USA > Iowa > Marion County > Pella > Souvenir history of Pella, Iowa : contains a concise story of the founding and life of Pella, Iowa > Part 2
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They are all Protestants who have left their native land (much like the Puritans of old) on account of political and religious intolerance and persecution. . They appear to be intelligent and respectable, quite above the average class of European immigrants that have ever landed upon our shores." Professor Newhall speaks of his good fortune in arriving in time to see the male adults going through the ceremony of declaring their intention to become citizens of the United States, which was one of the first duties they per- formed after reaching Pella. He says: "It was an altogether impressive scene, to behold some two hundred men with brawny arms upraised to heaven eschew- ing all allegiance to foreign powers, potentates, etc. And as they all responded in their native tongue to the last word of the oath, 'so help me God,' no one could resist the heartfelt response. All appeared to feel the weight of the re-
sponsibility they were about to assume. A fact worth recording during the ceremony before the clerk of the court was that of the whole number who took the intended oath of citizenship but two made their marks."
The first house built in Pella by the Hollanders was a long wooden structure of boards upright. So little were they acquainted with the nature of their new country that they built this in a low place, and the late autumn rains flooded it, setting all the beds in all the "sections" afloat. The first winter was by most of the people spent in dugouts with roofs of straw. This was called "Strooijstadt," or "Strawtown." But in these sheds, in which their descendants would hardly stable their cattle, these determined men and women were not unhappy. "Many times," writes one-H. de Booy -- "I have looked back to that winter as one of the happiest of my life. There was love, unity and helpfulness. The evenings were spent in psalm-singing and in edifying conversation." Pathetic it all was, but there were also amusing phases. For instance, a cow, finding better grazing on the straw-covered roof of one of the dugouts than on the prairie, gradually climbed upon the roof, and finally fell through it on the floor of the cabin beside ยท the bed in which a startled man and his wife were sleeping.
On the first Monday in April, 1848, the first election was held, Lake Prairie township, comprising two geographical townships, having been organized under a special act of the legislature of 1848. Green T. Clark and Mr. Scholte were elected justices of the peace, Isaac Overkamp, clerk, and A. J. Betten, G. Awtry
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SOUVENIR HISTORY OF PELLA, IOWA
and P. Welle, commissioners. A postoffice was opened, with the luxury of mails three times a week. Mr. Scholte was postmaster. Mrs. Post opened a hostelry and Wouters and Smink the first "store." The first child born in the settlement was named Bart Synhorst, and Lena Blanke was the first infant baptized in the church. Pella was platted in this same year by Stanford Douds. The nomen- clature of the streets, running east and west, and of the avenues, running north and south, was unique, a combination of religion and patriotism. Beginning on the north the streets were named in succession : Columbus, Washington, Franklin, Liberty, Union, Independence and Peace. Beginning on the east the avenues were named: Entrance, Inquiry, Perseverance, Reformation, Gratitude, Experi- ence, Patience, Confidence, Expectation and Fulfilling.
While the mechanics were building houses, the farmers tilled the virgin soil with a willingness that has never been excelled, even in America. Everything was new to them-the oxen and the plows, the soil and the crops, the times of sunshine and of rain, but they were apt pupils in nature's great school-room. And, by the hand of God, as they believed, they had come to a place where, as Douglas Jerrold says, they had but to tickle the earth with a hoe to make it smile with a harvest.
But, to their honor be it said, no material considerations were allowed to take precedence of religion and education. At first they worshipped in "God's first temples," and then in G. H. Overkamp's log house, until a church was built. The first schoolmasters were Isaac Overkamp and James Muntingh, both of whom are still living. The first teacher in the English language was Benjamin Sturman. Education was at first under the control of the church and in the Holland lan- guage, but both features were soon abandoned. Since those first attempts, al- though nearly a score school districts have been under their control, all education has been in the language of their adopted country. Not a dollar of public money's has since been expended for either sectarian or foreign education.
