Michigan - Day 9 - Holland

Dutch Treat Campground, Zeeland
Tuesday, 9 July 2019

On our early morning walks, I saw a rabbit that Dexter almost saw, but this rabbit froze in place so thoroughly that, though Dext took several good looks at it, he finally decided it wasn't real and lost interest.  I looked back after a bit, and that rabbit was still sitting frozen, though I'm certain it was a real rabbit.  Smart, though, to know it's the chase that's the attraction as much as the prey.

I also saw 2 families of sparrows, with the young fledged but still not on their own.  Very sweet to watch.

today's route

I had to plan the start of our day around the 9:00 opening time of the CVS Pharmacy in Wyoming that was filling a prescription for me.  While the dogs and I were waiting, we walked around the neighborhood a bit - nice area (lots of sidewalks, which I'm a fan of).

Then we drove down the road a ways to the next suburb of Kentwood, to the PetsMart there - I still needed to get a new name tag for Gracie's collar, and they fortunately had a working machine.  So now she's labeled.

The drive west
As we left the area, going back through Wyoming we were driving right along the city limits, which I could see by the Grand Rapids City Limits signs at major intersections to the right.

We passed a Kellogg's plant - a large one.

I saw a business named "Doody Calls" - and their slogan: We Scoop Poop!  (The exclamation mark is theirs.)

We passed what looked just like a very large castle, just before we were getting on the highway.  I stared as much as I could, with the traffic, but I couldn't find a sign to tell me what was going on.  It looked like it was under construction, and my guess was a casino. 

(photo courtesy of apartments.com)

This photo is copyright protected but I thought maybe if I said it came from apartments.com they would allow me to use it.  After all, their business is renting apartments.

And it turns out that's what this is - a huge apartment building (huge, as in 550+ apartments), with rents starting at $750 for a tiny studio with loft.  It's at such a convenient location, if you work in Grand Rapids, that with that outlandish exterior the place will probably be successful.

I didn't take the highway route, but instead went along a state highway so I could see some of the country.  I went through Hudsonville, "Michigan's Salad Bowl," they say.  In that area, I could see cornfields and also some other kinds of crops, presumably vegetables, though we weren't close enough for me to see clearly.

In Zeeland, I saw a large facility for Herman Miller, the chair people.  This is their HQ.

Almost next door I saw an equally large facility for Howard Miller, a clock company, also based in Zeeland.

Neither online mapping program would let me go through downtown, so I figured it out for myself.  Very clean, neat town, with banners downtown (old fashioned buildings) proclaiming: Feel the Zeel Z!

I saw a billboard advertising a restaurant in Holland called the Alpenrose, with a picture of a server wearing traditional costume.  The message read: "Casual dining - no lederhosen required."

In Holland, I got lost trying to find the local windmill, which is what I wanted to see.  It was odd - the town's got lots of signs saying the windmill is thisaway, over and over, and then suddenly I was abandoned.  No sign saying turn here to the windmill.  Just suddenly no more signs.  So I turned around and went back and again, more signs saying this way to the windmill and, again, no signs saying turn here.  Just suddenly no more signs.  I finally had to stop (miles away) in a factory parking lot and get back on the internet and look at the map of the town and figure it out on my own.  Turns out the main problems were that the sign (all one of it) was inconspicuous and that sign called this place something different than all the other signs had called it, so I didn't know the windmill is what the (one) sign was directing me to.

(photo courtesy of rmnetwork.org)

While I was wandering back and forth, I passed the First United Methodist Church and was surprised at the architecture.  Once again, this photo is copyright protected, but I hope these folks don't mind since I'm crediting their artwork.  I've seen a lot of Methodist churches in my life, and this one looked different to me.

But the rest of Holland is the usual mix of original Dutch-style building and more modern standard American-style.  Holland calls itself Tulip City and for the last 90 years has held an annual Tulip Time festival in May when their 5,000,000 tulips bloom.  They're intended to celebrate Holland's history of settlement by Dutch immigrants in the mid-1800s.  (And incidentally, Holland is also home of the church that started the What Would Jesus Do? bracelets in 1987.)

Windmill Island Gardens
I came to see the only working Dutch windmill in the US.

