Edam Historical

Edam is a small town in North Holland, about twenty kilometers northeast of Amsterdam, situated on the former Zuiderzee. For most of its history it was a market town — canals, a weigh house, a cheese market where farmers brought their round, red-waxed wheels from the polders every Friday. By the time Holland America Line named one of its ships after Edam in the 1880s, the town's cheese was already internationally famous. In America, "Edam" meant a red ball of Dutch cheese long before it meant anything else.

This was, in its way, a useful marketing fact. Dutch immigrants arriving in New York on a ship called the Edam were arriving on a ship named after something Americans recognized. The distance between Rotterdam and New York was already enormous in the 1880s — in time, in cost, in cultural gap. A familiar name was a small comfort.

The SS Edam was one of the fleet of small iron steamships that Holland America operated on the Rotterdam-New York route during the expansion years of the 1880s. She carried emigrants and cargo and did the steady, unglamorous work that built the line into what it became. She was not remembered for any single dramatic event. She was remembered, if at all, as the ship named after the cheese. That is its own kind of legacy — the ship whose name everybody knew, even if they didn't know the ship.

— In the Wake editorial

My great-grandmother used to say they came over on the cheese ship. She meant the Edam. Her family had emigrated from Friesland in the mid-1880s — my grandmother calculated it as 1884 or 1885, based on when the oldest child was born in Michigan. The crossing was on a Holland America ship, and her mother always called it the cheese ship because that's what her father had called it, and that's what the Americans called it when they arrived: the Edam, like the cheese.

What I know of the crossing comes from a single oral account that my grandmother wrote down in a notebook sometime in the 1950s. Her mother had told her the ship was cold, that the food was unfamiliar, and that she had been allowed, once, to stand at the bow and watch the water. She was eight years old. She remembered the spray and the particular color of the North Atlantic in the fall, which she described as gray-green, the color of the inside of an unripe apple.

They settled in Holland, Michigan — the Dutch went to Holland, Michigan, the way they went everywhere, in communities, where the language worked and the names were familiar. My great-grandmother lived there for seventy-one years. She never went back to Friesland. But she told the cheese-ship story to everyone who would listen, right up until the end, and by then it had been in the family long enough that the crossing felt like something all of us had taken, not just her.

— Inge T., Holland, Michigan, written 2008