Category: Blog

The traditional costume of Noord (North) Brabant, a province in the Netherlands.

The country of Holland has a wide variety of traditional costumes from the 1800’s and early 1900’s. The bright colors, intricate embroidery, and elegant lace caps were representative of the various provinces, and even of specific villages.

Maria Colyn, the heroine in my next book is from Noord Brabant. She lives on a farm there with her parents and three siblings. For this blog post, we will explore the details and the meaning found in the clothing that Maria and the women in her family wore.

As a quick note, the names introduced belong to actual people. As I researched, I discovered a group of family members who immigrated together to the Midwest. The men were listed by first and last names, while the women were listed only with a first initial preceding the last name. I gave them plausible Dutch names to help me develop their characters.

I’ll start with Maria’s mother, Lana Colyn, and her aunt, Corrie de Moor. Both of these women were married, so that contributed to the distinction of their appearance. On workdays, Lana and Corrie would have worn a dark dress in the color of black or blue with a plain apron in a muted tone. The fabric would have been durable so that the clothing was made to last for a long time. For work around the farm, they would have worn wooden shoes.

The symbol of their married status came out in their headwear. Lana and Corrie would have worn a white cap that was structured and fitted close to their heads. For Sunday wear, married women would have on a dark dress once again, but paired with an apron of high quality material in a simple, conservative pattern.

Over top of the white cap they would wear a Sunday bonnet, or a poffer, depending on the area of the province where they lived. The Sunday bonnet was fitted to the head and had white lace and ribbon trailing from the back. The poffer was more elaborate, all in white, with fringe on the edges, and pink or light green artificial flowers and leaves sewn on it. Broad silk ribbons hung down the back, and in some villages, tulle was worn over it.

Lana and Corrie would have worn basic gold brooches with their Sunday dresses, and they would have traded their wooden shoes for black leather ones. On cooler days, married women would wear a shawl in dark colors like black, blue, or brown.

Maria, as an unmarried woman, would look very similar to her mother and aunt on the workday in a dark colored dress. Her apron would also be of a plain fabric, and she would wear wooden shoes on the farm. Her white cap would indicate she wasn’t married because it would be simpler and have less starch than her mother’s.

On Sunday, Maria would wear a dark dress that was styled less rigidly than that of her aunt’s or mother’s. Her apron would be plain, and she would wear leather shoes. Since she wasn’t married, she would wear a white lace cap that was looser fitting and simpler than those of the married women. If she wore a shawl, it would be made of lightly colored woven patterns.

The overall traditional dress of Noord Brabant was restrained, modest, and practical. Women who were dressed in this conservative way would have been respected as members of an established household. They would have been understood as taking care of their appearance and of exercising discipline over their behavior.

The women in Maria’s family were intentional in their style and gave the impression of having everything in order. They practiced elegance through understatement rather than the display of bright colors and many pieces of jewelry.

When Maria and her family came to America, they retained their conservative style of dress and continued to wear the white caps. The work dress and plain apron would have been standard dress on the prairie as they helped to establish their farms, and would have blended in with the dresses and aprons of the pioneer women who were already living here.

Words and vocabulary interest me, so if they do you as well, then here is a vocabulary list to talk about traditional Dutch style in Noord Brabant:

Dress = jurk or kleding

Shawl = doek

Headwear = muts

Apron = schorten

Wooden shoes = klompen

Sources used in this article include “Dutch Costumes, a Look into the Past,” by Jacki Craver and Phyllis Zylstra, photography by Desha Bruxvoort, published by Custom Costumes, Pella, Iowa, 2007. The two photographs in this blog post came from this book.

National Costumes in Holland, Compiled with the assistance of the Netherlands National Open-air Folklore Museum, by Riet Hijlkema, Published by J.M. Meulenhoff, Amsterdam, 1952.

Koffie tijd

The Dutch are coffee drinkers. This taste wasn’t acquired when they settled in America, but extends back to Europe, to the late 1600’s. By the year 1700, the Dutch were the largest suppliers of coffee in Europe. Dutch merchants sourced beans from Yemen and planted them in Indonesia and India. These merchants soon discovered the economic value in raising and harvesting coffee, so they began importing it to the Netherlands. The Dutch also influenced the development of coffee plantations in South and Central America.

Coffee was first enjoyed only by the elite wealthy class as a luxury. Elegant coffee houses served coffee, tea, chocolate, and other imported treats. As coffee became more affordable, it grew in popularity among the rest of the population. Coffee has become a social beverage, central to Dutch culture.

To order a beverage and food for a proper Dutch koffie tijd, or coffee time, we must first learn some vocabulary.

