Windmills and Wooden Shoes

by Blair Jaekel

The Town Hall and market square in Groningen, where one may buy anything, from cucumbers to stepladders

For the full distance from Groningen to Zwolle I traveled in the same compartment with three of the most rabid stale air agitators I have ever run afoul of. To make matters worse, one was highly perfumed with a mixture of musk and mint, and wore the nails of his little fingers long—half an inch would not be an exaggeration—as some sort of a mark of caste, possibly borrowed from the Chinese. During the trip they tried to make things as blithe and agreeable for me as possible—although with the opposite intent, judging from several remarks which I finally succeeded in translating—by giving a variety of imitations of various barnyard animals because I guarded one open window with my life.

All through the province of Drenthe the sources of another industry in which little Holland is preëminent may be seen from the car windows—the great peat bogs. Upon peat the Dutch housewife must rely for her fuel, for the coal mines in the Netherlands are next thing to null and void; so the preparation of peat has become at once an art and an industry. Towns and hamlets are named for it—“veen” with an appropriate prefix. It is as indigent to Holland as the wild turkey to the mountains of Virginia. But, instead of striving to eliminate as quickly as possible a very essential natural resource, the Dutch have developed the scientific cultivation of peat and made the vast bogs into almost inexhaustible producers of fuel.

The lighter, more fibrous peat, laagveen, in Dutch—found several feet in thickness in the eastern part of Groningen, all through Drenthe, and even stretching well across the German border—is contrasted with the dry peat, or hoogeveen, underlying a thick layer of clay. In the case of the latter, the layer of clay is removed carefully, the peat is dredged from under it, and what water remains is drained off. The peat is then spread upon the ground and worked by foot pressure until the process, assisted by exposure to the sun, brings it to a certain consistency. It is then cut into convenient lengths, stacked, and allowed to dry. In the meantime the layer of clay has been mixed with sand, replaced, and planted with crops. With respect to the bog peat, the fen is first surrounded with a canal for drainage purposes; also the plant putrefaction is assisted by successive reformations of soil from city refuse, laden with which the peat boats return to the fens.

The bait with which Assen, the capital of the province of Drenthe, should lure the tourist to stop off, if only between trains, is the church of an ancient nunnery suppressed during the Reformation. This relic, with a fragment of the old cloisters still attached to it, has been transformed into Assen’s Town Hall, and forms a part of the adjoining provincial offices erected on the site of the nunnery. The great tumuli, or so-called “giants’ caves,” within half an hour’s drive from Assen, and marked with huge boulders borne down by the glaciers from Scandinavia, are of interest more to the profound archeologist than to the ordinary sight-seer.

Meppel, farther down, is a peat town of no artistic or historical importance, although it is the junction of the peat and the butter routes through the hinterland. From it the traveler may journey up through the butter district direct to Leeuwarden, or he may break through the peat country on another line to Groningen.

Zwolle, the first stop below Meppel, is an attractive town, but with fewer types even than Groningen. Here the familiar windmills and wooden shoes begin to diminish perceptibly in numbers. With its 32,000 inhabitants, Zwolle is but a shade smaller than Leeuwarden. It is the capital of the province of Over-Yssel and was the birthplace of Gerard Terburg, one of Holland’s celebrated seventeenth century wielders of the brush and crayon. But like too many other towns in the Netherlands, Zwolle has been so short-sighted and so remiss in her duty that she has failed to preserve for public appreciation a single example of the work of her most famous son.

The most striking architectural feature of the town is her old Sassen-Poort, or Saxon gateway, the five Gothic spires of which tend to relieve any monotony of city skyline. It stands but a short distance from the station, framed behind a green mat of trees that lends a pleasant contrast to its diamond window shutters of delicate blue and spotless white. The modern stone bridge across the canal just in front, although forming rather an inappropriate approach to the old tower, is one of the most artistic in all Holland.