De Zwaan (the swan)

This structure is 125' up to the top of the blades.  There are 7 levels, each with windows.  The lower 3 levels are built of Michigan brick, but all the upper part of the structure is original.  This particular windmill was built in Norway in 1761, but some of the pieces came from other mills so are even older.  It was moved to The Netherlands in 1884 and, as you can see below, moved to its present location in 1964.

side 1

side 2

The Netherlands once had more than 8,000 windmills, but over time they fell into disrepair or were sold out of the country, leaving only 900 by the 1960s.  To hang on to what they had left, the government prohibited exporting any more windmills, which is why these folks in Holland (MI) had to negotiate for this one.  One of the conditions was that it continue to be a working windmill, and it is.  They also agreed to educate visitors, and they do.

This windmill was used as a lookout in WWII and has bullet holes in the vanes from being shot at.

windmill vane used for 100 years

close-up of holes in vane

It was also used to save at least one life: 2 Dutch boys helped a Jewish boy hide from pursuing soldiers.  The 3 boys climbed to the very top - the 7th floor, which actually doesn't have a floor, just rafters.  The boys lay along the rafters to hide from the soldiers, who didn't want to climb that high to look for them but shot upwards trying to reach them.  The boys stayed on the beams all night to be sure the soldiers had gone before leaving.  The mill people know this because not long ago, one of the visitors to the mill told them this story, saying he was one of the Dutch boys hiding a friend.

Dutch miller certificate

The current miller, Alisa Crawford, is the only Dutch-certified miller in America.  Not surprisingly, there's no miller training program in the US, so she went to the Netherlands to learn.  And incidentally also had to learn Dutch because the final exam was in Dutch.  Of the 35 taking the test, she scored the highest, over the 34 Dutch men also taking the test, maybe because she had to work extra hard to do the program anyway.  She's very proud of that plaque.

The 3 lower brick-wall floors of the windmill are laid the way they'd be laid in Holland, which allows both for weight-bearing and for waterproofing.

waterproofing

load-bearing lay

Laying one row with the length forward and the next row with the width forward helps carry more weight - and these bricks are carrying 70 tons above them.

Laying them on a slant with the lower end outward and the upper end inside keeps water from seeping into the building - important when you're dealing with grain and flour.  I understand visiting masons are impressed with this brick-laying job.

I should say right now that I didn't understand some of the things our tour guide explained so clearly and fluently.  Though the mill wasn't working when we were there, there was still a lot of noise, there were 15 or 20 of us in our tour group, and though we were almost standing on top of each other by the 5th floor, the mill wasn't built for acoustics.

looking down on the bag & shoe

This first floor is where the farmers would drive their wagons into the building, stop to unload their sacks of grain, then drive out their unloaded wagons.  That bag in the photo below left holds 2 50-pound bags of grain at a time, which are pulled up to the top floor, as you can see in the right-hand photo.


The shoe is for the customer to send instructions and money up to the miller - there were no staircases originally and the miller didn't want to be climbing up and down ladders just to get basic info from the customer.




The second floor is for sifting, which the intern on the left is doing.  The flour used to come down the chute shown on the right, but not now (though I didn't understand how they do it now).  For some reason I also didn't understand, the USDA says they need to have 3,300 pounds of flour in the bin before they begin the sifting.  (Huh?)  This intern, by the way, is the grandson of the first miller who worked here when the mill was rebuilt.

They can sift 250-300 pounds an hour.  They remove the coarse fiber but leave in the fine fiber and wheat germ.  It's all natural flour with no preservatives, so they keep it in a freezer until it's sold, and recommend the buyers do the same.

The third floor is for milling and where the miller tests the quality of the grind while it's being done.  She may lower the millstones to get a finer grind, for instance.  To start that process, she goes to the 4th floor, where she has access to the wheel.

the wheel

She stands on the rim of the wheel, which is maybe 8' tall, and walks on the spokes to make it turn: one full turn of the wheel gets 1" movement in the cap above which moves the blades into the wind.  They rotate 360° but the pitch is fixed.  There are 28 rollers under the cap which allow the blades to turn and there's a come-along to connect it all.

looking up to the cap & a blade

Each of those blades is 6' wide and 40' long, and together they weigh a total of 6,600 pounds.  The weight is all on one side of the mill (though not always on the same side because of rotating them for the wind).  Imagine the engineering that went into creating these structures - and this one is well over 200 years old.  Well, this particular structure is only about 50 years old, but all the pieces are the original ones, put together in the original way they were 240 years ago.  Amazing.

