VANDENBROEK Road cuts straight through town, past Van Lieshout Park. This is a Wisconsin area where they sometimes still speak Dutch, where an old man may be called opa, and where you can still be tante or oom. They eat stamppot and wortelstoemp. There’s a Dutch windmill, naturally, and on the river sits Heesakker Park. Father Theo van den Broek himself rests in peace behind the church that he built. The undertaker who digs the graves is Dirk van Deurzen.
This is Little Chute, but it could just as well have been named Little Uden. Father Van den Broek had been sent there by the Dominicans in Brabant to convert local Indians, and when in the mid-nineteenth century he came over from America to settle his parents’ estate, he put an ad in the Catholic newspaper De Tijd: come and live and work in America. He convinced three boatloads of emigrants to join him: more than 900 men and women.
Most came from Uden and surroundings, Boekel, Oploo, Gemert, and also the village of Zeeland, hence today the Van Zeeland garage and Van Zeeland nursery in Little Chute. Father Theodore had spent his entire childhood in Uden. He single-handedly triggered an exodus of Dutch Catholic families to America. Over time, an estimated 40,000 predominantly Brabant Catholics emigrated.
THE VAST majority of large groups of Dutch people who moved to America in that period were Protestant. They settled in states like Michigan, Iowa, Illinois, Nebraska, and in Wisconsin itself there’s still a flourishing town of Oostburg, founded by Dutch Reformed Zeelanders. But these folks who followed Fr. Van den Broek’s call were Roman Catholic – and their descendants in Little Chute still are.
Their start was tough. The Father had not only advertised but also sent letters to De Tijd. He wrote that his church in Little Chute had bought a large tract of land where immigrants could come and work. The newspaper corrected the word acres, it became akkers by mistake, but when the people from Brabant arrived there wasn’t a single piece of cultivated land. Moreover, jobs were promised to dig canals, a Dutch specialty, but canal building never amounted to much despite the proximity of Green Bay and Lake Michigan.
IT LED many immigrants to try their luck elsewhere, yet Little Chute is where the largest concentration of Dutch Catholics stuck together. For a long time Dutch was everyone’s primary language. Sinterklaas is still celebrated there on December 5. Until recently there was a Brabant kermis every year. And that Dutch windmill built by Lucas Verbij, it really mills, adjacent to a visitor center named Van Asten, near the Vanderloop shoe store.
Go and have a look one day. Mayor Mike Vanden Berg welcomes tourists.
