ORANGE City, Iowa has gone to great lengths to honor all of the nation through their street names. States: Kansas Avenue, Arizona Place, Kentucky Avenue, Delaware Avenue, and many more. State capitals: Providence (Rhode Island), Albany (New York), Harrisonburg (Pennsylvania), Juneau (Alaska) and so on, each with their own avenue. Sandwiched between the Landsmeer golf course on one side of town, the Dutch Dogs animal shelter on the other, not far from Nederlander’s Grill. Because this is, after all, Dutch glory, the city is named after the House of Orange.
You would think that the most commonly used street name in America is Main Street, but it is not. Number one is Second Street, of which there are some eleven thousand. Third Street comes second, and then First Street. That’s the one that competes with Main Street, which itself sits in seventh place. One town prefers First, another likes Main, but in either case those were usually the original main drag. You add up those two, that’s 18,000 streets, substantially more than Second Street.
AMERICA loves numbers, we know that. That’s why digits are the first to be pulled out of the hat when city councils set out to name streets. Fourth, Fifth, Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth all fall within the top fifteen American street names. But beyond that? You might think of Washington and Lincoln for instance, but neither of them appears in the top listing. What does: Park, and trees: Pine, Maple, Cedar, Elm. Standing out: Oak. America has seven thousand Oak Streets, which should come as no surprise because most oak species in the world are found in North America.
When Dutch immigrants acquired a piece of land, they would first build a barn, and their house later. The cattle were given shelter first, and while waiting for a home of their own, early farmer families would move in with their own animals temporarily. Oak wood was often the building material. Oaks are strongest when the tree is a century and a half old, they tend to live an average of 300 to 400 years, and in new, young America those trees were all still standing tall, ready to be cut and utilized. Their early popularity is reflected in America’s street names, a ballad to the oak.
BUT because every town is often looking for something that symbolizes its own population in addition to the obvious street names, Orange City also has an Amsterdam Drive and a Rotterdam Court. That was not quite enough however, they figured, in a city brimming with names such as insurer Van Engelenhoven, the Bultman stadium and Kraai’s furniture store. Hence the search for something arch-Dutch, and they decided on the last thing those first emigrants saw after they had departed from Amsterdam and left the white dunes behind them while sailing between Den Helder and Texel on their way out to the ocean. The Zuiderzee. So good, you name it twice.
Orange City has a Zuider Zee Drive and a Zuider Zee Court.
