Building Churches, Building Communities (Origins 42-2)

The spring 2025 issue of Origins magazine is in the works. Here is a free article from the Fall 2024 issue.

Peter Bulthuis tells the story of Dick Veenendaal, a Dutch immigrant to Canada in the 1930s; after World War II, he helped meet the religious needs of a new wave of Dutch immigrants. (He was my high school geography teacher in high school, a lifetime ago!) From the late 1940s to the late 1950s, Veenendaal and his crew constructed a dozen church buildings for new Christian Reformed congregations in southern Ontario. They also built a Christian school in Woodstock, Ontario. Veenendaal’s company worked with immigrant Dutch Reformed communities to put up the buildings. In the process they not only built churches, but they also built communities.

There are four more stories in the issue:

• Robert Swierenga sheds light on an overlooked part of the story of Holland, Michigan, describing the lives of the small number of African Americans who found their way there from the 1840s, when it was a Dutch immigrant colony, to the post-World War II years, when a still small but more permanent, African American community emerged in the area around Holland.
• In part three of a series, Marcia Lagerwey continues the story of her parents, Wilma and Walter. During World War II, Walt was in Europe and Wilma at home in the United States with their young son Wally. In part three we learn something about what Walt did during the war, but we learn more about what he felt and thought about his experiences. We learn about how his time in the army, away from his Dutch Reformed home community, challenged and changed him, experiences that occasionally led to conflict with Wilma.
• Janet Sheeres tells the story of Geertruij Marcus, a Dutch immigrant woman uprooted in many ways. She came as part of a Dutch Reformed family. But, like thousands of other women, she found a new home in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, including becoming a “plural wife.”
• I tell the story of the “Calvin Seminary Dames,” a club for the wives of seminary students, founded in 1927. Along with that, I tell the story of the story of my mother, a Seminary Dame in the 1960s. (This article expands on a couple of blog posts I did a few years ago here in Origins Online.)
• Finally, I review Village Talk: A Country Merchant’s Memoir and Folk History (2023), edited by Michael J. Douma and Robert P. Swierenga. Village Talk was written by Ray Nies (1877–1950), a hardware store owner in Holland, Michigan. It’s a quirky window into the town’s culture and history, depicting a time when the town was evolving from a Dutch immigrant colony to a modern American city.

Enjoy Peter Bulthuis’s story for free! For the rest you’ll need to subscribe (we hope you do) or wait four years until we put them online for free on the “Origins in Print” page of Origins Online. The Spring 2025 issue is in the hand of the layout editor. It will go to the printer in April and should be in the mail in late April.

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William Katerberg is a professor of history and curator of Heritage Hall at Calvin University.