Category: History and Research

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

Introducing Jacob Grandia and Maria Colyn

The Souvenir History of Pella Iowa 1847-1922 mentions Jacob Grandia on page 146. There is no picture of him, but there is a paragraph describing him. It says, “Jacob Grandia was born in Schravandelen, Province of Gelderland, Netherlands, in 1826. At the youthful age of nineteen, he emigrated to America in the spring of 1847 and was among the very first to arrive in this community. He was a lad with ambition and usefulness. He, with Henry Hospers, assisted the surveyors in platting the town of Pella. He was united in marriage to Miss Marie Colyn, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Leendert Colyn. To this union were born six sons and three girls … Mr. Grandia died in June 1868.”

Early in my marriage, when I was a new resident of Pella, I knew I had ancestors with the Grandia name, but I didn’t have much information on them. I’d purchased a copy of this book to learn more about the Van Zante family, but when I discovered this paragraph about a Grandia with roots in Pella back to its very beginning, I was intrigued. I spent time doing the research until I had his story pieced together.

Jacob and Maria Grandia are my great-grandmother’s grandparents. I know that goes back a little way, but it also forms a strong link down through the generations of my family. My great-grandmother, Adrianna Granda Van Zante, was the daughter of Jacob A. Grandia, and he was the fifth son of Jacob and Maria.

The Souvenir History of Pella claims that Jacob was nineteen when he left Holland for America. In researching his life, I’ve found some discrepancies on his age. This resource lists him in his teen years, genealogy on the Grandia family says he was born in 1822. The ship logs show his age as twenty-four, and his marriage record to Maria, occurring in Pella in February of 1850, says he is twenty-seven. Since the marriage record is the most concrete of any of the sources, I used that age to determine his birth year, and also his age at the time of immigration.

Many people have done diligent work in researching this man’s life, so I certainly do not want to discredit any of those records. However, putting his birthdate in the year 1823 makes him twenty-three at the time he sailed for North America. A hero in his early twenties serves the story well, so since this work is fictional and isn’t necessarily an exhaustive record of a person’s life,  I’m going to keep him at the age of twenty-three.

Genealogy shows his birthday to be September 1, so he will celebrate it and turn twenty-four upon his arrival in Pella.

According to the same genealogy, informed by the Grandia family website (familiegrandia.nl), Jacob was born in ‘s Gravendeel. The spelling of the town given in the Souvenir History of Pella was likely the way the name sounded when it was spoken, so it looks a little different typed out than the actual Dutch spelling does. This little town is near Dordrecht, south of Rotterdam a few miles. This would have located his birth in South Holland and not in Gelderland like the Souvenir History book says. But Dordrecht is very near the line between the three provinces of South Holland, Noord Brabant, and Gelderland.

Fiction writing allows scope for creativity as long as the finished product is plausible. Since the group that immigrated with Scholte was a close-knit community, I am going to have Jacob in friendship with the Van Zante brothers, five of whom sailed for America in the 1850’s. They lived in Gelderland, so approaching the story in this way gives Jacob the connections with the Gelderland folks to say he was “from” there, as history implies, even though he may not have necessarily been born there.

His typical costume would have been long pants, a vest, a striped shirt, and a flat hat, all in dark colors.

Jacob’s father died in May of 1826 when he was three years old. His mother died in 1832 when he was nine, and his brother John, born in 1826, died as a child. Jacob was alone in the world, so he went to live with a lady named Jenneke Reedijk who died in 1846 at the age of seventy-four. Her relationship with Jacob was unknown. She may have been a relative or only a housekeeper.

The last mention of Jacob is on April 3, 1847, when he was officially removed from the civil administration of ‘s Gravendeel. The column titled “left for” says “to North America.” He sailed on the Nagasaki, one of four ships secured by Scholte for the transport of the colony. It made the trip across the Atlantic in thirty-six days, on the route from Rotterdam to Baltimore, Maryland.

Curiously, his name is not listed with the ship’s passengers in the Pella Souvenir History Book, but it is shown in the large volumes of Pella History Books where the ship logs are published. His age is given here as twenty-four and also confirms his presence on this particular ship. He likely traveled in steerage, so may have been a more transient, elusive passenger than an older married man with children who functioned as the head of a household. Jacob is listed on the ship log with other young men who probably all made the journey together.

