While we’re on the subject of the Dutch in the United States and in Iowa particularly, I recalled a postcard I’d seen some time ago: “The Dutch Room” in the National Hotel, Minneapolis, Minnesota. It was one of those sumptuously appointed interiors with linen table cloths and napkins; the sort of place populated by Edwardian “ladies who lunch” and at other times by Bull Moose businessmen transacting the Big Deal du jour. I suspect smoking was acceptable, mostly cigars with coffee and desert. Surely there were those who thought of cigars as desert.

Every town of even moderate size had one of these; the Twin Cities undoubtedly had several. Since we’re talking about the Dutch—which, by the way, often meant German (i.e., Deutsch) rather than a native of the Low Countries—this one came to mind. I had thought one of this type would certainly have been in The Blenheim, Agincourt’s fashionable hostelry built circa 1900, though its potential decor hadn’t crossed my mind until this evening.

Themed restaurants were popular at the turn of the last century, especially if it was “Old World” and affected. East Coast ostentation spread quickly to Cincinnati, Chicago, St Louis, Kansas City, Omaha, anywhere that affluence and conspicuous consumption prevailed. Remember, there was no income tax.

I’d imagined The Blenheim in that category, though very likely scaled down a bit for a town the size of Agincourt, which would have looked to Des Moines and Omaha for models. Agincourt men would certainly have traveled for business, even to Minneapolis and Chicago, and brought back stories of fabulous food and elegant decor; they might even have formed stock companies to replicate those experiences at home. That’s how I imagined The Blenheim’s beginning.

I though of it in terms of elegant cooking and baking (such as Vandervort’s Bakery, which might have been a supplier of breads and pastries) but also because its kitchen had hidden Tadao Ito, a hyphenated Japanese-American seeking shelter during the Second World War. But that’s another story for tomorrow. The last thing I need right now is another design project. Still, how can I avoid the richness in Agincourt’s narrative that might evolve from such a notion.

All I’ve drawn of The Blenheim thus far has been a second floor plan: rooms on a single-loaded corridor surrounding a two- or three-story skylit court. On the ground level, one of those four sides will open into the Blenheim’s dining room, its answer to elegance, posturing and pretension. Whether its a cozy inner elevation or a glazed facade on The Square could be decided soon.

In the meantime, any ideas for the menu?

PS: While I’m thinking of it, have you ever seen Davenport’s Restaurant in Spokane? More food for thought. Or is it more thought about food?

Perhaps it’s time to reacquaint with Alexis de Tocqueville, that guy you recall from high school U.S. history taught by the basketball coach. No wonder your recollection is foggy. So is mine.

Tocqueville wrote about us when there was sufficient perspective for his observations to have meaning. He was, after all, a European and our revolution (and his) was at least a generation behind them. Tocqueville’s Democracy in America appeared in two volumes in 1835/1840, at the heart of the Jacksonian Era. America was yet in the throes of inventing itself; self-birth has got to be painful. I wonder what parallels might be made between the 1840s and the 2000-teens, which is to say, What would Tocqueville make of us now?

The image above isn’t some family reunion of the late-summer sort, siblings sipping beers while cousins cavort in the late afternoon stillness and heat. This is something else; something troubling that Tocqueville would have noted. This is a picture of democracy still being born.

Leith is a town with sixteen inhabitants (according to the 2010 census) situated in Grant County in south-central North Dakota; a place where real estate goes begging and it’s a buyers market. Enter the American Nazi Party, intent on establishing a “White’s Only” enclave—it would soil the word “community” to have used it in this context—by snarfing up all the properties available for literally pennies. North Dakotans are hardy people; isolation and extreme weather have made us that way. Remember a few years ago when Rand-McNally published a U.S. atlas that neglected to include North Dakota? That sort of treatment can make you cranky. There’s a wide streak of cantankerousness hereabouts that 1) demands its Second Amendment Rights, while simultaneously 2) clinging to boldly Socialist institutions like a state-owned bank and a state-owned mill and elevator, all the while not seeing any conflict inherent in these contradictions.

