USA > Iowa > Marion County > Pella > Souvenir history of Pella, Iowa : contains a concise story of the founding and life of Pella, Iowa > Part 1
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M. L.
GENEALOGY COLLECTION
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ALLEN COUNTY PUBLIC LIBRARY 3 1833 01084 9047 E
Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2018
https://archive.org/details/souvenirhistoryo00unse_0
HENRY PETER SCHOLTE
Published by G. A. Stout
"A Bit of Holland" By Cyrenus Cole
Historical Resume By N. J. Gesman
SOUVENIR HISTORY OF PELLA, IOWA
1847-1922 This book contains a concise story of the found- ing and life of Pella, Iowa, with illustrations and short write-up of people and scenes that will be remembered by hun- dreds of present and former citizens. This piece of his- tory starts with people and things in 1847, bringing the life and actions of the peo- ple up to the present time in 1922.
Cyrenees cale
HISTORICALLY ILLUSTRATED
Compiled and Published by THE BOOSTER PRESS G. A. Stout, Publisher Pella, Iowa
FOREWORD
IN COMPILING and printing this book, the publisher desires to give as near as pos- sible an idea of the founding of our little city by the Hollanders in 1847. We have en- deavored to make it something that will be of in- terest to every person who has been and is now living in this community. We believe that it will be so appreciated that at the end of the next twenty-five years there will be some person who will carry on the history so carefully that it will be as perfect as can be. It has cost considerable money and time to compile the carly history of this book as it has been necessary to get in touch with former residents who reside in the extreme East and West. There are some illustrations which were impossible to get on account of the lack of photographers at that time, but we be- lieve that we have succeeded in making the early history of this community quite complete as to scenes and portraits of people of those times.
THE PUBLISHER
A Bit of Holland in America
BY CYRENUS COLE
I
I N THE summer of 1847 a company of immigrants from Holland settled in Marion county, Iowa, on the divide between the Des Moines and Skunk rivers. In their own country they had been persecuted on account of religion, being dissenters from the state Reformed church, and so they called their new home, Pella, the name meaning a place of refuge. Upon the seal of the new town they inscribed the words: In Deo Spes Nostra et Refugium, or, In God Our Hope and Refuge.
To speak of religious persecutions in Holland is almost to contradict history. Holland has been one of the cradles of religious liberty in Europe. The Pilgrim Fathers of American history found refuge there, although all the political power of England was used to dislodge them. And long before the pilgrimage at Ley- den, triumphant over the cruel Spanish Inquisition and the combined Catholic powers on sea and land in the most tremendous struggle of Protestantism, Holland not only permitted Roman Catholics to live under her splendid republic, but de- creed that no man should be molested on account of his religion. Under the same republic the Jews of Europe found protection. The Anabaptists, the most misunderstood' and despised sect of the times, who were butchered in Luther's Germany, and drowned in contempt of their doctrine of rebaptism in Zwingli's Switzerland, in Holland were not molested. And when the Quakers were driven out of Massachusetts, the advice of old Amsterdam to New Amsterdam (now New York) was that "at least the consciences of men ought to be free."
But the Holland of 1840 was not the same as the Holland of 1640. The stadt- holders had become kings. Religious toleration had become intolerance. A state supported clergy had gradually clothed religion with temporal power. Such power is always bigoted and cruel, no matter what its religious creed may be. But if government and church had undergone a change in Holland, the spirit of resistance to ecclesiastical dictation still lingered among the people. It was the folly of governments seeking to rule the consciences of men which was to be reenacted.
