Dutch Reformer, Institution Founder & Michigan Entrepreneur
Albertus Christiaan Van Raalte was born in 1811 in the Netherlands, was a pillar in the Afscheiding, sat under Groen van Prinsterer, was always running from the law, wrote letters to Abraham Kuyper to not over-work (which council Kuyper failed to apply), led the emigrations to Michigan, helped start Hope College and Western Seminary, and loved him so church polity. To talk about Van Raalte we are joined by the living-legend Robert Swierenga, author of “A. C. Van Raalte: Pastor by Vocation, Entrepreneur by Necessity.”
A stagnant economy, premodern agriculture, and high population growth had led to a sense of hopelessness. Then Enlightenment rationalism and political discontent cast the Dutch Reformed Church adrift in a sea of doubt and uncertainty. This set the stage for the welcome by Dutch liberals of invading French “liberators” in 1795 and the formation of the Batavian Republic, which disestablished the public church. French dominance increased under Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte who established the Kingdom of Holland under his brother Louis in 1804 and made the nation a French vassal state in 1810. The new regime introduced the French Civil Code and modernized an antiquated bureaucracy, bringing with it new taxes and intrusive regulations, such as the first national census, universal military conscription, a civil registry, and other constraints. Young Albertus received the best education the Netherlands could offer in the nineteenth century—parochial day school, Athenaeum, and university. He became an itinerant pastor who planted congregations in the largely rural province of Overijssel. When desperate poverty drove thousands of these Separatists to emigrate to America in the 1840s, Van Raalte himself decided to emigrate and lead his followers to safer pastures. Had he remained in the homeland, as did all but a few of his colleagues, his life would have been comfortable and in familiar surroundings, within his subculture and its routines. Emigrating overseas never entered his mind until midlife, but doing so lifted him to a dynamic role in a period of change in both countries, with different speeds, directions, opportunities, and threats.
The two major Dutch Reformed colonies in the 1840s were those of A. C. Van Raalte in Holland, Michigan, and Rev. Hendrik (Henry) P. Scholte in Pella, Iowa. Van Raalte and Scholte, erstwhile friends in the Netherlands, faced a role reversal in America, and they became rivals, competing for settlers and influence. Pella had the early advantage because Scholte had brought almost nine hundred followers, compared to Van Raalte’s fewer than one hundred. But Scholte’s religious independence and refusal to join the American branch of the Reformed Church, as Van Raalte did, hurt his recruitment efforts. The poverty-stricken Holland colony was isolated and twenty miles from the nearest market towns. But thanks to its harbor, wood products shipped to insatiable Chicago markets paid for provisions and supplies that were brought back on return sailings. Holland’s harbor offered easy sailing to Chicago and other Great Lake ports as far away as Buffalo and even New York City via the Erie Canal. Kalamazoo, fifty-five miles southeast, provided a direct rail connection to New York. Pella in south-central Iowa lay fifty miles from Des Moines, the capitol and nearest large city, and it had no railroad service for twenty years. As a result, it remained for generations a small, market town that serviced farms within twenty miles. Holland lay astride the two most productive agricultural counties in Michigan—Ottawa and Allegan. The Holland area today has five or six times the population of the Pella area. And Holland’s diverse industrial economy far surpasses that of Iowa’s agricultural economy. In the rivalry with Scholte, Van Raalte’s accomplishments became the embodiment of what Scholte had hoped to achieve.