Now, I don’t think Agincourt is ripe for a similar take-over. But I do hope there might be a comparable independence among its citizens. And that its patterns of association and assembly would be worthy of Alexis de Tocqueville’s discerning eye and discriminate pen.

Homecoming and its Cohorts

Tocqueville was captivated by the tendency of Americans to associate at the drop of a pin. We form, reform and unform, cluster and scatter with such rapidity that sociologists are hard-put to keep track, let alone take stock. In a typical year in Agincourt, how many gatherings will have brought together people variously of like mind and similar intention? My friend Howard needs to write about some of these. Consider:

• High School Homecomings and Reunions (either year-specific or “all-school”)
• National holidays that are community oriented, such as Memorial Day, the Fourth of July/Independence Day, Labor Day (despite the anti-union sentiment so prevalent today), and
• National holidays that are more family oriented, like Thanksgiving
• Religious holidays like Easter and Christmas (despite its secularization); but where do you put New Years?
• Purely local holidays, like Founders’ Day on October 25th (celebrating the incorporation of Agincourt as well as the actual Battle of Agincourt, for which the town is named)
• Elections (local, state and national) that bring us out as “party animals” of a different sort
• School graduations (grade, high and college)
• Pageants
• Anniversaries (personal, i.e. birthdays and weddings; and those of businesses and institutions), especially those ending in a zero or two (50th, 100th and 150th anniversary celebrations)
• Cultural events, like sport, music, theater, art, etc.
• Protest, like the folks converging on Leith, to say that it is both American and Un-American to form a community of like-minded individuals and to protest that exclusionary process

What have I forgot? And how should we prioritize them for treatment in the narrative?

This week my friends Dave Pence (a.k.a. Diesel Dave) and Elizabeth Eiseloeffel celebrate the sesqui-centennial of the Eisloeffel family farm near East St Louis, Illinois. Congratulations and many happy returns for a rare survivor among genuine family farms in the 21st century world of agribusiness. I’m not buying the argument that enormous scale is the only way for growing stuff to make a buck. Kudos to the Penciloeffels and their families—for persistence, if nothing else.

From the growing folio of pix on Dave’s facebook© page, my mouth has begun to water, for there is clearly a banquet of epic proportion in the making. I can almost smell the pies from here. All of which fits nicely in the madness of the moment: This is just one of the many sorts of “re-union” that beg to be incorporated in the Agincourt story. Do you suppose Dave and Elizabeth will let us “borrow” their story? [The pic above, by the way, is an unauthorized filching from his FB page.]

The story will either be appended here or as a continuation in version 1.something.

There are as many ways to re-unite as there are relationships between and among us.

I’m writing this at O’Hare airport in Chicago, waiting for the return flight home and still reflecting on last night’s festivities at Mama Luigi’s restaurant, venue for my fiftieth high school reunion. I’d been too shy to attend the tenth and was still reluctant to be at the twentieth, so soon after my father’s death (and all that that had entailed). I thought I’d been dis-invited to the thirtieth—except that there hadn’t been one, so no harm, no foul.

When the fortieth was announced, I ponied up the requisite shekels but promptly forgot to note the date on my calendar [yeah, like I really have a calendar]. So, a week after the event, I’d missed another one. I vowed the fiftieth would not be unattended, and my surgery in June only stiffened that resolve.

Everyone knows that birth months are each assigned a semi-precious stone, in the way that each house of the zodiac has its sign, grouped in cycles of fire, water, earth and air. I’m “earth” but you can see that a half mile away.