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The botanist who studies plant life intelligently digs into the earth after the roots. The intelligent study of men and events exacts no less. Emerson's famous one hundred years for the training of a child may be extended to one thousand years in the making of a people. Encamped in the shadow of the Pyramids, Napoleon told his soldiers that forty centuries looked down upon them. Half as many centuries, not of sand and rock, but of blood and deeds, looked down on the Holland of 1840. Shakespeare speaks of "that day he [Caesar] overcame the Nervii," but Caesar himself wrote that to overcome them he had to kill them; and the remnant of them, because of their bravery, in the dawn of Dutch history, were made an exception in all Europe which he had conquered, paying no tribute except the tribute of blood. Eight centuries later, Charlemagne came as another
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SOUVENIR HISTORY OF PELLA, IOWA
conquering Caesar, but he consented that it should be written in the statute books that "the Frisians shall be free as long as the wind blows out of the clouds and the world stands." After another like interval, we find the descendants of the Nervii and the Frisians pouring out their blood as freely as water to resist the political power of Spain and the ecclesiastical power of Rome. In that struggle William the Silent became the type of the moral hero for all time. And there was another William, the husband of Mary, who went to England to save Protestant- isni there, with whom the Dutch were willing to die in the last ditch, and under whom they cut their dikes and gave their farms and cities to the sea rather than to the French.
All through European history the blood of these stubborn adherents of right and righteousness runs as a thread of scarlet and their love of liberty as a thread of gold. Sir Philip Sidney, "the flower of chivalry," who, for the love of God and his fellow-men, fought in the armies of the Netherlands, returned to England to tell Queen Elizabeth that "the spirit of the Dutch is the spirit of God and is invincible." This same spirit, I like to think, reappeared in the men and women who early in the thirties revolted against the state church in Holland, seven hun- dred of whom came to Pella in 1847.
II
The Pella pilgrims in Holland believed in the complete separation of church and state. They were opposed to the established church because, in their opinion, it had become an institution of form, instead of being an expression of faith. They were separatists as the English pilgrims had been under Robinson and Brewster. The difference is mainly that between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries. In creed they were adherents of the doctrine of which John Calvin was a later expounder. In faith and in history the Protestants of Holland, which term includes practically all Hollanders, are associated with the Waldenses of Switzerland, the Huguenots of France, the Puritans of England and the Cove- nanters of Scotland.
Of those who found refuge in Pella some had been in prison, and many had been fined-and all of them had been harassed by populace and by soldiers. Prominent among the persecuted dissenters was Rev. Henry Peter Scholte, or Dominie Scholte. He was born in Amsterdam, October 25, 1805, and died in Pella, August 15, 1868. While a student at Leyden he took a part in suppressing the Belgian revolution. As a minister of the established church he soon fell into disfavor because of his disregard of ritualism and even authority. He declared church organizations to be of little importance and said he was "prevented from clothing his faith in the straight-jacket of ecclesiastical formalism." For various breaches he was at first suspended and afterwards arrested. Under a clause in the Code Napoleon the government denied the right of the dissenters to assemble in companies of more than nineteen persons. Mr. Scholte's was made a test case. The trial, at Appingadam, became one of the celebrated causes of the day. Some of those who were present-it was in 1834-are still living in Pella and remember vividly the crowd in and about the court house. As a result of the trial Dominie Scholte was imprisoned for three weeks. "This may have a very gloomy outlook to you," he said to those who came to sympathize with him, "but to me the out- look is glorious, indeed."
In the history of these people we come now to more than ten years of dis- turbed worship. Denied admittance to the regular churches they held their re- ligious services in dwelling houses, in barns, under hay sheds, or under the open
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A BIT OF HOLLAND IN AMERICA
skies. Many interesting incidents mark this period. At one time Dominie Scholte was preaching from a farmer's cart, when the dragoons came and ordered the people to disperse. Refusing to obey, the soldiers cut the cart into splinters, the brave preacher and his wife going down with the wreck. Often they sang psalms in self-defense, and there is at least one instance on record when they sang so fervently of the love of God that their persecutors were conscience smitten and departed, leaving the worshippers in peace.
All this time the conviction grew that they were called upon to establish free- dom of worship in a strange land. Borneo was considered, but the government was not favorable. Texas, whose independence had just been established under General Sam Houston, held out such liberal inducements that the cautious Nether- landers took fright and looked elsewhere. Missouri was rejected because of slav- ery within its borders. At about the same time another company of dissenters under Dominie Van Raalte settled in Michigan, founding the city of Holland in that state. The Pella colonists nearly all came from the well-to-do agricultural classes, who owned and tilled their own farms. The first meeting of the colonists was held at Leerdam, July, 1846, and at a meeting held at Utrecht in the following December, a formal organization was effected with Mr. Scholte as president, Rev. A. J. Betten, vice-president, and Isaac Overkamp, secretary. G. H. Overkamp, G. F. Lecocq, John Rietveld and A. Wigny were appointed a commission to receive and consider applications. They were instructed to receive as members of the colony only sober, industrious and moral persons. Infidels and atheists were barred, also Roman Catholics.
