For Henry and Toni Van De Stroet (ii)

Continued from yesterday.

John Van De Stroet, his son Henry says, used to tell him there was a time when he made more money off the river bluffs than he did on land he could work. In fact, those bluffs may have saved the who;e operation. When, mid-Depression, drought meant no feed could be grown or purchased, John let his sheep graze those bluffs, where they made it through hard times by eating buck brush. When things got worse, he shooed his hogs up there too, where they munched acorns from groves of burr oak that run like a unruly mustache through the hills. When other farmers were dumping livestock, those gorgeous bluffs came through spectacularly.

After the seventh grade, Henry put his pony and buggy away and quit school because there wasn’t enough money to keep the hired man or the half-time help his father had employed when times weren’t so bad. “Well, Henry,” his father told him, “now you’ll just have to work hard as two men,” but he said it in the Dutch language, of course.

So, son Henry did. For most of his life, in fact, Henry’s shoulder has carried a callous the size of an orange from lugging feed baskets in endless repetition from the corn crib to the cattle shed to feed livestock. Today, the county social services might well call that “child abuse”; back then, Henry says, it was a matter of survival. Besides, Henry claims he always loved livestock. What’s more, amid all that lugging, his father wasn’t cracking a whip or sitting in town drinking coffee--his father was hard at work right beside him.

The hills hold the story of Henry's own great love. In the late 40s, Antonia Bronkhorst, with her family, swapped life in the Netherlands for a farm about a mile or so north of the Van De Stroet home place, up in the bluffs. He saw her in church, where she played the organ while his little brother Garrett pumped air through the bellows. When things between Henry and Toni started warming up, he’d head up to her place to pick her up, then return down the hill to his dad’s farm, the two of them aboard the horse he’d ridden up on. “Was I sore!” Toni will tell you, giggling. Not sore enough to mind.

Before they were married, John Van De Stroet bought the farm place across the road for the two of them, his eldest son and new wife. Early on the day of the wedding, January 2, 1952, the two of them went over to that house and put wood in the stove so when they’d return, on their honeymoon, so to speak, the new place would be comfy. And it was. Henry says his father used to say he didn’t put his money in the stock market because he wanted to invest in something he could walk on.

Really, it’s no wonder the Van De Stroet family hasn’t left the peninsula. Today, Henry’s siblings are as plentiful as pheasants in the place where the Big Sioux takes a wild swing east. Tillie Van De Stroet Zylstra and her husband live a mile or so south and a bit west of the home place, up top the bluff on the South Dakota side. Cora Van De Stroet Van Beek was Henry and Toni’s neighbor to the east, just a mile or so from Fairview, on the Iowa side. Albertha Van De Stroet Kampen lives just a bit south of Newton Hills (SD) State Park. Mace Van De Stroet and his family live right there on the bottomland on the corner where the river decided to bend east. Gilbert Jo Van De Stroet, the first of the family to be born in a hospital (the others were born at home), lives on the home place. Betty Van De Stroet Zomermaand lives just a mile north of Inspiration Hills. Garrett, who died several years ago, was the only sibling to leave the land.

Gilbert’s son Jerome lives on the house they made sure would be warm when they returned from their wedding. The neighborhood's filling up with a new generation of Van De Stroets putting down their own roots along the river.

And even though Henry and Toni, now retired, live in Rock Valley, they still get out there to the hills once in awhile. Every winter he’s been in town, Henry has been putting out box traps to catch what he can of Rock Valley’s burgeoning rabbit population before they terrorize too many town gardens. He catches them live, then totes them out to the bluffs, where he lets ‘em go. Midwinter, the coyotes probably need a little sport. As long as he’s out there, he stops in Canton for a cup of coffee with his buddies.

It’s quite a story really, and quite a place—hands down, the most beautiful land in the county. It’s no wonder so many Van De Stroets stayed there on that oddly shaped chunk of land someone, long ago, called Settlers Township.