Wedding anniversaries also have their symbolic assignation for gift-giving, though I only know a few of the biggies: paper, wood, tin, for example, representing the 1st, 5th and 10th. But did you know there is an unspoken theme, a hidden agenda attached to each decennial gathering of your high school class? Here’s what I’ve gleaned from my sources:

• TEN: The tenth, given our age approaching the late 20s, is guaranteed to focus on possessions; the things that measure our achievement. [For “achievement” read “acquisitiveness”.] “Oh, really? Just the one boat?” the debate team captain snarks to the football quarterback.
• TWENTY: By the twentieth, with each of us in our late 30s, the bloom is off the rose. Kids are essentially grown and gone; the nest is borderline empty, while eyes and possibly other body parts have begun to wander. The theme is divorce. “Really, she took you for that much?” the car wash manager says to the corporate VP.
• THIRTY: Now in our late 40s, those same body parts have began to fail and even fall off, the thirtieth—the one I missed—dwells uncomfortably on medical procedures: “Well, as long as they were in there, the gall bladder ought to go, too,” the overly-tanned candidate for carsinoma says to the hypochondriac.
• FORTY: All the foregoing stress of acquisition and infidelity probably contributed to those operations and, time not being on our side, the late 50s may have thinned the ranks. I wonder at the fortieth—another one I missed—how many times you heard “No one told me! He/She was so young,” grateful you weren’t asked to be a pallbearer.
• FIFTY: The fiftieth, I’d been warned, could evidence the onset of senility, given that the gray cells are beginning to catch up with all the other deterioration. Listen, my friend had further distressed me, for the telltale signs of failing recollection: “I wasn’t in ‘The Diary of Anne Frank,’ you idiot. That was [fill in the blank],” or even “Who the hell are you?” or, offhandedly, “Is this the right room?”

Happily, Saturday night’s event bore no resemblance to that last one. And I haven’t been told what to expect at the sixtieth—if it even happens, due to our shrinking numbers. So I’ll get back to you. But in the meantime, let me tell you what did happen during six hours Saturday night.

My exchanges with people were proportionate to the degree of interaction we had had in school. 1) I saw and spent considerable time with the handful of folks who had meant the most to me during those fateful, fitful years; I loathed high school and barely survived it, thanks to their good company and extended grace. 2) I planted a seed to regain contact with some who were not there or who had graduated a year before or after me. 3) I learned that many had, in fact, gone prematurely to their reward and, sadly, that I had not been able to say goodbye and share my gratitude for what they had meant to me, with or without their express intention to mean anything at all. 4) Erik and I got reacquainted and I built a bridge with his wife Donna. 5) I danced with Flo, while she thanked me for teaching her about Frank Lloyd Wright and how to draw 3-D. 6) I received an honorary gift from my dear friend Stella and equally valuable intangibles from good friends and bare acquaintances, again whether they knew it or not. All things considered, I was accepted and excepted, each with equanimity. I would have it no other way.

Today, I write these few words for those of you looking into the future, down a longer corridor of time than I can at 68. They do not pass for wisdom; just advice.

And to the memory of Ken “Pookie” Herd, Jerry Rasmussen and Wanda Lee Roberts, I miss your presence among us.

Homecoming

You might know this would morph into an episode of “All things Agincourt”.

Reading the biography of Michael Pauluzen Van der Voort (1615-1690), among the earliest settlers of New Amsterdam, I’ve learned that the name (and its many variants) probably comes from the Voort River in the Netherlands, but also that (reading between the lines) it more generically refers to someone from far away. Odd.

Odd because I chose a name that means something similar for another character created for a different part of the story. Urrutia (oo–ROO–shuh) is a surname from the Basque Country of northern Spain and far, far southwestern France. I’ve been fascinated by the Basques for decades and chose their city of Donostiako (San Sebastian in Spanish) as the fishing port where Anson Tennant was brought when he nearly went down with the Lusitania. Graxi Urrutia was the nurse who cared for him in the convent hospital where he recovered—physically, because he still suffered from amnesia until the first shots of the Spanish Civil War were fired. For Picasso fans, you’ll recall “Guernika”, his editorial statement about the war. Guernika is a Basque village.

