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ment of both. Every achievement in American communities worth recording has woven into it the influence of the printing press. Pella was fortunate in having as its first editor Mr. Scholte. In association with Edwin H. Grant, February 1, 1855, he founded the Pella Gazette. The Des Moines Slur had suspended and the Gazette was just then the most western paper printed in Iowa, except on the Missouri slope. The paper was independent in politics, but leaned toward the new, or republican party, Mr. Scholte afterwards sitting as a delegate in the convention that nominated Abraham Lincoln. In 1860 Henry Hospers founded the Weekblad, a paper printed in the Holland language, which he sold in 1870 to H. Neyenesch, its present editor. In 1865 C. S. Wilson founded the Pella Blade.
One of the delusions of the times was the navigation of the Des Moines river. The people of Pella shared extensively in this. The prospects of a river commerce appealed strongly to them for they were accustomed to traffic by water. A company was formed with Mr. Bousquet as the leading spirit to build and operate boats. The people of Pella went so far as to lay out a town on the river, three miles from the main city. They called it New Amsterdam, the name once borne by New York, and afterwards by Buffalo, and everywhere dear to Hollanders because associated with their commercial and naval greatness. New Amsterdam had an elaborate system of streets and avenues and pleasure grounds and market squares. Its front street was on the river and its back street on the beautiful Lake Prairie. Lots in New Amsterdam sold for $100, and in Pella for only $50. Its site is now a deserted station on the Wabash railroad, a wilderness of brush and jimpson weeds, with beautiful farms in the distance. Leerdam, a town platted on the Skunk river, northeast of Pella, met with a similar fate.
These are only a few of the many hopes which were blasted, only a few of the expectations that came to naught. Close by the home of my childhood I have often sat and pondered on the remnants of a system of dikes and ditches which a sturdy toiler commenced there in remembrance of Holland. No sea beat against those dikes and no water ever stood in those ditches for they were on the top of a hill. The rains of forty-seven summers and the frosts of as many winters have almost obliterated all trace of them and the pioneer who dreamed there with his pipe and toiled there with his spade has himself long since returned to the earth. But his dream and his labors live after him to adorn a tale and point a moral.
But if their hopes on the Des Moines and Skunk rivers came to naught, these people founded at least one other city which has become an honor to them and to the state. This is Orange City, in Sioux county, established under the leadership of Henry Hospers, in 1870. Motley says that the history of the people of Holland is "marked by one prevailing characteristic, one master passion-the love of liberty, the instinct of self-government." He might have added also the instinct of colonization, in which respect Holland has been second only to England, and today, after so much of her glory has departed, her colonial possessions are those of a first-class European power, excelled in wealth only by those of England. This national instinct has regularly manifested itself among the settlers of Pella. In 1878 a Kansas colony was projected with H. de Booy as president and N. J. Gesman, secretary, but the drouths in that state cut the project short. Finding no satisfactory outlet farther west the descendants have spread out on every side of Pella until now they are scattered over an area forty miles east and west and fifteen miles north and south, and the value of their farm lands has been steadily rising. They have written "yes," after the laconic question, "Does farming pay?"