Qualla: Foxhol

Foxhol: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Wutsje, CC BY-SA 3.0. Willem Albert Scholten went to Germany in the early 1840s to learn about paint. He came back fascinated by something else entirely: potato starch. The Germans were using it in their dyes, and Scholten could not stop thinking about everything else it might do - thickeners, adhesives, sizing for paper, food. The problem, he decided, was logistics. Potatoes are heavy, water-laden, and not worth shipping far. The factory needed to be where the potatoes already were. In 1842 he opened the Eureka factory in Foxhol, a small village between Groningen city and the peat colonies, on a lake near a canal. From that one decision came a Dutch industrial empire and, eventually, one of the great transatlantic shipping companies of the nineteenth century.

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Image: Wutsje | CC BY-SA 3.0

Foxhol: The Fox Hole

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Donald Trung Quoc Don (Chữ Hán: 徵國單) - Wikimedia Commons - © CC BY-SA 4.0 International.(Want to use this image?)Original publication 📤: --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 19:32, 29 June 2019 (UTC), CC BY-SA 4.0. The name is older than the factory. Foxhol means 'fox hole' in Dutch, first recorded in 1460 as Vossehol. Local lore connects it to Nittert Fox, a Saxon knight said to have been killed here in 1499, but the village name predates the knight by forty years. The earliest inhabitants...

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Image: Donald Trung Quoc Don (Chữ Hán: 徵國單) - Wikimedia Commons - © CC BY-SA 4.0 International.(Want to use this image?)Original publication 📤: --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 19:32, 29 June 2019 (UTC) | CC BY-SA 4.0

Foxhol: Eureka and the Holland America Line

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alf van Beem, Public domain. The Eureka factory took its name seriously. Scholten's instinct about potato starch turned out to be exactly right, and the operation expanded fast. By the end of his career he owned twenty-four factories across Europe, processing not just starch but the whole derivative chain th...

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Image: Alf van Beem | Public domain

Foxhol: The Moluccan Neighborhood

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Dickelbers, CC BY-SA 3.0. In December 1961, Foxhol became the unwilling stage for a small, bitter chapter in postcolonial Dutch history. After Indonesian independence, thousands of soldiers from the South Moluccas - who had served in the Dutch colonial army and who supported an independent Moluccan republ...

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Image: Dickelbers | CC BY-SA 3.0

Foxhol: What Remains

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andre Hosper, CC BY-SA 4.0. The Maranatha church was replaced by the Petrus Church in 1995, and by 2009 only an estimated ten to fifteen Moluccan families still lived in Foxhol. Most had moved on, generation by generation, into the wider Netherlands. The village center was redeveloped in 2010 after the reta...

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Image: Andre Hosper | CC BY-SA 4.0

Foxhol: Aerial View

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cgfwg, CC BY-SA 3.0. From above, Foxhol reads as a long industrial corridor along the Winschoterdiep, with the lake to one side and farmland stretching to the horizon. Tankers and barges still move starch product down the canal. The site of the original Eureka factory is still in operation, a continu...

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Image: Cgfwg | CC BY-SA 3.0