Oostburg CRC--150 years - ii

 

But, old as I am, I’m no pioneer. I had an education he could have only dreamed of back in the day he watched men from Oostburg follow the call to the Civil War. 

    He died before it happened, but Evert Hartman's own grandson died 100 years ago last in France near the River Vesle, by way of a German grenade. That hero, Edgar Hartman, is buried just north of town too.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. Although most of the survivors are buried in a cemetery a mile or so west of Gibbsville, the Phoenix ship disaster had a significant effect on the earliest residents. Over 200 Dutch immigrants, coming here—not to Sheboygan, but to Town of Holland and its suburbs—were so close to a destination they dreamed of when, on a Sunday morning, the Sabbath, that ship went down just off Sheboygan harbor. It was November 27, 1847, and, at the time, many Dutch immigrants believed that this Wisconsin colony of Hollanders would mushroom. Many Dutch immigrants thereafter determined to go to Michigan instead, and, as a result, the Dutch of Sheboygan County never reached the numbers of their sister colony in across the pond. No one knows exactly how many died that night, estimates range between 170 and 300. But then, the passengers were immigrants--who really cared?

Nothing changed Oostburg like I-43 replacing old Highway 141, the only link between Milwaukee and Green Bay when I was a boy. Just before it opened, I rolled sod balls up and out on the hills created by its viaducts, the hardest work I’d ever did in my life.

Nothing changed Oostburg that much except the railroad. When steam locomotive came through, East Oostburg got its first name because the west Oostburg was rolled along on tamarack boughs cut from the lakeshore woods in order to move a mile west to greet passengers and commerce.

But I was talking about woods because I wanted to take you on a tiny road trip too, to show you what I’ve been shocked to find at obscure places a day’s travel or more west. Like this:

    If you’re like me, you’ll notice that all the names are peculiarly Oostburg-ian. The windows are not—nor have they ever been in Oostburg. If you’d like to see them, you’ll have to travel to way-out-of-the-way Bemis, South Dakota, north of Brookings, to a rural church named Holland Presbyterian.

    And then there’s this too. Once again, if you have an eye and ear for local surnames, it’s impossible not to notice that the residents of this graveyard in Holland, Nebraska, have some family link to the soil beneath our feet.

Holland, Nebraska is a half hour south of Lincoln, where a group of Hollanders from Oostburg migrated when much of the nation was moving west for new prospects. 

    Land was cheap because Abraham Lincoln had instituted the Homestead Act in 1862, amidst the horrors of the Civil War, to attract families to the great frontier west. Both churches—Bemis, South Dakota, and Holland, Nebraska--and their supporting communities grew out of the homesteading visions of Oostburgians because the “western movement” was so strong it captured even those who hadn’t been here long.