Qualla: Nijkerk

Nijkerk: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Alex Hoekerd from Nunspeet, The Netherlands, CC0. In 1633, the West India Company handed the keys of New Netherland to a 27-year-old from Nijkerk. His name was Wouter van Twiller, and the Nijkerk parish books had recorded his baptism on May 22, 1606. A generation later, his nephew Arent van Curler, also a Nijkerker, would walk into Mohawk country and bargain for the land that became Schenectady. For a Gelderland market town of farmers and tobacco growers, that is an outsized share of the men who shaped seventeenth-century Manhattan, the Hudson Valley, and upstate New York. Nijkerk has never been large. It has simply, repeatedly, punched above its weight.

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Image: Alex Hoekerd from Nunspeet, The Netherlands | CC0

Nijkerk: The Church That Kept Burning

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Atsje, CC BY-SA 4.0. The town's name is literally an explanation: Nieuwe Kerk, the New Church. There was an older chapel here, but it burned in 1221, and the building that replaced it gave the settlement its identity. That replacement also burned, in 1421, and the one after that, and the one after th...

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Image: Atsje | CC BY-SA 4.0

Nijkerk: Tobacco and the Hudson

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Gouwenaar, CC0. By the 1700s, Nijkerk had found its rhythm: it was a port. Ships could reach the Zuiderzee through the Arkervaart canal, and what the ships carried, increasingly, was tobacco. The Veluwe's sandy soil suited the crop, and growers around Nijkerk, Amersfoort, and Wageningen fed leav...

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Image: Gouwenaar | CC0

Nijkerk: The Doctor and the Chickens

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Swarte Kees at Western Frisian Wikipedia, Public domain. Christiaan Eijkman was born here on August 11, 1858. He took his medical training, joined a Dutch military expedition to the East Indies, and ended up running a laboratory in Batavia where men were dying of beriberi - the wasting nerve disease that struck Asian garrisons, prisons...

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Image: Swarte Kees at Western Frisian Wikipedia | Public domain

Nijkerk: A Town of Quiet Famous People

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit ben.fitzgerald on Flickr, CC BY 2.0. The roll continues, oddly long for a place of forty thousand. Henri Nouwen, the Catholic priest whose books on loneliness and grace sold in the millions, was born here in 1932. Bernardus Alfrink, the cardinal who pushed the Dutch church through Vatican II, came from the same stre...

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Image: ben.fitzgerald on Flickr | CC BY 2.0

Nijkerk: From Sea to Lake

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Agnes Monkelbaan, CC BY-SA 4.0. The water that made Nijkerk a port is not the water that is there now. When the Afsluitdijk closed off the Zuiderzee in 1932, Nijkerk's salt sea became the freshwater IJsselmeer, and a later dam carved off the Nijkerkernauw - the narrow lake at the city's edge today. The Arkervaa...

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Image: Agnes Monkelbaan | CC BY-SA 4.0