Celery City, the Dutch, and the Black Muck

For most of the second half of the nineteenth century, Kalamazoo was known as the Celery City. That nickname was not a joke. By eighteen seventy-one, more celery was shipped by rail out of this city than from any other point in Michigan except Detroit. By nineteen ten, six and a half pages of the Kalamazoo City Directory were devoted to listing celery growers. By nineteen thirty-nine, a thousand acres of celery were under cultivation in and around the city.

The industry began with two competing legends. In eighteen fifty-six, a Scotsman named George Taylor brought celery seeds from Europe and planted them in the river bottomland south of town. The second story credits Cornelius De Bruin, who arrived from the Netherlands in eighteen sixty-six and is said to have discovered a plant growing wild in a neighbor's soup-celery bed, transplanted it, and developed the mild, bleached table celery that would become a restaurant staple across the country.

Either way, Dutch immigrants recognized immediately what the land offered. The Kalamazoo River valley sat atop deep glacial deposits of black, loamy muck lying over water-impervious clay, the same soil conditions the Dutch had been farming in the low countries for centuries. They knew how to drain it. They knew how to coax it. Wave after wave of Dutch settlers arrived in the eighteen sixties, seventies, and eighties, purchasing small muck plots south of the city center and turning swampland into some of the most productive vegetable fields in the country.

The industry peaked and then died over roughly a generation. Paper mills sank deep wells and dropped the water table. Celery blight arrived in the nineteen thirties when farmers failed to rotate their crops. Competition from California and Florida undercut local prices. The celery fields were paved for housing. The Dutch Triangle, as historians call the communities of Kalamazoo, Holland, and Grand Rapids, kept its character but lost its green gold. The Celery Flats Interpretive Center in nearby Portage now marks the fields that once defined this city's economy.