To order a small beverage, you would ask for a kopje, or a cup. To order a larger one, you would request a mok, or a mug.

If you prefer a latte with milk, you would order koffie verkeerd. But if you wish to drink black coffee that is strong an flavorful, you would request normal coffee, or just koffie. You could also emphasize that you want your coffee without milk, and you want to drink it black, so then you would order zwarte koffie.

If you would like something to eat with your coffee, you could choose from appelbak (apple pastry), ontbijtkoek (breakfast cake), boterkoek (butter cake), vlaai (fruit tart), or poffertjes (small, fluffy pancakes).

In the Netherlands, specialty shops serve cold drip coffee even though it requires special glass equipment and makes small batches. The most common style of coffee is made with hot water filtered through coffee grounds and drained into a large pot.

Koffie tijd occurs at specific times throughout the day, usually at 10:00 a.m. and again at 3:00 p.m. This tradition is a short pause in the day for rest, socializing, and hospitality. These times line up with the breaks we took in the day on the farm. Sometimes coffeetime was closer to 9:30 in the morning, depending on how long choring took. The afternoon coffeetime might stretch to 4:00 so that kids coming home from school could participate. This was especially the case if someone had a birthday to celebrate. Then the menu would definitely include cake as well as ice cream.

The world’s largest coffee roaster is Jacobs Douwe Egberts.

The largest coffee auction is The Dutch Coffee Auction.

I relied on the website weaverscoffee.com for much of the information in this blog post.

The Tuttles of 1847 Iowa

Lake Prairie Township, the location of the town of Pella in Southern Iowa, has a pioneer story of its own. The main characters in this story are Thomas and Nancy Tuttle. Along with several other families in the township, they sold their land to the Dutch when the colony arrived in the summer of 1847.

In researching the Tuttle couple, I’ve concluded that they were quiet farmers who worked the land with hopes of establishing a farm. Their reasons for selling out remain a mystery, but my imagination has created all sorts of possibilities. Maybe they had family inviting them to move or maybe they had encountered drought or disease or insects. Maybe the prices weren’t what they hoped, or maybe the work of farming was harder than they expected.

Thomas and Nancy traveled to Lake Prairie Township from Fairfield. They were married in Fairfield in 1842, and then moved farther west in 1843. History books claim they were among the first to settle this area of the state with their closest neighbor living twenty miles away.

Nancy was twenty-five years old when she and her husband started farming. She’d been born in Virginia in 1822 and gradually moved west with her family until meeting Thomas. He was quite a bit older than Nancy since he was thirty-five when he married her, and forty years old at the time he sold his farm to the Dutch.

I’ve wondered if perhaps he was married previously and Nancy was his second wife. Little information exists on his life prior to his marriage to Nancy, so I haven’t been able to learn about the people he might have known. Thomas was Canadian but his parents were citizens of the United States. With origins in Canada, Thomas apparently drifted south with his family while Nancy’s drifted west, eventually bringing them both to Iowa.

Two years after the Tuttles arrived on the newly opened prairie, Marion County was organized. This took place in 1845, and Iowa became a state one year later in 1846. Marion County was formed from the western portion of Mahaksa County. The town of Knoxville, which serves as the county seat, was founded in 1845, and then became incorporated ten years later.

Other settlers listed in Pella and Marion County history books include Green T. Clark and his wife Nancy, John B. Hamilton and Robert Hamilton, Wellington and Levi Nossaman and their wives and children, and William and Elizabeth Welch and their children.

Thomas and Nancy built a cabin of walnut on the edge of a patch of timber. The land was believed to be easier to work nearer to a treed area, so it makes sense that Thomas would want to put his farm there. The Tuttle cabin was the location of the sale of land to the Dutch. Dominee Scholte and a land committee of five or six other men arrived at the Tuttle farm late in July, led there by Baptist minister Moses Post.

Scholte bought the land and buildings from the Tuttles as well as from several other families. Scholte used the Tuttle cabin as his own accommodations while the town of Pella was getting settled and while he waited for his own home to be built.

This cabin still stands, and it is located just a couple blocks north of Pella’s downtown square. A sidewalk connects it to Sunken Garden Park, and along the sidewalk are displays with information on them about the Tuttles and the Dutch settlement in Marion County.

Records show that the Tuttles moved farther west and farmed in the area of what is now Prairie City. The couple never had any children. A local historian recently told me that Thomas and Nancy are buried in Illinois. This pioneer couple would have remained completely unknown except for their connection to Dominee Scholte. They fell under the spotlight for that brief era in their lives and then faded from the attention of history.

