch Muck and Much More: Dutch Americans in Farming, Religion, Art, and Astronomy (The Association for the Advancement of Dutch American Studies (AADAS))

In this publication of the papers from the 21st biennial conference of the Association for the Advancement of Dutch American Studies (June 2017 in Pella, Iowa), Janel Curry guides us in “reading” agricultural landscapes, which begins with discerning large-scale, global patterns of immigration, such as who came and whence and when they came. Robert Swierenga’s contribution is a wide-ranging overview of Dutch involvement in the production of celery “on the muck.” Ken Bult’s article focuses on Dutch farmers growing “onion sets” around South Holland, near Chicago, and not far from his own hometown. Wisconsinite Mary Risseeuw tells the story of the pea-canning factories in her state in the early and mid-twentieth century. Donald Sinnema discusses two key inventions made by Dutch Canadians to help keep soil from drifting after plowing. The two immigrant Koole brothers, of Monarch, Alberta, introduced strip farming in 1918, and twenty years later, their nephew invented the Williamson single V-blade. Janet Sheeres employs her characteristic talent for sleuthing out neglected topics by telling about 19th- and early-20th-century Dutch immigrant farmers (and their descendants) in Wayne County, New York. Michael Swanson looks at his own locality, the mostly rural, Whiteside County, Illinois, as a place where Dutch immigrants put down roots. Most of them were farmers who remained so in Whiteside County. David Zwart examines the rural, farming sensibilities of the midwestern Dutch in the twentieth century, as shown in the mini-histories composed for significant anniversaries (like centennials), as well as in Tulip Times, pageants, and other celebrations. Justin Vos illustrates the decisive role religion played, even more than ethnicity, in the case of a typical Dutch immigrant family. Vos draws upon 185 family letters, written during a period of over thirty years, translated and published in the Netherlands in 1999, to show that religion was the foundation of at least some immigrants’ communal experience. Henk Aay is a geographer and relies principally on letters as the basis for his contribution. Aay’s thorough study of the immigrants’ (and visitors’) environmental observations, knowledge, and behavior relies on their private letters and memoirs, as well as their published articles and letters in Dutch American newspapers and other publications. Jan Boersema, aided by yet another Dutch-born scholar, Nella Kennedy, has a much narrower focus than Aay. These coauthors tell the sad tale of the unforeseen, sudden extinction of the passenger pigeon in America during the latter part of the nineteenth century. It is also one of the great mysteries of our time that so numerous a species should vanish so quickly, first from urban dinner tables and ultimately from the earth. Boersema, a biologist by vocation and an environmentalist by avocation, is well qualified to tell the story, while Kennedy, a historian of art and of the Dutch American scene, has led in transcribing and deciphering the obscure, difficult document used as the basis of this study. Earl Wm. (Bill) Kennedy has given us the story of the erratic Rev. Hendrik Georg(e) Klijn (1793-1883), the sometime (1857) cofounder of the future Christian Reformed Church and son of a Lutheran murderer.George Harinck offers us insight into the early career and exodus of the biblical theologian Geerhardus Vos (1862-1949). Nella Kennedy, herself an art historian in public and a creative artist in private, has written on the career of a once-prominent but now little-remembered instructor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Dutch American artist John Henry Vanderpoel (1857-1911). Huug van den Dool, professional meteorologist, introduces us to the most recent of the Netherlanders featured in our volume, the world-renowned planetary scientist Gerard Peter Kuiper (1905-1973).