Jacob Grandia settled in the Pella area and farmed on the border of Lake Prairie Township and Black Oak Township.

Maria Colyn

Maria’s story is more subdued than Jacob’s. She is mentioned only in the list of passengers on the ship Pieter Floris that sailed from Amsterdam to Baltimore. Her trip to America took quite a bit longer, requiring two full months at sea until reaching their destination.

She was born in 1826 in the province of Noord Brabant. Her father likely farmed since the majority of the people who came to Iowa with Scholte were farmers. At the time of immigration, Maria was a twenty-one-year-old unmarried woman. She traveled with a cluster of family members, including her father, Leendert, and her mother. The ship log only gives her the initial L., so I invented a name for her and will call her Lana in the book. There were also two brothers and one sister, all in their teen years.

From her mother’s side of the family came J.W. de Moor, his wife, and his school-aged daughter. From her father’s side of the family came Huibert Colyn, and his four-month-old daughter Alberta Jacoba. It’s easy to assume Huibert lost his wife in childbirth, so I am going to use that theme as part of the overall plot of the story.

The Colyns and de Moors all survived the trip and reunite with the other Dutch travelers in St. Louis. There, they are given a bit of a respite from travel while the Land Committee starts its exploration to Iowa in search of farm ground to purchase. Maria and her family, along with Jacob and many other friends, join in worship services at a Presbyterian church they are allowed to use during their time in the city.

Maria, her mother, and the other Noord Brabant women would have made quite the impression on the Americans dressed in their dark Dutch dresses and the lacy headgear known as poffers.

Maria’s brother, Jacob Colyn, is mentioned in The History of Marion County as a farmer and stock raiser. He was born in 1829 on the line between North and South Holland. He spent his boyhood days on his father’s farm and attending school.

This brief summary of her brother provides clues to Maria’s origins and childhood as well. She and Jacob Grandia are among the first couples to marry in the new world, and then they settled on a farm and raised a family.

A quick note to end this blog post relates to the sources I quoted here. Blog Post #1 mentions all of the books I used to research for this project, so I will refer the reader to that article instead of formally citing them here. I will draw on those sources many times going forward, so will continue to encourage my readers to refer back to my first blog post to learn more about the sources I relied on to gather my information.

The photographs in this blog post are taken from Dutch Costumes, a Look into the Past, by Jacki Craver, and Phyllis Zylstra. Photography by Desha Bruxvoort. Printed in Pella in 2007.

Research Materials

As I mention in my August newsletter (coming soon!) I’m working on a new book. For a long time, I’ve wanted to trace the lives of various members of my family when they left Holland, traveled to North America, and settled in Pella, Iowa. Researching genealogy has helped me understand the forces influencing their lives. The process of research fascinates me and grows my awareness of who I am and where I came from.

This new book focuses on the life of the main character and hero of the story, Jacob Grandia. He’s a young man who emigrated from the province of Gelderland, Netherlands, in the year 1847.

The heroine of the story is Maria Colyn, a young woman who emigrated with her family from the province of Noord Brabant, Netherlands, also in the year 1847. I will share more about their characters in future blog posts, but for today I want my readers to know that they were real people, and these are their actual names. I plan to use their real names in the finished book unless an editor or publisher would suggest otherwise.

Jacob and Maria were married in Pella a couple of years after arriving in Iowa. They fit into my family as the grandparents of my great-grandmother, Adrianna Grandia Van Zante. That’s a little ways back, I know. I believe that gives my family six generations between me and Jacob and Maria as the first arrivals.

As I found more information on their lives, I realized that their story is woven into the founding of Pella, which is the town where I live. I’ll get into more details on that in future blog posts, but in this first post about the historical research behind this new book, I thought I’d share the resources I’ve relied on to make this story as accurate as I possibly can. This new book won’t be a comprehensive history of the settling of Pella. That hasn’t been my goal. The style of writing required for fiction uses only the facts necessary for developing the characters and their motives, revealing the setting, and ultimately moving the story forward.

I trust that the descriptions I include in the book will give the reader a glimpse into Dutch life and culture, their piety and devotion, and their experiences of settling in the American Midwest.