Late in April, 1847, they set sail for America. There were four ships in all, three sailing from Rotterdam and one from Amsterdam. The ships, three-masters, were the Nagasaki, the Catherina Jackson, the Maastrom and the Pieter Floris. Few good wishes accompanied them. Those who gathered in the various vil- lages to see the pilgrims depart regarded them as enthusiasts who would come to grief either on the ocean or in a strange land. Many family bonds were irre- trievably broken. Religious belief is in some aspects relentless. I may cite the case of my own father, who was one of the colonists, and whose sacrifices I know best. Among his people he alone joined the dissenters. His father was dead and he was enabled to receive a portion of the family estate. The prospect of a large inheritance was in vain held out to him by a rich uncle. He gave up all- brothers, sisters, mother, for Christ's promises were to him real and literal, a hundred fold for this world and in the world to come everlasting life. His mother clung to him while the boat lay waiting and would not be shaken off. One heart was broken there, and in after years in America, one head was often bowed in thought of her, and of those last words of despair heard from a mother's lips. But though he never saw any of his people again, and heard but little of them, never a word of regret passed his lips, for in his heart was the determination of a man who believed he was right, strangely linked with the humility of one who sought to do the works of righteousness, as in the sight of God daily.
The incident is no part of this history. This man was only a follower. It is recorded here as characteristic of the spirit in which these pilgrims came to Pella, and incidentally as a son's acknowledgment of an indebtedness that can never be paid in the coin or service of this world.
III
The Catharina Jackson reached Baltimore in twenty-six days. The Nagasaki was thirty-six days at sea, and one of the ships did not reach the American port much short of two months. On shipboard, religious services were held almost
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SOUVENIR HISTORY OF PELLA, IOWA
daily, consisting mainly of psalm singing. It is still told in Pella how the rough seamen showed proper respect for these services, and how with bared heads they crowded around the psalm singers. The ships were dirty when they went aboard, but long before they reached Baltimore the people had made their sea habitations as clean as proverbial Dutch kitchens. The health officers at Baltimore were so impressed with the cleanliness of the ships that the immigrants were allowed to land, practically, without the usual inspections. The captains testified that they had never brought across the Atlantic more orderly or better behaved people.
Maryland was beautiful in the verdure of May. How glad they were at the sight of land! But Baltimore bewildered these men and women of simple faith. Like the strictest of the Puritans, they had eschewed all amusements, and reduced their lives to a solemn barrenness the grandeur of which lay in the rugged out- lines which no verdure softened. Baltimore seemed to them a wicked city. The dance halls in the lower wards shocked them most. In all their later experiences only one other thing shocked them as much, and that was the sight of women smoking pipes in the doorways of unswept cabins.
On their departure from Baltimore a scene was enacted that outdid that of Æneas carrying his father from burning Troy. One of the immigrants found that his aged mother, an invalid, had been left behind. He ran about frantically, trying to make people understand that he wanted a conveyance of some sort. Time was limited, but his fears were not. Finally despair seized him, and pick- ing up his mother he carried her in his arms through the streets of the city to the train which was waiting. This man was Dirk Synhorst. He stood six feet tall, built like a giant. He and the mother he cared for so tenderly have both gone to their last rest.
The journey inland was a very tiresome one. The American railway was still in its beginning. The cars were small, hardly accommodating eight persons comfortably, and these were jerked and jolted over a rough road. The cars were drawn up the steeper grades by stationary engines. The immigrants had never seen so many mountains. They longed for the prairies which they were told lay to the west. At Columbia, Pennsylvania, they were packed into dirty and inadequate canal boats, like herring in boxes. In these boats they remained fourteen days, when they reached Pittsburg. They were used to canals and canal boats in Holland-picturesque craft on strips of water between green meadows and cultivated fields; but the American canal climbed hills by means of locks. crossed rivers on aqueducts, and tunneled mountains. From Pittsburg the jour- ney was down the then national highway, the Ohio river, and thence to St. Louis.