The position of the blades had meaning for the town this was originally near.  When they were in an X-shape, it meant the miller wasn't working.  During WWII, they used the position of the vanes to convey messages around the area.

Along the lower edge of the blades is some furled canvas.  The blades will move without the canvas (which seems impossible to me, but they say so), though they need 20-30 mph winds to operate the mill.  At times while the grind is in progress, the wind will die down, which is when the miller comes out, climbs up to each blade and unfurls the canvas to try to catch more of the wind.  She actually climbs up there and hangs on to the blades and fools around with the canvas.  What's more, she never leaves the canvas up overnight and goes back up again to furl the canvas.  Safety belt or not, that's a serious head for heights.

structural beams

There are 8 of these beams shown on the right up here on the 4th floor.  The wood was imported to Holland from Norway because Dutch trees aren't strong enough for this job.  That's part of a person in the far lower left of that photo, which may give you an idea of the scale of this thing.

Note too that there are stairs.  Originally there was only a ladder for the miller to climb up and down, and up and down, all day long.

And now we're on the 5th floor, the highest they'll let us go.  This is where the millstones are.

demonstration set

wooden gears

The wooden gears to the left are part of the apparatus that moves the millstones and sets their angle for the grind fineness.  To the left of the gears is one of the chutes through which the unmilled grain falls to be fed between the millstones.  This mill originally used two sets of millstones and could (and did) grind two batches of grain at the same time.  Now they're just using one set.

The right-hand photo above shows where one set of millstones was but what's there now is for demonstration purposes; the set they use now were under wraps on the opposite side of this room, in the process of being cleaned.  Periodically, the miller has to clean the grooves in the stones to get out flour or grain that's become packed in.  That photo shows where the wooden chute funnels the grain between the stones.  The capstone weighs 1,500 pounds; the bedstone weighs 1,000 pounds.  They were originally carved of Belgian bluestone from Germany, though I don't know if the stones they use now came from there.  They also have to be sharpened now and then, which seems like an odd idea to me.

The millstone in the photo on the left isn't in use any more.  I took this so you can see, if you blow it up, the grooves in the stone that grind the grain.  Both stones have these grooves, and the bedstone stays stationary while the top rocker stone rotates and does the grinding.

This mill will grind about 12,000 pounds of grain a year, mostly Michigan Winter White Wheat, but also corn into cornmeal and corn grits.  They sell various ground products but were all out of cornmeal when I was there, which is what I wanted.  Just as well because I don't really have room in my freezer to keep it.

They didn't just bring this thing across the world and plunk it down any old place.  Instead, they dug canals and landscaped this area to provide the right setting for it.

picturesque, huh?

as it might have looked before

That photo on the right looks over a swamp filled with cattails and Red-winged Blackbirds and other critters that like that milieu.

the sluice gate

explaining authentic flood control measures here

sign on the door of the green house, left

village re-creation

explains posthouse on right

this posthouse replica is used as the visitor center

just a sample of some of the landscaping

a Dawn Redwood

explains the redwood

I understand these grounds are stunning when the tulips are blooming.

They've been certified as an official Monarch Butterfly Waystation.

We were told that windmills have been around since the 12th century, though I'm wondering which 12th century, because surely people used windmills much longer ago than that.  Maybe they mean windmills set up like these, which are no small feat.

The Netherlands were happy to adopt them to pump water off their land, because so much of the country is below sea level.

Back on the road (sort of)
Leaving Holland behind, we traveled on to Zeeland.  Hard for a stranger to tell much difference, but the folks who live around here think there is one.  When I ask people in a store in Holland, for instance, if they live there they'll say well, they live in Zeeland.  And the other way around.  Both attractive towns, one right next to the other these days, though I'm sure there was originally a greater separation.  And then to our campground.