Veendam Historical

Veendam is a town in the province of Groningen, in the northeastern Netherlands — flat country, far from the coast, built on a canal system that was dug in the 17th century specifically to transport peat from the bogs to the rest of Europe. The name means Peat Dam. It is not a romantic name by most standards, but it is an honest one: the town existed because the peat existed, and the peat was worth money because half of Northern Europe used it for fuel. Veendam grew, prospered, and eventually found itself on the roster of Dutch place names that Holland America Line considered worth carrying across the Atlantic.

The first Veendam was one of the ships in HAL's expanding fleet of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. She carried the name that would eventually pass through four ships, the last of which — the S-class MS Veendam — sailed until 2020. That four-generation span covers a century of Dutch-American maritime history, from the era of iron steam ships and immigrant crossings to the era of air conditioning and Indonesian buffets and Alaska glaciers. The first Veendam could not have imagined the fourth. But she established the name.

The peat bogs of Groningen are mostly drained now — turned into farmland or nature reserves, the old extraction economy long replaced by other things. Veendam is still there. The name still carries the word for peat, even though the peat is gone. Names outlast what they're named for. That is especially true on ships.

— In the Wake editorial

We have a fragment of a letter in the family, written by my great-great-grandmother Trijntje in 1898, addressed to her mother in Groningen. It begins: "We have arrived. The crossing took fifteen days and I was sick for eleven of them. The ship was called the Veendam which made us laugh because we had not come from Veendam but close enough." Close enough appears to have been the family's philosophy on most things.

They settled in Grand Rapids, Michigan, where the Dutch community was substantial and the Dutch Reformed Church was present and the language could be maintained in the first generation and forgotten in the second. Trijntje's grandchildren spoke English. Her great-grandchildren don't speak Dutch at all. But the letter fragment remains, in her handwriting, and the information remains: she crossed on the Veendam, she was sick for eleven of fifteen days, and she found the name funny. That is more than most people know about how their families arrived.

The crossing she made in 1898 is 126 years ago as I write this. The ship she sailed on is 126 years gone. The letter exists because someone put it in a box instead of throwing it away, and someone else found the box and recognized what it was. This is how history mostly works: things survive by accident, and what survives is not necessarily what mattered most but simply what someone thought to keep.

— Sara D., Grand Rapids, written 2024