News and History from Heritage Hall
Bessie Vander Valk was an unlikely candidate to church plant in Cuba. She was from Paterson, New Jersey, and did not speak Spanish. Nonetheless, she felt called to evangelize the island nation despite opposition from her family and home church of Bethel Christian Reformed Church …
The stories of churches and families are intertwined. My grandfather, Frank Visscher, and his family emigrated from the Netherlands in March 1949, arriving in Canada on the RMS Aquitania in early April. He had been a prosperous farmer in the Netherlands. But he wanted land …
Pierre Van Paassen lived a life of contradictions. He was a pacifist who set aside his principles to serve in the Canadian military and later returned to pacifism of a sort. He was a journalist who made up stories and bounced around jobs from Canada …
Tulip Time in Pella, Iowa, seems so innocent in this mid-twentieth century postcard from the E.C. Kropp Co. of Milwaukee, Wisconsin. But was this ethnic festival a sign of something untoward in the American heartland? Were Dutch Reformed “colonies”–as the immigrants themselves called them in …
The current Calvin University and Calvin Theological Seminary campus–named after the “Knollcrest” farm, purchased in 1956–is the fourth for two institutions. Earlier Calvin campuses, going back to 1876, were on William Street, Madison and Fifth, and Franklin Street. This rephotography post focuses on the Madison …
Klaas Niemeijer’s life was typical for an immigrant, and yet quite unique. He was a man on the move, first back home in Europe and then in his new home in America. Niemeijer moved to Germany around 1900 to work in a coal mine and …
June Horowitz’ dad was a lot like the other fathers on Worden Street in the 1920s. He worked hard, invested in his children’s education, and was civically engaged. However, he mowed the lawn on Sundays, an outright anomaly in his predominantly Dutch immigrant neighborhood in …
Garrett Heyns (1891-1969) died five decades before the Calvin Prison Initiative was born, but it is a part of his legacy. Heyns was a Christian educator whose vocation took an unexpected turn in 1937. Things started conventionally enough for the Calvin alum. He was born …
Origins Online? Why? I am a digital person. I have a blog and several social media accounts. But I remember when life was analog. I learned to type on a manual typewriter in the early 1980s. In college I wrote papers and an undergraduate thesis …