WHOA, a Spakenburg Road in Wisconsin. What gives? A little farther on: Staphorst Lane. Hans Brinker Lane, Amsterdam Prairie Road. Well then, go ahead, throw in Dutch Avenue, Rotterdam Avenue and Vermeer Street. And a Van Dunk Place. Cross the highway, and you drive into Volendam Street and Keppel Street.
Holmen in Wisconsin. Originally founded by emigrants from Norway, but they brought too few of them to make things last. The neighbors in the town next over did better, one of four Wisconsin towns named Holland. Holmen and Holland. Van Dunk was a farmer, Willem van Loon’s neighbor. The Van Dunks are still a typical Holmen family name, pastor Gregg van Dunk, who until recently served a large church in Milwaukee, hails from here.
MOST of those Dutch streets are on the Holland side of the highway. But Van Aelstyn Drive, named after a family from Meppel, can be found on the Norwegian side, just like Volendam Street. Spakenburg and Volendam, names you do not often come across in the US. It points to the immigration wave of the second half of the nineteenth century, when it was typically the poorer Dutch farming and fishing families who ventured to America, in search of a more prosperous living, often co-prompted by religious motives.
Staphorst, that’s a different story altogether. Staphorst was not an unknown name in America by the time a handful of its farmers settled here. Jaap and Klaas van Staphorst were Amsterdam bankers when Ambassador John Adams came to Holland begging for loans. The brothers said yes, and lent their money to the state of Maryland just when the newly independent United States desperately needed their role model to help them, the Dutch United Seven Provinces.
MESSRS Van Staphorst were supposed to be paid back in hogsheads of tobacco, but when the loan ballooned, Maryland, on closer inspection, didn’t like the terms after all. The brothers sued, using hired diplomats, and it ultimately turned into the very first lawsuit to be heard by the U.S. Supreme Court: Van Staphorst vs. Maryland. This scared the heck out of Maryland, and it quickly negotiated a settlement. The bankers still got what they were entitled to.
In Wisconsin, no one remembers that incident. The name that sticks here, next to Van Dunk, is that of Willem van Loon. Van Loon Lane and Van Loon Drive are named after him in yet another neighboring little town, New Amsterdam. Willem owned large tracts of farmland, and he was so happy with all that America had brought him that he turned it all over to the people of Wisconsin. It is now a wildlife reserve. Name: Van Loon Wildlife Area, stretching all the way down to the Mississippi river. So you drive around and rub your eyes, astonished. Volendam, Staphorst, Spakenburg, Rotterdam, on the Mississippi?
Yes indeed.