Oh, by the way, Urrutia means “not from these parts”.

Ultimately, Anson (though he didn’t know his name) married Graxi and they spawned three children: Aitor (Hector), Mikel, and Alize. That story has been told in part before and will, no doubt be told again, since Anson did return home and live the last twenty years of his life commuting between Agincourt and his wife’s family in Euskal Herria. Adds another dimension to being “bi-coastal” doesn’t it? But I digress.

When Piet Vandervort arrived in Agincourt (date yet to be determined) he was certainly “from far away”. But his story causes me to rethink my defaults: patterns that I choose, not because they are prevalent in my own life, but because I wish they had been. Dr Bob will tell you that The Project, as we call it, has enabled me to work through a wide variety of issues from childhood, several of them focused on continuity (or its absence).

Take a local institution like Adams’ Restaurant, for example. Maud Adams (Mrs Benjamin Franklin Adams) had become a widow in 1889 and, lacking any financial resources, was supported by friends in the establishment of a restaurant. The image of Adams Restaurant was so vivid, and the profile of Mrs Adams strong, that the establishment survives today. The Same can be said for Anton Kraus and his foundry: his great-granddaughter Tony Benedetti is CEO of the successor firm today. There are other examples of similar continuity, but I suspect that they would be more rare in real life.

So, now there is Vandervort’s Bakery and Piet Vandervort, whose family may not wish to have been successive owners of the place. It may be that the strong reputation of Piet’s product lives on but the business has passed to others. And that story, perhaps opens doors for a different, more difficult narrative than is my default.

Whatever I may be these days, whatever my deficiencies, I am not without perspective.

One of the underlying ideas of “The Agincourt Project” has been the notion that we look at a building—any thing, really—in a multi-layered, many-faceted way. I haven’t written about this before and I’m hesitant to bring it up today. But I do now largely because it provides some insight to the way my mind works; I can’t speak for yours. I call this “Object, Window, Mirror, Lens”. This nifty graphic was part of my presentation in Bozeman last week.

Here’s how it works.

Let’s consider, as an example, a building many of you will recognize: The Sagrada Familia in Barcelona by Antoni Gaudí. Conjure up an image from your storage banks; Gaudí’s is such a powerful conception that I don’t need to put a picture here. Whether you’ve chosen an exterior or interior, overall view or detail, the Sagrada Familia is an architectural object. It has three dimensions (which my photo here certainly would not!) and your experience of it in real time would add the fourth dimension. It has a sense of structure; it has proportion; it has surface ornamentation and detail. It can be described as an entity in the history of art and architecture with sophisticated, PhD-approved terminology. This is actually much the same sort of physical description used in the preparation of a nomination to the National Register of Historic Places.

The Sagrada Familia is an OBJECT and it can be described objectively.

Now take a step back from Gaudí’s masterpiece, the focus of his intuitive powers from 1885 until death in 1926 (the fault of a tram or taxi driver, as I recall). The building exists in a physical, socio-economic and cultural context. Therefore we can use the Sagrada as a WINDOW, a blinkered, framed, partial view into Catalunya at the turn of the 20th century. Gaudí was part of that context, influenced by and influencing it in myriad ways. His friend and client Eusebio Güell was there. As was his colleague/collaborator Josep Puig i Cadafalch. As was the Eixample neighborhood that surrounds it. So we use the Sagrada as a tool to understand the close working relationship of designers, clients and craftspeople in the collaborative creative process in 1900 Barcelona.