In St. Louis they sojourned several weeks, but it was in the intense heat of an American summer, and many of them suffered greatly. Mr. Scholte, in one of his pamphlets, tells us that few died at sea, four on the journey from Baltimore to St. Louis, but many in the latter place. The record adds: "They died like Christians, witnessing that death was their gain." But even greater troubles grew out of the reports, which had been widely published in the newspapers of the day, that these Hollanders were the possessors of great wealth. In the same pamphlet it is stated that everywhere many people came to stare at the strangely- carved chests which were supposed to contain riches as fabulous as those of Peru. In consequence of these rumors, also, the people with whom they had business dealings charged them more than they charged Irish and German immi- grants for the same services. While they rested in St. Louis, they "sent out spies after the manner of the children of Israel," to find a location for the colony. Of this commission, two are still living. Isaac Overkamp of Pella, and Teunis Keppel of Michigan.
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A BIT OF HOLLAND IN AMERICA
Meantime, Mr. Scholte, as the president of the colony, visited Washington, where, he says, he was well received by the officials of the government. He went to Boston, which he found in such Emersonian enthusiasm that he refers to it with sorrow as the capital of "Amerikaansche rationalismus." In Albany he was cordially welcomed by the descendants of early settlers from Holland. In that city he preached in his native language. These welcomes were repeated and doubled in New York City, where he found many families which had perpetuated the language of their ancestors in Holland. He was welcomed in all the Dutch Reformed churches (the adjective Dutch has since been dropped from the name of this church), and in many of the Presbyterian churches also. In the profuse welcomes, the colonists journeying toward Iowa were referred to as men and women destined to set up the worship of the true God in the wilds of the West. They were referred to as missionaries instead of home-seekers. "Everywhere," wrote Mr. Scholte, referring to his experience in New York, "the name of Hol- lander is a title of honor."
While they tarried in St. Louis a committee came from Nauvoo, out of which the Mormons had just been driven, and offered to sell that city outright. But they had come to America to make homes of their own. In due time the spies sent out from St. Louis reached Fairfield, Iowa. There the death of the child of the register of the land office played an important part in the location of the colony. Mr. Scholte, while attending the funeral, met Rev. M. J. Post, a. Baptist missionary, who had traversed all of the then known Iowa. Mr. Scholte writes that in this man he "noted the hand of God," and he did not let go of it until Mr. Post had promised to go with the commission in search of a site. Mr. Post led them to what he called the finest tract of land in the state, the divide on which the city of Pella stands. The commissioners bought the claims within the desired tract and then returned to St. Louis, where the news of their purchase was re- ceived with much rejoicing.
The journey of the home-seekers was at once resumed, by steamboat from St. Louis to Keokuk. They embarked one Saturday afternoon and the following Monday morning stepped on Iowa soil. On the intervening Sunday religious services were held on board the boat, Dominie Scholte himself preaching the sermon, in which he likened their journey to that of the children of Israel to the Promised Land. At Keokuk a heavy rain was falling when they landed. For the journey inland some hired and others bought wagons with horses or oxen. The people of Keokuk were amused as well as benefited in a financial way, for the immigrants paid for everything in gold, which was then seldom seen in the West.
The writer's grandfather, Mathias de Booy, placed his family with their house- hold goods in a wagon drawn by two horses, the price of the whole outfit being $250. But when the time for starting came the horses refused to move, however much he talked to them about the necessity of doing so. He was arriving at the conclusion that he had been swindled when fortunately an interested spectator, who had been much amused, stepped forward and assured him the horses were all right, except that they did not understand Dutch. The stranger thereupon spoke to the horses in the vernacular of Keokuk, and immediately they started, almost at a run, and the owner began to wonder whether they would understand enough Dutch to stop when he wanted them to!
It was a curious procession that made its way up the Des Moines river valley. Quite a spectacle it must have been for the natives. There were more than seven hundred colonists in strange garb and speaking a strange language. Some rode in wagons drawn by horses and some in carts drawn by oxen, and some walked,
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SOUVENIR HISTORY OF PELLA, IOWA
no doubt, in wooden shoes. The men were broad shouldered and the women were rosy cheeked. The men were in velvet jackets and the women in outland- ish caps and bonnets.