The religious and educational liberality of these people was shown in the inducements they held out to the Baptists of the state, when early in the fifties this denomination was seeking a site for a college. As a result Central Univer- sity came as a godsend to them. Foremost among those who labored for this university was A. E. D. Bousquet. Mr. Bousquet's influence, in this as in every- thing else, was in behalf of progress in worldly affairs and toward the complete merging of the colony into the larger life of the American people. The univer- sity was founded in 1853. It was formally opened for students of both sexes (which circumstance makes it a pioneer in higher co-education) September 1, 1857. The teachers were Rev. Elihu Gunn, president; Rev. E. II. Scarff, vice- president; Prof. A. N. Currier, Mrs. Ira Joy Stoddard and Miss Marse. Four years later one hundred and twenty-four young men who were, or had been, students. including every able bodied male student of age, and some who were not of age, and Professor Currier, enlisted in the Union armies. In the college library there now stands a marble slab on which are the names of the twenty-four who never returned, or came back to die of wounds received in their country's service. Is there another college that has such a record as this? And the colony also offered up its best young men, some families giving three and many two sons to the service of their adopted country. The oath of allegiance which they had taken in 1847 was not a matter of form, it was a baptism into a new and broader citi- zenship.
But no account of the moral and educational development of a community would be complete without a mention of its newspapers. The press is the ally of the schools and the churches. It is the complement of either and the supple-
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A BIT OF HOLLAND IN AMERICA
ment of both. Every achievement in American communities worth recording has woven into it the influence of the printing press. Pella was fortunate in having as its first editor Mr. Scholte. - In association with Edwin H. Grant, Feb- ruary 1, 1855, he founded the Pella Gazette. The Des Moines Star had suspended and the Gazette was just then the most western paper printed in Iowa, except on the Missouri slope. The paper was independent in politics, but leaned toward the new, or republican party, Mr. Scholte afterwards sitting as a delegate in the convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln. In 1860 Henry Hospers founded the Weekblad, a paper printed in the Holland language, which he sold in 1870 to H. Neyenesch, its present editor. In 1865 C. S. Wilson founded the Pella Blade.
One of the delusions of the times was the navigation of the Des Moines river. The people of Pella shared extensively in this. The prospects of a river com- merce appealed strongly to them for they were accustomed to traffic by water. A company was formed with Mr. Bousquet as the leading spirit to build and operate boats. The people of Pella went so far as to lay out a town on the river, three miles from the main city. They called it New Amsterdam, the name once borne by New York, and afterwards by Buffalo, and everywhere dear to Holland- ers because associated with their commercial and naval greatness. New Amster- dam had an elaborate system of streets and avenues and pleasure grounds and market squares. Its front street was on the river and its back street on the beau- tiful Lake Prairie. Lots in New Amsterdam sold for $100, and in Pella for only $50. Its site is now a deserted station on the Wabash railroad, a wilderness of brush and jimpson weeds, with beautiful farms in the distance. Leerdam, a town platted on the Skunk river, northeast of Pella, met with a similar fate.
These are only a few of the many hopes which were blasted, only a few of the expectations that came to naught. Close by the home of my childhood I have often sat and pondered on the remnants of a system of dikes and ditches which a sturdy toiler commenced there in remembrance of Holland. No sea beat against those dikes and no water ever stood in those ditches for they were on the top of a hill. The rains of forty-seven summers and the frosts of as many winters have almost obliterated all trace of them and the pioneer who dreamed there with his pipe and toiled there with his spade has himself long since re- turned to the earth. But his dream and his labors live after him to adorn a tale and point a moral.
But if their hopes on the Des Moines and Skunk rivers came to naught, these people founded at least one other city which has become an honor to them and to the state. This is Orange City, in Sioux county, established under the leader- ship of Henry Hospers, in 1870. Motley says that the history of the people of Holland is "marked by one prevailing characteristic, one master passion-the love of liberty, the instinct of self-government." He might have added also the in- stinct of colonization, in which respect Holland has been second only to England, and today, after so much of her glory has departed, her colonial possessions are those of a first-class European power, excelled in wealth only by those of Eng- land. This national instinct has regularly manifested itself among the settlers of Pella. In 1878 a Kansas colony was projected with H. de Booy as president and N. J. Gesman, secretary, but the drouths in that state cut the project short. Find- ing no satisfactory outlet farther west the descendants have spread out on every side of Pella until now they are scattered over an area forty miles east and west and fifteen miles north and south, and the value of their farm lands has been steadily rising. They have written "yes," after the laconic question, "Does farm- ing pay ?"