Whatever you think of Gaudí and the Sagrada Familia—though this part works better if you happen to like it—the church is a MIRROR reflecting each of us who observes it; that is, I see reflected in it some of the things that have interested me over the decades. In Bozeman I spoke of its structural system of branching columns (which were, significantly, not in place when I was in Barcelona more than twenty years ago). Lift your hand and hold an imaginary waiter’s tray and immediately understand how intuition and analogy can work to our advantage as designers. I also happen to be fascinated by fractals, and while I see the physics principle of fractals operative in Gaudí, I do not for a moment believe that Gaudí himself even knew of fractals—or for that matter whether the domain of physics had even conceived them at that time. I doubt it, which suggests that the fractals principle I perceive in the Sagrada is a reflection of my own personal agenda, my defaults. You will see/ be attracted by/ project onto it other ideas that interest you.

Ultimately, Gaudí and his Sagrada Familia are a LENS which enables us to sense the fiber, the entire continental phenomenon that we call Art Nouveau, Jugendstil, Stile Floreale/Liberte, Secession, or whatever other nationalistic variant you might prefer. Gaudí becomes a figure comparable with Louis Sullivan (born in the same year, by the way) and is in the same bailiwick as Louis Comfort Tiffany, Koloman Moser, Reginald Knox, Eliel Saarinen and a bunch of other folks whose work characterizes an entire era and nearly a quarter of the Earth’s surface.

This was the point I tried to make to an audience of architects in Montana. This is the point I’m trying to make in Agincourt, Iowa.

Please tell me if it makes any sense.

I’m just trying to help.

During the first Agincourt seminar, I introduced the community as having been founded circa 1853 (shortly after a treaty with the Sac & Fox people opened a large portion of northwestern Iowa to settlement) and incorporated as a municipality in 1857, to conveniently anticipate a purported 150th anniversary in the fall of 2007.

In 19th century America, however, any town-platting scheme without hope for rail connections to the rest of the World was doomed to failure. The history of westward migration and settlement is founded on real estate speculation: the get-rich-quick intention to acquire a section of cheap agricultural land, anticipating the imminent arrival of a railroad, which itself was yet a stock company whose route was highly speculative and fully capable of being lured in your direction with sufficient incentive (read “cash”). So whoever the as yet unnamed Founders of Agincourt may have been, it is clear that they either knew something and waited for the railroad’s arrival or that they actively incentivised it in their direction.

I had looked at 19th century rail maps of Iowa and the larger Midwest and announced (with little more than opinion) that the Chicago & Northwestern would have arrived at the southern edge of Agincourt’s townsite soon after incorporation. At which point Justin Nelsen raised a confident hand and told us all that “No, this is Milwaukee Road country.” Until that moment, I had no idea that Justin’s other passion was, in fact, railroading. Not the HO-gauge scale modelling sort, but real-time, full-scale trains of the classic era of steam traction, with all its attendant puffing, belching and wheezing. How could I have been so foolish to not know this (about the Milwaukee Road, not Justin’s interest in it)? Suddenly the trajectory of a large portion of community history had been set: a significant component of its infrastructure now had direction.

It’s good to know things and especially valuable to learn what you don’t know or what you thought you knew but were incorrect.

Justin’s knowledge and design ability provided the community with a passenger and baggage-handling facility at the south end of Broad Street, probably a replacement in masonry for an earlier wood station of the 19th century. His design (now, tragically lost) may even have been a third-generation facility. But we also knew that there would have to be a significant development along the railroad’s right-of-way devoted to heavy, clunky, noisy, stinky, volatile things like lumberyards and light industry, not to mention the potential for actual rail facilities, such as roundhouses, repair shops, etc.

With the exception of the early 20th century addition of an interurban line—using the CMStP&P right-of-way, and then diverting to its own station nearer downtown—much of that urban/industrial strip has yet to be considered, let alone designed.

Does anyone want to step up to the plate?

Incidentally, the image above is a photograph of the roundhouse at Nevers, France, taken by Hippolyte-Auguste Collard circa the early 1860s. Isn’t it amazing! Would that Agincourt warranted such a thing.

This has been a curious week; filled, overfilled, crammed even, with feelings—and the desire to not feel at all. The notion of tsunami is clearer than it has ever been.

