Leerdam Historical

Leerdam sits on the Lek river in South Holland, a small town in the Alblasserwaard polder region. It was never a major city or a famous port — it was, for most of its history, a market town and glassmaking center. Royal Leerdam Crystal, which the town is still known for, had been producing glass there since the 17th century. When Holland America Line named one of its early fleet ships Leerdam, they were naming it after the kind of Dutch place that Holland America's own passengers knew well: a quiet, careful town where skilled people made things with precision and intention.

The SS Leerdam was one of the small iron steamships that HAL operated in the 1880s on the Rotterdam-New York route. She was built in an era when "steamship" still felt like a modern miracle — when crossing the Atlantic in sixteen days rather than six weeks was genuinely new. She carried emigrants who had never been on a ship before and would never be on one again, making the one crossing of their lives to arrive somewhere they could not entirely imagine before they arrived.

There is a particular Dutch quality to naming a ship after Leerdam rather than Amsterdam or Rotterdam — the preference for the specific over the obvious, for the small town that did its work carefully over the big city that made itself famous. The Leerdam was that kind of ship: not famous, not celebrated, just a well-built vessel doing its work on a difficult ocean. Dutch enough.

— In the Wake editorial

My grandfather was a glassblower in Leerdam. His father had been a glassblower in Leerdam. His grandfather had been a glassblower in Leerdam. The glass factory had been the reason the family stayed in Leerdam for four generations when many of their neighbors had emigrated or moved to Amsterdam. Then the factory reduced its workforce in 1893 and my grandfather found himself with skills that had nowhere to go.

He sailed on the Holland America ship Leerdam — which he found meaningful in the way that people with no other options find things meaningful. The ship named after his town. He arrived in New Jersey in 1894 and made his way to Pittsburgh, where there were glass factories that needed men who knew how to work molten silica. He was employed within a week. He worked in glass for thirty-seven more years, until his hands got too unreliable, and he never stopped talking about how strange it was to leave a town on a ship bearing that town's name, as if the town were waving him off.

He went back once, in 1921, to see what remained. His sister was still there. The glass factory was still there. The ship named Leerdam was long gone by then — he looked it up when he returned to Pittsburgh, found it had been out of service for years. He said that seemed right. The ship had done its job. So had he.

— Pieter H., Pittsburgh, writing about his grandfather, 1967