My speculations about them might be inaccurate, and farming may not have been too difficult of work or disappointing in profit. Perhaps their willingness to sell came from a similar desire to that of Charles Ingalls. They might have wanted to be the first to settle in undisturbed land, and to see it and know it before railroads or fences or powerlines broke it up. Their life and their experience as the earliest farmers in Iowa help us understand the authentic pioneer experience.

Psalmody for Calvinist Worship

To discuss the use of the psalter for worship in Dutch churches of the Netherlands, we must first take a look at some history of the country. The Reformation first arrived in the Netherlands around 1530 because a variety of dissenting Protestant sects were developing. Among these were followers of John Calvin, known as Calvinists.

During 1550-90, the Netherlands was ruled by Spain under the Catholic King, Philip II. He enforced anti-Protestant policies and gave power to local magistrates to detect and destroy these heretics because they were viewed as threats to the royal government. This sort of persecution, along with rising taxes and frustration with Spanish rule, led to one hundred years of violence, destruction, and death, with religion as the primary reason.

In 1648, war ended, and a Protestant Dutch Republic was formed. This Republic included only seven of the provinces of the Netherlands. The other provinces of North Brabant and Limburg remained a Roman Catholic area, and it was goverened by the States-General.

The main religion of the Dutch Republic was Calvinism, which was the theological tradition of John Calvin. The Dutch Reformed Church (Nederlandse Hervormde Kerk) adopted his order and style for worship, including psalm singing. Calvin was French, and he arrived in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1536. Soon he discovered that there was no congregational singing in the worship services.

Prior to the Reformation, the Catholic tradition required the average lay person to stand silent while the music was given to the priests and the cantors. The words were sung in Latin, a language incomprehensible to the congregation. The reformers in Geneva influenced the churches there to ban all music from worship so that there was no singing at all. Calvin, and other ministers, were concerned about the coldness of worship so attempted to introduce the congregational singing of Psalms.

A couple years later, he had the opportunity to minister in Strasbourg, to a church of French refugees. The German Protestant congregations there had been singing the psalms for about a decade and caught Calvin’s attention. He began creating a Psalter in French, and when he eventually returned to Geneva, he continued to develop it. This Psalter was a work in progress and finally reached completion in 1562.

The Genevan Psalter includes 49 texts from Clement Marot, a French poet, and 101 from Theodore Beza who was a professor in Geneva. The melodies were mostly new compositions by musicians Guillaume Franc, Louis Bourgeios, and Pierre Davantes. The psalter contains 124 different tunes, some being used for more than one Psalm. Several tunes, like the ones used for Psalm 80 and Psalm 141, were borrowed from Gregorian chants.

The intervals between the notes are small and each tune stayed within an octave. Rhythms are simple using half notes and quarter notes.

Calvin wanted the songs to be primarily for the people in the congregation to sing, and not the laity or the choir only. He taught that the congregation should sing in unison to emphasize that God’s people sing praise to the Lord with one voice.

The Genevan Psalter was orginially published in French, but was translated to Dutch by Pieter Datheen using the Genevan melodies in 1566. This Dutch version became the official hymnbook for the Reformed Churches in the Netherlands.

Two well-known psalms from the Genevan Psalter are Psalm 42 and Psalm 134. This psalm uses the words to Psalm 134 in the Bible, but has the tune that we recognize as belonging to the Doxology. The words we sing to this tune are newer than the Genevan Psalter, having been written in the 1700’s.

Listen to Psalm 42

Listen to Psalm 134

Instead of using keys with majoy or minor chords, the psalms use modes. Represented among the Genevan melodies are Phrygian, like in Psalm 100

Mixolydian, like in Psalm 74

Aeolian, like in Psalm 72

Ionian, like in Psalm 97

In the first two years of publication, 27,000 copies of the 1562 Psalter were sold within a few years. The number of copies may well have reached 100,000 in over 30 editions, in addition to the thousands of copies printed in translation to nine languages, including Dutch. The psalter was an essential for practically every literate member of the Protestant congregations being formed all over Europe.

Singing the psalms in meter was at the heart of the communal prayer of God’s people in the Reformed and Presbyterian tradition. Metrical psalmody is the particular gift of the Reformed tradition to the broader Christian community.

Resources used to write this blog post include:

Worship, Seeking Understanding by John D. Witvliet

Article: A Reformed Approach to Psalmody: The Legacy of the Genevan Psalter by Emily R. Brink

New Genevan Psalter edited by George van Popta, published in Canada

Recordings of Psalms were taken from the corresponding website to the New Genevan Psalter: genevanpsalter.com