Holland, Michigan — Van Raalte's Kolonie

In the winter of eighteen forty seven, a Dutch minister named Albertus van Raalte led a group of approximately sixty families through the snow of western Michigan and into the Black River valley at the eastern end of Lake Macatawa. They were Calvinist separatists who had been fined, jailed, and harassed in the Netherlands for worshipping outside the official state church. They had sold what they could, crossed the Atlantic, and pushed through the Michigan wilderness looking for a place to build what Van Raalte called a kolonie: a colony not just of settlers, but of a close-knit Christian community.

What they found was a dense forest of white oak and basswood, a river that could power mills, and land that could be cleared for farms. Van Raalte chose the spot carefully. The Black River ran to Lake Macatawa, which connected to Lake Michigan, which connected to the Great Lakes shipping network and Chicago and the world beyond. The kolonie would not be isolated. It would be productive.

The first years were brutal. The settlers cleared land by hand, built log cabins, and buried a quarter of their number to cholera in the summer of eighteen forty eight. Van Raalte wrote letters home urging potential immigrants to come while privately acknowledging that the mortality was alarming. They stayed.

By eighteen sixty seven, Holland was incorporated as a city. Van Raalte founded what became Hope College in eighteen sixty six, fulfilling his stated goal of building what he called an anchor of hope for the people of the kolonie. By the end of the nineteenth century, Holland had a functioning port, mills, and a community that still worshipped in Dutch and kept Dutch customs in the home.

Today Holland has about thirty four thousand residents and the densest concentration of Dutch heritage culture in North America outside the Netherlands. The kolonie that Van Raalte planted in a Michigan snowstorm became a city. The city planted tulips, and the tulips brought the world to its door.