KEVIN Klynstra is the mayor, Tim Klunder the city manager in charge of the day-to-day management. Jim Broersma is on the city council, as are Mary Beth Timmer and Rick van Dorp. The town’s coat of arms is a lion half under water, one that struggles and emerges, and across from city hall are two Reformed churches. The town center is laid out as a woonerf, a la Dutch. Welcome to Zeeland, Michigan, home of the Chicks.
Douwe Wyngarden was to blame for that. He started a chicken hatchery a century ago and turned it into a cackling success. Before long, ten million chicks were shipped all over the country every year, all hatched in Zeeland. The town became the chick center of Michigan, but frankly also of the entire country, because Zeeland and surroundings was considered America’s Quality Chick Center. There were about 40 such chick hatcheries, and schools named their sports teams the Chicks. There was a parade every year, the prettiest girl became the Zeeland Chick Queen – the first in 1941 was Dorothy van Voorst, sixteen years old. That was before she married Paul van Dort.
JANNES van de Luyster would have had no idea, more than a century and a half ago, the days of what the Dutch called Afscheiding, the break-away. With a capital A because that was the moment when the Dutch Reformed broke away from the official Reformed church. Now they’re all back together, but back then it was a big deal. The breakers had a point. After Napoleon, the Reformed church had been made the official state church of the Netherlands, headed by the king. Bottom-up church democracy had been abolished, and, conveniently, the government had kept one law of Napoleon’s: without permission, gatherings of more than twenty people were prohibited.
So Jannes organized church services in the open air, sometimes for crowds of a thousand people or more, in Goes, Borssele, sometimes Middelburg. Life there was no fun, jobs were scarce, pay was meager, and people were fed up. Jannes persuaded five hundred men and women to come with him to America, on three ships. It was the era of the second Dutch emigration wave, around 1850, many thousands of Dutch people mainly from the northern and eastern provinces, the Zeeland and South Holland islands, and some Brabant enclaves. They aimed for America’s Midwest, Illinois, Michigan, Wisconsin, Iowa, Nebraska, and sometimes they named their new settlements after the provinces they had left behind: Groningen, Vriesland, Drenthe, Overisel, South Holland. Jannes and his people built Zeeland.
IT IS still a close-knit and happy community 170 years later, and very much Dutch: De Bruyn seeds, Van Enk woodcrafters, gas station Venema, Borgman’s window tinting, pastor Gary DeKoekkoek, and lawyers Haveman, Boerman and James Donkersloot. Feel the Zeel flags fly everywhere, and during Covid also Heal the Zeel – fighting the virus together.
Jannes and Diena van de Luyster from Cadzand were the first settlers. They had seven children. Three of them remained faithful to the Dutch Protestant break-away tradition: once in America, they separated from their father’s church.
