Qualla: Veendam

Veendam: Introduction

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Viedz, CC BY-SA 3.0. Holland America Line has christened four of its ships Veendam. The first sailed in 1888. The most recent, retired only in 2020, carried twelve hundred passengers on Caribbean and Alaskan cruises for nearly thirty years. There is something faintly comic, and faintly proud, about an inland Dutch town - 27,000 people, surrounded by farmland, fifteen kilometres from the nearest piece of saltwater - being honoured four times over by a shipping line. But Veendam was never quite the landlocked place it now looks. For most of the nineteenth century it ran a serious merchant fleet, and Lloyd's Register chose it, along with Amsterdam and Rotterdam, as one of its first three offices on the European mainland.

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Image: Viedz | CC BY-SA 3.0

Veendam: Wildervanck's Bog

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit JakobHosp, CC BY-SA 4.0. Adriaan Geerts Wildervanck founded Veendam in 1648 as a peat colony - one of dozens being cut into the great bogs of eastern Groningen during the seventeenth century. His scheme was unusual in one respect. Where most peat colonies followed the standard pattern of a single straigh...

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Image: JakobHosp | CC BY-SA 4.0

Veendam: From Peat to Ocean

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Janwillemvanaalst, CC BY-SA 4.0. Peat made Veendam, and the canals built to ship peat to the cities made it useful for other cargoes when the peat was gone. By the early nineteenth century, Veendam skippers were sailing through the Wadden Sea and out into the North Sea - first along the coast, then across to Eng...

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Image: Janwillemvanaalst | CC BY-SA 4.0

Veendam: The Other Industry

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Niels Elgaard Larsen, CC BY-SA 3.0. Iron and steel killed off Veendam's wooden shipbuilding by the late nineteenth century. The bigger yards moved to Rotterdam. What replaced shipping, on the peat-rich soil left behind by the colonies, was potato starch. The cooperative now known as Royal Avebe traces its origins d...

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Image: Niels Elgaard Larsen | CC BY-SA 3.0

Veendam: The Football Club That Was

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Cgfwg, CC BY-SA 3.0. SC Veendam was founded in 1894, turned professional in 1954, and for most of its life played in the Eerste Divisie - the second tier of Dutch football. Two short seasons in the Eredivisie was as high as the club ever climbed. Their home was a stadium called De Langeleegte, which ...

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Image: Cgfwg | CC BY-SA 3.0

Veendam: People from Here

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit McSmit, CC BY-SA 3.0. Anthony Winkler Prins, born in nearby Voorst but for many years a pastor in Veendam, edited the Winkler Prins - the Dutch general encyclopedia that remained the standard reference work in Dutch households for over a century. Addeke Hendrik Boerma, born in nearby Annerveenschekana...

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Image: McSmit | CC BY-SA 3.0

Veendam: Getting There Again

Sat, 16 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Fantaglobe11, CC BY-SA 4.0. Veendam's railway station closed to passengers in 1953. Freight kept running on the line, but for almost sixty years if you wanted the train you went to Zuidbroek and caught it there. The station reopened in 2011, with passenger service back to Groningen city via Zuidbroek. In 20...

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Image: Fantaglobe11 | CC BY-SA 4.0