Living with Rivers Netherland Plain Polder Farmers' Migration to and Through the River Flatlands of the States of New York and New Jersey Part I
Living with Rivers Netherland Plain Polder Farmers' Migration to and through the River Flatlands of the states of New York and New Jersey Part I 1 Foreword Esopus, Kinderhook, Mahwah, the summer of 2013 showed my wife and me US farms linked to 1700s. The key? The founding dates of the Dutch Reformed Churches. We followed the trail of the descendants of the farmers from the Netherlands plain. An exci- ting entrance into a world of historic heritage with a distinct Dutch flavor followed, not mentioned in the tourist brochures. Could I replicate this experience in the Netherlands by setting out an itinerary along the family names mentioned in the early documents in New Netherlands? This particular key opened a door to the iconic world of rectangular plots cultivated a thousand year ago. The trail led to the first stone farms laid out in ribbons along canals and dikes, as they started to be built around the turn of the 15th to the 16th century. The old villages mostly on higher grounds, on cross roads, the oldest churches. As a sideline in a bit of fieldwork around the émigré villages, family names literally fell into place like Koeymans and van de Water in Schoonrewoerd or Cool in Vianen, or ten Eyck in Huinen. Some place names also fell into place, like Bern or Kortgericht, not Swiss, not Belgian, but Dutch situated in the Netherlands plain. The plain part of a centuries old network, as landscaped in the historic bishopric of Utrecht, where Gelder Valley polder villages like Huinen, Hell, Voorthuizen and Wekerom were part of.
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