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SOUVENIR HISTORY OF PELLA, IOWA
I can speak but briefly of their manners and customs. At first they were those of Holland. Many of these customs still survive among them, and some are too good to be allowed ever to perish. Family life among them is pure and noble. Its basis is the Christian religion, and its aim Christian character. Every home is a church and a school, each in miniature. The old-time family board was an elaborate event, not because of the things to eat, hut because of the things that were said. A prayer preceded every meal and a bible reading and a longer prayer followed-three times a day, in winter or in harvest time. And it was all sin- cere. There is no make-believe in anything that belongs to these people. And if they were strict in religion, they were equally strict in morals. Honest with themselves, they are also honest with other men. Debts among them are sacred, and the public conscience is as active as the private conscience. Municipal and other public affairs are as carefully administered as is private business. As to strong drink they are temperate, many families to the verge of prohibition. Ex- cessive drinking is among them almost wholly unknown and neither are they steady drinkers. Their social beverage is wine-not beer-and the wine is gen- erally home-made. While in Albany, Mr. Scholte recorded the fact that he was lodged in a hostelry where liquors were not served, and in the same pamphlet he records that among the sorrows that befell the colonists while at Keokuk were a death and a burial-and a case of drunkenness, which caused so much shame and humiliation to all "that the Christian organization no more recognizes him as a member of it." In their social life they are hospitable and sincere. In every well regulated family from nine to ten in the morning is coffee-time and from four to five in the afternoon tea-time, and to these pleasant hours of social leisure friends are always welcome and strangers within their gates always invited.
V
Here the curtain must be dropped on what Marshall Talbot, that strange genius who gave to lowa art at least a local habitation and a name, called the most picturesque settlement in Iowa or in the West. Times and conditions have been changing. Much of the original coloring has been effaced. This bit of Hol- land I have tried to describe has been merging into America. But Rembrandt come to earth again might still repaint some of his great faces in Pella.
I have burdened this sketch with few names and fewer dates. I have tried to concern myself with principles, not persons; with purposes, not with years. It was a saying of Carlyle that history is but biography. Taine struck nearer the true philosophy of events when he maintained that great men are only indicators. Great events are but accumulated inheritances, lighted by some sudden fire of the heart.
When these nineteenth century pilgrims came to Pella, this midland region was still a riotous barbarism. They built their homes in the wilderness, and their farms they carved out of the raw prairies. They prayed and-went to work. Among them industry and thrift have been brother and sister, husband and wife. walking hand in hand and smiling on abundance. What they suffered, and what all the settlers of the West suffered, will never be told. The development of the West has been the theme of orators and the dream of poets. It has perplexed historians and bewildered philosophers. In this great contest between man and nature it was "an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth." No gospel of love here freed men from the hardness of the Mosaic law. The ancient conquerors com- ing to a river crowded their vanguards into it and made bridges of human bodies. In this manner civilization crossed these great prairies. The sweat-the tears
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A BIT OF HOLLAND IN AMERICA
which labor sheds-and the blood of men are the warp of this fair fabric which the world admires, and the sighs and tears of women are the woof of it. Men groped in the dark, where now it is light. By faith men entered the wilderness and by labor they conquered it. Once on these prairies God was a cloud by day and a fiery pillar by night. Here fortunes were wrecked as well as made. Here men gave up their lives that others might live. In the little army of sturdy pio- neers, whose deeds I have set down in love, when any were cast down, religion consoled them and when pride came with success they felt what the author of Robert Elsmere calls "that fierce self-judgment of the good-the most stirring and humbling thing in life."
