Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1998
Citation
Great Plains Quarterly Vol. 18, No. 4, Fall 1998, pp. 349-350
Abstract
How large should an immigrant community be to shed light effectively on the wider immigrant experience? This is a subject of frequent debate. Here is an excellent study of immigration to the American Midwest based on a single person, a Dutch farmer, Ulbe Eringa. And for the better part of the book, Eringa himself speaks through memoir and letter, translated from the Dutch by a daughter.
The narration and reproduced texts recreate Eringa's life story. It begins with his birth in 1866 to a dairy farming family in western Friesland and continues through his early formative years in Calvinist schools and his pitiful teenaged years as an orphaned servant. In 1892, at twenty-six, he migrated to the United States, joining the Dutch farm community of Sioux County, Iowa. Within a year he moved on to better fortune in Bon Homme County, Dakota. Here in 1899 he and his wife, Maaike Rypstra, a fellow lower-class Frisian, became land owners. They also became central players in the community, assisting Frisian chain migrants and supporting the local Dutch Reformed church. Over the next thirty years the Eringas raised six children, increased their land holdings to 640 acres, secured a college education for several of their daughters, and passed the farm on to their only son, Pier. In 1926 the Eringas returned to Iowa to settle in a town, and here in 1949 Ulbe wrote his last known letter. He died a year later.
Comments
Copyright 1998 by the Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska- Lincoln