A situation—a simple question, really—rose early in the week, and the search for an answer revealed a metaphor for my very existence. So, while I cope with it, Agincourt may in fact be my refuge.

Dr Bob warned me about this.

“There’s only two things I hate in this world. People who are intolerant of other people’s cultures and the Dutch.” —Michael Caine’s character Nigel Powers in “Goldmember”

ETHNICITY

Ethnicity in Agincourt’s story has played a minimal role—to date. In naming its Roman Catholic parish, for example, I had avoided several saints’ names because so many of them have nationalistic overtones, as patrons of specific countries; that’s where Ahab came to my aid (as he will to yours, if you’re a pirate or suffer from OCD).

Native Americans (or the happier “First Nation” umbrella used by Canada) figured in the earliest history of the place, used as it was as a seasonal campground for the Sac & Fox people. A burial mound from pre-European settlement interrupted the path of Third Street SE, near the Martin Richard Elementary school. And, of course, our first fifty years were closely connected with the life of Cissy Beddowes, wife of Indian Agent Amos Beddowes and herself a medicine woman of the Sac & Fox. As the friend of Maud Adams and Belle Miller—it’s difficult to think of those two women even being on speaking terms—their triumvirate changed the lives of many 19th century women in the community.

On the first block of North Broad there is Hansa House, home of the old German-American Insurance Co., now less parochially part of the Farm Bureau. Its pedimented front was intended to evoke the narrow slabs of Hanseatic League cities such as Lübeck or Gdansk. A social hall for the Germanic population in this region once occupied the fourth floor, which has since become an apartment (though the aroma of kraut and bier may still permeate the walls and floors). But by and large, Agincourt has been a Yankee town until after the Second World War, with the arrival of ethnicities and races unimagined by the Founders.

Oh, wait, then there’s Vandervort’s Bakery, delicious tip of the Dutch iceberg in these parts.

The Dutch in Iowa

The largest number of Dutch settlers in 19th century Iowa came to Pella in central Iowa and Orange City not far from Agincourt in the northwest. Both were founded by Dutch Protestants seeking religious freedom, which they apparently could not enjoy in The Netherlands. Strange, since I had always thought of the Dutch as among the most tolerant of Europeans: socially conservative, but accepting of other beliefs and behaviors. But the Low Countries in the 19th century were in turmoil. Both Belgium and The Netherlands were culturally bifurcated by religion and politics—Catholic and Protestant, urban and rural, Socialist and its socio-economic antithesis. So it was enticing to imagine some of these folks within the confines of Fennimore county. Which brings us to evidence of Nederlanders hereabouts.

Most recently, of course, Howard has written about Dr Henry Cuijpers, but he came in the early 20th century and there were arrivals long before then.

Vandervort’s Bakery has been at 114 North Broad Street since the 1880s. Family-owned for two or three generations, it operates today under different management, but the recipes are original and still treasured by generations of patrons. I’m told by my friend Howard that the apricot Weertervlaai* is delicious. I’ll ask him to write something up for us and perhaps identify the family’s arrival and from whence they had come. I have a postcard view of the building somewhere.

Several miles northeast of Agincourt, near the county’s northeast corner, in fact, is the village of Grou, a name with connections to Friesland in the Dutch north. That province has its own language, Frisian, which I am told is the European language closest to English in grammar and vocabulary. [Not sure whether that would make it easier or harder to learn. Our son Tjipke Okkema was a Frieslander.] The history of an entire community is more complex and may take more time (and mental gymnastics) to flesh out, given some of the things I’ve said about Grou already (and may have to retract or rationalize).

I enjoy having my cage rattled now and then and being nudged to expand the story in new directions.

*Vlaai is a generic Dutch reference to pie; Weertervlaai, by extension, is a regional variant connected with the town of Weert in Limburg, most Catholic of the Dutch provinces. How that comes to play with the Vandervorts is unexplored territory.