When Pella had become a prosperous community, Rev. Cohen Stuart, one of the learned men of Holland, came bearing the greetings of the king and his acknowledgment that these people had been maltreated in their own country under his predecessors. But kings and petty magistrates had long before been forgiven, and almost forgotten in the joys of American citizenship. Time effaces the memory even of offenses and time brings also the comforting conviction that "offenses must needs come." All history, in a sense, teaches the predestination of nations. If events are not determined from the first, at least the end is deter- mined by the beginning. The sea and its wrath, the Rhine which overflowed its banks in the spring or when the wind blew on the sea, Caesar and Charlemagne and the Spaniard, the bulls of the popes and the fagots and torches of the Inquisi- tion-all seem to have been of the purposes of history, if not of the Providence of God. They made a hardy race, whose commerce and whose colonies belted the earth and whose navies ruled the seas before England became great; a race of men who governed themselves when America was still a dream of colonization and a scene of European plunder, men who maintained against all the world that "at least the consciences of men ought to be free," and that "religion is ever a matter between the individual and his God." On nine thousand square miles of land, that had once been swept by the sea, European history was focused for a whole century. There "the purest of the Teutons"-and Motley says they were also the bravest-governed themselves, resisted the feudalism of the Middle Ages. tolerated no lords, temporal or spiritual, worshipped God according to the dic- tates of their own consciences, though the price was an eighty-year war, painted pictures whose renown still fills the earth, printed books, made many inventions, grew rich, and then ceased to be great.
But if Holland in Europe declined, Holland in America-of which Pella is only a later bit-has grown greater and brighter as modern historical research is giving it recognition. American history is no longer written in the shadow of European royalty, but in the light of European republicanism. We are going back to first things, "and in many respects," says William Elliot Griffis, who in- vestigated this matter for the Boston Congregational Club, "Holland is the land of first things in modern Christian civilization." The Hollanders had the first common schools in Europe. They had consumed twenty-four editions of the New Testament and fifteen of the whole bible before there was a bible printed in England. And when Tyndale's Bible came, bearing light for this world and the world to come, it was printed by Hollanders and smuggled into England. Hallam says that in Holland "self-government goes beyond any assignable date." Taine says that when Shakespeare was writing, "the Dutch were two centuries ahead of the rest of Europe," as great on the sea and in the world as England was in the time of Napoleon. Motley says that they were "the most energetic and quick-witted people of Europe." The Dutch Act of Abjuration of 1580, the Magna Charta of 1688 and the Declaration of Independence of 1776, Mr. Griffis
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SOUVENIR HISTORY OF PELLA, IOWA
says, look like grandfather, father and son. A Dutch province was the original home of the Anglo-Saxons. Puritanism in England came from countries where a hundred thousand Dutch Protestants had settled during the Inquisition. Crom- well's military instructor came from Holland. The Pilgrim Fathers of America went to school under the same republic. Thomas Hooker went from there to Connecticut, Roger Williams taught Milton Dutch. William Penn's mother was a Hollander, and Penn himself preached many sermons in her language. New York, the most influential state in the Union, has a substantial Dutch basis. But these things have been enumerated by others, who have directed the thought of the world to Holland as the source of much that is most distinctly republican and American. I have only cited this much to show that the people who came to Pella in 1847 came to their own. The country was strange to them, but not the country's institutions, for these were theirs from "beyond any assignable date."
Thus far the etoquent pen of our old schoolmate and former townsman, Cy- renus Cole, has brought the narrative of the early history of the founding of Pella and of the fundamental conditions that led up to it.
We feel confident that all our readers will agree that we have been excep- tionally fortunate in securing this able and eloquent account, from the pen of one of our sons who years ago went out from Pella into the great world of oppor- tunity, carrying with him those sturdy principles of thrift, industry and hard endeavor, that have blazed for him a successful career on the larger stage of life. A career that has added luster to his alma mater, and to the City of Refuge, which he still loves to call home.
NOTE .- The beautiful tribute of Mr. Cole was written in 1895 and some of the men recorded as living have since passed to their reward. These things will be automatically corrected as we endeavor to bring this history up to the present time.
Before resuming the history of the Hollanders who founded Pella, we con- sider it fitting to refer briefly to a number of American pioneers who settled in this locality several years before the Hollanders arrived.
AN EXPLANATION .
