HIS BIRTH house in Hasselt, Overijssel, is a museum. There is not much to see; he hardly lived there. Jeweler Kiliaen van Renselaer spent his life mainly in Amsterdam, and in Nijkerk where his entire family is buried.
In US history he is a big name. There are cities named for him in Indiana, Missouri and New York, and streets in just about every other state, usually with double S, Rensselaer. Kiliaen pretty much single-handedly founded America. Not as a country, not as a colony, but as a company, an enterprise. From his Amsterdam headquarters, the West India Company, he turned America into a foreign branch.
NEW NETHERLAND he called it, and the village at the mouth of the river that led to New Netherland he called New Amsterdam. The river was named after Prince Maurice of Orange, the Maurice River, now the Hudson. Mr. Van Renselaer’s business was trading furs. Beaver pelts. Those were supplied by native beaver trappers, Lenape, Mohicans, Mohawks.
It was predominantly a peaceful trade, buyers and sellers needed each other, they did not quarrel. On the contrary, they often married each other, had children. The most common surnames among the Ramapo Lenape Nation in New Jersey today are still Van Dunk, DeGroat, DeFreese and Mann, descendants of men once called Van Donck, De Groot, De Vries and Man. The name of the marketplace was Beverwyck.
Kiliaen himself never set foot on American soil. His relatives and neighbors did, families from Nijkerk, Bunschoten, Spakenburg, Amersfoort, Hoogland. Jaap Korlaar built Hartford in Connecticut, Wouter van Twiller became governor of New York, Jan Hoed and Rachel van Bunschoten started the family tree that produced Elvis Presley, Harm Vedder became progenitor of Pearl Jam’s Eddie Vedder, as well as the Westinghouse electronics concern. And where Beverwyck used to be, there’s now New York’s capital city of Albany and its neighboring town of Rensselaer, in Rensselaer County, seat of America’s oldest polytechnic college, the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.
But in Hasselt, Overijssel, no one really ever talks about this. Mainly because no one there has ever learned about those facts in school. Dutch king Willem Alexander visited Albany just last week, for all the historic reasons because Kiliaen’s adventures started precisely 400 years ago. Maybe the museum took notice.
