News and History from Heritage Hall
Most people who know that Calvin Theological Seminary and Calvin University have had more than one campus only know about the “Franklin” campus on what is now Martin Luther King Jr. Street. A few know about the “Madison” campus, at the corner of Madison and …
The Spring 2025 issue of Origins is in print and in the hands of subscribers. Here is a free article from the Spring issue. In it, Robert Schoone-Jongen tells the story of the Wispelwey family. It migrated from the Netherlands to the United States in 1910, arriving in …
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 …
In 1917 there was a major debate ongoing among Christian Reformed folk around Prospect Park, NJ. They needed to decide if it was time to establish a Christian high school. Most people in the mainly blue-collar, immigrant community saw education beyond the basics of reading …
“Family stories” can mean a lot of things. For the Spring 2024 issue of Origins, it means two things: stories about families in the literal sense and stories that expand and diversify how we think about the Reformed “family.” This blogpost includes one of those …
The Spring 2023 issue (Volume 41, Issue 1) of Origins: Historical Magazine of the Heritage Hall Archives has been mailed to subscribers. If your not yet a subscriber you can order a copy by emailing Heritage Hall (crcarchives@calvin.edu) or subscribe online. This blog post includes …
On 21 March 1956, my grandparents, Arie and Martha Verhagen boarded KLM flight 603 with their two small children from Amsterdam to New York City. A week earlier they had received visas under the Refugee Relief Act of 1953, allowing their immigration to the United …
The fall 2022 issue of Heritage Hall’s print magazine, Origins, included a story by Jane E. Griffioen. Her book London Street: A Memoir has been read widely by people who grew up in Dutch immigrant communities connected to the Christian Reformed Church. London Street is …
You never know where a story is going to take you. One that I read as a child led me to a digitization project in the Heritage Hall Archives at Calvin University. Now I am working on the collections associated with Albertus C. Van Raalte, …
For the past half year, I’ve been doing re-photography posts on Heritage Hall’s Facebook site. Usually it is two pictures, one from the deeper past and a more recent image, sometimes a photograph I’ve taken. Some of the posts include a story about the congregation, …