Mr. Cole's article, "A Bit of Holland," was written for a magazine. This re- quired brevity, and for that reason could only touch on many incidents which we have repeated in more elaborate form in the chapters which follow. The same thing applies to the two accounts of Central College.
The First Band Concert in the Garden Square
T HE first settler in what is now Pella was Thomas Tuttle, who came to the state in 1838, and settled in Jefferson county the year following. On the 13th day of May, 1843, he came to the present site of Pella. Not having any children or other help, Mrs. Tuttle assisted him to build a cabin in the edge of the timber where north Pella is now located. Soon after they made a claim of part of the plat of Pella and put up a claim pen, or log cabin, in what is now the Garden Square, a little west of the center.
When this pioneer couple took up their residence here they were not aware of the existence of any other family of white people within a radius of twenty miles. After living here a month or so it was found necessary to replenish their stock of breadstuff which was running very low; so it was decided to go to Ft. Madison for a supply. Mrs. Tuttle had to choose between going with her hus- band on the hard and hazardous trip, through forests and prairies, with no trails, roads or bridges, or of spending the lonesome days and still more lonesome nights, with no company other than a big cat, and seeing no human beings except Indians as they passed and repassed, occasionally entering the house without first announcing their presence or uttering any kind of salutation. With true pioneer courage Mrs. Tuttle chose to remain in the little cabin home. For nine days and nights, that must have seemed like so many months, she was alone. It is beyond the power of our imagination to conceive what such an experience must have been for this lonely woman, or to draw a mental picture of her surround- ings, familiar though we are with the location now.
Think of that lonely little cabin, built of logs chinked with mud, the only evidence of the presence and handiwork of man, set there on the native prairie, surrounded on all sides by the vast, dim solitude of the primeval forest. Think of the long nights with the solemn, brooding silence broken only by the wild howl of the wolves, the blood-curdling scream of the panther, or the death cry of a stricken deer, the first band concert ever heard by a white person in the Garden Square. What a contrast with the present. Where then the cold stars of heaven were the only illumination, is now a blaze of electricity. The lone cabin is replaced by a beautiful and ornate band stand, the deer trails by wide, winding cement walks, and where the wild crab tree bloomed in fragrance, now a magnificent fountain reflects the multitude of electric lights. The shadowy for- ests have given way to the palatial homes of our fair city; and where one poor, lonely woman kept her vigil almost four score years ago, now thousands of happy, prosperous citizens gather to meet their friends in this magnificent park, and enjoy the strains of music rendered by our excellent band.
OTHER SETTLERS OF 1843-44
Most prominent of those who first settled in Lake Prairie township were Wellington and Levi Nossaman, William and John Welsh, Wilson Stanley, George Gillaspy, John B. and Robert Hamilton, Dr. James L. Warren, Asa and Jasper Koons, John Gillaspy, John and William George, William Clayton, Ose Mathews, William Bainbridge, Jacob C. Brown, I. C. Curtis, and Green T. Clark.
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Many of these American pioneers were men of sterling worth and character, who were of great help to the Hollanders after their arrival in 1847. Many of them remained in Pella and vicinity and were prominently identified with the growth and development of the community. The nature and limited scope of this publication makes it impossible to give these sturdy men the space and recognition to which their ability and usefulness entitle them, but we hope that this will be remedied in part by the personal biographies found in succeeding chapters.
In August, 1843, four families named Buffington settled three miles north of Pella, forming what was soon after styled "The Buffington Settlement." The names of those who headed these families were William, James, Samuel and Abram.
The Methodists and Baptists were the first religious denominations that or- ganized societies in Lake Prairie township. The first Methodist class was formed at John B. Hamilton's, and the first Baptist church was organized at Aaron Foulk's by Rev. Moses J. Post, and the place of holding services was at Nossaman's school house, four miles south of Pella. The first to receive the ordinance of baptism, by immersion, in this township, and in the county, were Sarah Nossaman and Emily Baker, administered by the Rev. M. J. Post. The first Baptist minister licensed to preach the gospel in this township and also in the county was Rev. I. C. Curtis.
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