This book hasn’t yet found a publisher, but I trust that the right team of people at the right publishing house for this story will help me at just the right time. In the meantime, I will enjoy sharing with you the behind-the-scenes research and writing process.

Today, let’s take a look at the books I’ve acquired that have helped me with research. Each one has its own story, so they add a rich dimension to the characters and the overall theme.

Local History

The first category is local history. A book that has been really helpful to me in understanding the politics in Holland in the 1830’s and 1840’s is Hendrik P. Scholte, His Legacy in the Netherlands and in North America by Eugene P. Heideman. It is one of the books in the Historical Series of the Reformed Church in America, and is published by Van Raalte Press in Holland, Michigan. I have a signed copy because the author came to Pella as part of a conference held at the Opera House in August of 2018, which also happens to be the year my first book Hope for Tomorrow was published. This conference focused on H.P. Scholte and featured presenters from Pella and from Amsterdam, and also authors who have written on the topic of Dutch immigration.

Another helpful book is the Souvenir History of Pella 1847-1922. It has early town history, lists of families and which ship they sailed on, and brief biographies on notable citizens. Jacob Grandia is mentioned on page 146 as one of the surveyors in platting the town of Pella.

I’ve also enjoyed reading through volumes one and two of the Pella history books. I don’t own a set, but I am able to access them at the Pella Public Library. These volumes contain stories of pioneers, letters, and much good information on the families that helped to establish Pella.

Dutch Immigration

The next category of books covers the topic of Dutch Immigration to America. They include Netherlanders in America by Jacob Van Hinte, Dutch Transplanters on the Grasslands by Brian W. Beltman, and Iowa Letters by Johan Stellingwerff. I have a signed copy of this book as well because the editor for the work, Robert P. Swierenga, presented at the conference I referenced above.

A delightful book I have enjoyed perusing is Dutch Treat by Rien Poortvliet. He is a Dutch artist, and this book serves as his own illustrated memoir. It contains drawings of the Dutch countryside, animals, buildings, and people. I like the house on the cover. The shape of the roofline and the colors on the shutters are reminiscent of building design in Pella.

Psalters, Liturgy, and Doctrine

The next category of research I’ve done is on the topic of psalters, liturgy, and doctrine. I will devote a separate blog post to this subject someday, but here I will list the titles of books. The Psalms, and Hymns, with the Catechism, confessions of Faith, and Canons, of the Synod of Dort; and Liturgy of the Reformed Protestant Dutch Church in North America is a thick book of psalms and liturgy. The lengthy title pretty much covers it. The book contains information dating back to 1847, and has been helpful to me in knowing what kinds of prayers were used and what lyrics were sung during worship services in the era when my story takes place.

The Heidelberg Catechism published by Faith Alive in Grand Rapids, Michigan is the copy I received in high school when the catechism was taught at my home church during the Sunday school hour.

The New Genevan Psalter published in Canada by Premier Printing is a book that shows the printed music of each metered psalm. It is the best resource I can find that shows the original lyrics and melodies from the Genevan Psalter, inspired by John Calvin and composed by assisting musicians in the 1550’s, during the time of the Reformation. These metered psalms are what the Calvinist Dutch immigrants would have sung in their worship services. An accompanying website, genevanpsalter.com, has recordings of choirs singing each psalm. So beautiful!

Family Heritage

The last area of research I’ve done is on my own family’s heritage. During my grade school and teen years, my grandparents lived one mile away in the large house on their farm. Grandpa grew up there, and also raised his family there. Many artifacts were stored in the house including the Bibles belonging to his parents, my great-grandparents. These Bibles are a small 5 x 7 size in the Dutch language. They contain the New Testament, the catechism, and a full psalter in the back. These Bibles are special to me because they signify the heritage of faith that has been passed down through each generation. The Bible from my great-grandmother has written inside the front cover

Adrianna Grandia, Pella, Iowa, December 25, 1889.

This makes me wonder if perhaps she received it as a gift.

The research of the topics of local history, Dutch Immigration, and psalms and liturgy has been so fascinating. The writing of this new book is going well, and I look forward to someday sharing the finished product with readers.