After a journey of several days, during which the houses became farther and farther apart and finally almost disappeared, for between Oskaloosa and Des Moines were only a few scattered settlers, they came, on August 26th, to a place where stood a hickory pole with a shingle nailed to the top, and on the shingle the word:
PELLA
"But, Dominie, where is Pella?" asked Mrs. Scholte before alighting. "We are in the center of it, my dear," was the reply. But like the little girl in the fairy tale of Hans Christian Andersen, the dominie's four-year-old daughter, Jo- hanna, now Mrs. John Nollen of Pella, could not see anything at all, and came to the conclusion that Pella was all a make believe.
IV
lowa, as they saw it in 1847-no pen can describe it! It was billowy like the sea which they had crossed. There was wave after wave of grass, every- where breaking into spray of wild flowers-wind-flowers and violets in spring; lilies and roses in summer; golden rod and asters in autumn, and great white stretches of snow in winter. Far away were the forests along the rivers, green as emerald when they first saw them in August, and crimson and gold in October. And the sun and the stars in a beautiful Italian blue sky over them always-an infinite blue sky over an infinite green prairie, the sky studded with stars like flowers and the prairie with flowers like stars. So beautiful was their new home that they soon forgot the cultivated fields by the dikes and ditches over the sea and the windmills that stood over them; and now, after forty-seven years, the remembrance of it in the hearts of those who have survived is vivid enough and sweet enough to comfort them in old age.
But in 1847 Pella was beautiful simply as a country. As president of the colony Mr. Scholte occupied a log cabin which stood on the center of what is now a beautiful park. This eabin was built as a claim pen, in 1843, by Thomas Tuttle and his wife. Farther north was another cabin which this pioneer couple used as a residence. The blood of heroes flowed in the veins of this man and woman. It is related that when Mr. Tuttle found it necessary to go east after supplies, his wife kept guard in the cabin for nine days and nights, her only companion being a cat. Wolves that howled at night along Thunder creek and Indians who passed stealthily, distance and loneliness-none of these daunted the courage of this brave woman.
This history would be incomplete without a mention of a band of pioneers who stood upon the site of Pella even before the Tuttles built their cabin there. They reached Pella on the 26th of April, 1843, five days before the New Purchase was thrown open for settlers, having made their way through the government lines. Of this band only three are now living, Robert Hamilton and Green T. Clark of Pella, and Robert B. Warren of Des Moines. Mrs. Sarah Nossaman, who came only a few weeks later, is also still living at Pella, and Mrs. Mary Butts and Mrs. Mary Todd who were then children. They were religious men and women and organized a Methodist church and afterwards, under Mr. Post, a Baptist church. Mr. Hamilton, writing of the Hollanders, says: "After living among
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A BIT OF HOLLAND IN AMERICA
them forty-seven years I can say I never knew a people more religious, church- going and sabbath-observing."
The commissioners from St. Louis had purchased most of these claims. The new settlers at once put the plow to the prairies and the axe to the forests. I will let Professor Newhall, a traveling writer of that time, tell of the magic trans- formation which they wrought here. "Methinks I hear you exclaim," he wrote in a letter to the Burlington Hawkeye, " 'where is Pella?' Not the ancient city of Macedonia, but a foreshadowing of the famous Holland settlement which has recently been located upon our beautiful prairies of the New Purchase. To tell you this would be like telling you fiction. Just about two months ago I halted about sunset at a lone cabin on the ridge road midway between Oskaloosa and the Raccoon Forks. . Again to-day, (the 17th of September) about noon, I find myself dashing along this beautiful road. I did not dream, neither was I in a trance, for my eyes beheld the same beautiful earth clothed in its rich garniture of green-yet I discovered a new race of beings. The men in blanket coats and jeans were gone. And a broad-shouldered race in velvet jackets and wooden shoes were there.
Most of the inhabitants live in camps, the tops covered with tent cloth, some with grass and bushes. The sides, barricaded with countless numbers of trunks, boxes and chests of the oddest and most grotesque
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