The Vermeer Windmill turns above the Square in central Iowa, its sails throwing a slow shadow across Franklin Street. Below, in May, a parade of girls in white caps and wooden klompen scrubs the brick with stiff brushes before the marching band rounds the corner. This is Pella. A town of roughly ten thousand people, an hour east of Des Moines, that has spent nearly two centuries insisting it is still, in some quiet and stubborn way, a Dutch place.
The Place
Pella sits in Marion County, in the rolling farm country between the Des Moines River and Lake Red Rock. The town is laid out around a Central Square, with Franklin and Washington Streets crossing at its centre and the rest of downtown radiating out in a tidy grid. The brick storefronts on the Square wear Dutch gables and painted shutters, some of them genuine nineteenth-century, some of them later additions in the same idiom. Drive twenty minutes in any direction and you are back in soybean fields. That contrast, the small Dutch town in the middle of the corn belt, is most of the story.
How It Became Dutch
The Afscheiding of 1834
To understand Pella you have to start in the Netherlands, in a parsonage in the village of Ulrum, in 1834. That October the local minister, Hendrik de Cock, formally seceded from the Dutch Reformed Church. He and a small circle of orthodox Calvinist clergy had spent years arguing that the state-aligned church had drifted into liberal theology and that the only honest response was to leave it.
The split became known as the Afscheiding, the Secession. The seceders called themselves the Christelijk Afgescheiden Gemeente, the Seceded Christian Church. They were a small minority, perhaps one percent of the Dutch population, and the government did not let them go quietly. Their meetings were broken up. Their ministers were fined. Soldiers were billeted in the homes of families who hosted prayer services.
One of the leading voices of the movement was a young pastor named Hendrik Pieter Scholte, who served a Seceder congregation in Utrecht. By the early 1840s Scholte had concluded that there was no future for his people in the Netherlands. The harassment was constant, the land was crowded, and a string of poor harvests in the mid-1840s pushed many of his parishioners toward starvation.
Scholte’s Decision to Leave
In 1846 Scholte and a fellow Seceder pastor, Albertus Van Raalte, began organising emigration. They worked separately, with different congregations, but the goal was the same: a Dutch Calvinist colony in the United States where Reformed worship could be ordered without a state looking over its shoulder. Van Raalte took his group to western Michigan and founded the town of Holland in 1847. Scholte took his group to Iowa.
Roughly eight hundred people sailed with Scholte across the Atlantic in the spring of 1847, on four sailing ships that took about two months to make Baltimore. From there the group travelled by rail, river, and wagon to the prairie of central Iowa. They had bought eighteen thousand acres in advance, sight unseen, with funds Scholte had partly raised himself.
A City of Refuge
The first families reached the chosen site on August 26, 1847. The land had been promised with log cabins ready. There were none. The Dutch arrivals spent the first winter in sod houses and dugouts that locals later called the Strooienstad, the Straw City.
Scholte named the place Pella, after the city in the Decapolis where, according to early Christian tradition, the Christians of Jerusalem fled before the Roman destruction of the Temple. A city of refuge, across the Jordan, for a people who had been driven out. The name was a sermon in itself. Within two years the sod houses had given way to frame buildings on the Square, and Scholte had built his wife Maria a Greek Revival mansion on what is now Washington Street.
The Parallel Colony in Michigan
Pella was not the only Dutch Seceder colony to land in the United States that year. Van Raalte’s Holland, Michigan was its sibling, founded a few months earlier with the same theological backbone and many of the same Dutch provincial roots. The two colonies kept up a correspondence for decades, and their descendants would eventually anchor the Reformed Church in America’s mid-western base.
Holland grew faster and absorbed later waves of Dutch immigration through the Great Lakes. Pella stayed smaller and more agricultural, more tied to the land Scholte had bought. The two towns share a founding generation. They are not the same place.
The Landmarks
Scholte House Museum, 728 Washington Street. The home Hendrik Scholte built for Maria in 1847 and 1848, finished in about six months and barely a year after the first sod houses went up. A twenty-two room Greek Revival mansion that signalled, more than any sermon could, that the Dutch had come to stay. Scholte family descendants lived in it until 1984. The Pella Historical Society now operates it as a museum, with most of the furnishings still original to the family.
Pella Historical Village, 507 Franklin Street. An open-air complex of more than twenty restored buildings just off the Square, including pioneer cabins, a working blacksmith shop, a Dutch-style bakery, and the row house where Wyatt Earp lived as a boy. The village functions as the town’s collective memory, the place where Pella keeps the artefacts of its first century.
The Vermeer Windmill, 714 East First Street. A working Dutch grain mill, an 1850s-style koren mill in the Old World tradition, built in Hoogmade in the Netherlands by miller Lukas Verbij, then disassembled, shipped to Iowa, and reassembled in Pella in 2002. At 124 feet 6 inches to the top of the sail, it is the tallest working windmill in North America. The mill grinds wheat into flour, by wind, on calm-enough days. It was funded by the Vermeer family, the same family behind the agricultural-equipment manufacturer based in town.
The Klokkenspel, on the Square. A musical clock tower with a 147-bell computer-driven carillon and eight four-foot mechanical figures that emerge to perform a short play five times a day. The figures include Hendrik and Maria Scholte, a blacksmith, and a young Wyatt Earp. The Klokkenspel was the project of local businessman H. Stuart Kuyper and was dedicated during Tulip Time in 1985.
Central College, 812 University Street. Founded by the Baptist Convention of Iowa in 1853, with the active backing of Hendrik Scholte himself, the college opened its first class in October 1854. After more than sixty years under the Baptists, it transferred to the Reformed Church in America in 1916 and 1917 and has been a Reformed-affiliated liberal arts college ever since. It is one of the institutional reasons the town did not assimilate quietly into the wider Iowa prairie.
The Wyatt Earp Boyhood Home, in the Historical Village. The east row house built in 1855 by the Van Spanckeren brothers, where the Earp family is believed to have lived in the early 1860s after they stopped in Pella on their long migration west. Wyatt was a child here. The building was listed on the National Register in 1990 and reopened after a major renovation in 2021. It is a strange thing to find in a Dutch Calvinist town, which is part of why Pella loves it.
Where They Came From
The first wave of Pella Dutch came mostly from three provinces: Utrecht, where Scholte had served as a pastor; Gelderland, the largely rural eastern province whose Seceder congregations had been some of the most harassed; and South Holland, with smaller contingents from Overijssel, North Brabant, and Zeeland. They were farmers, tradesmen, and a small core of clergy and clerks. Almost all of them were members of an Afgescheiden congregation back home.
What pulled them was a particular argument that Scholte and Van Raalte had been making since the early 1840s: that the Netherlands offered Calvinist Seceders neither religious liberty nor economic ground to stand on, and that the United States offered both. Once the first letters started coming back from Pella and Holland describing land at one dollar an acre and church services without a state inspector at the door, chain migration did the rest. The same villages in Gelderland sent second cousins. The same Utrecht congregations sent grandchildren a generation later. The Dutch-American Reformed network that runs from Pella to Holland to Grand Rapids today was largely built on that pattern.
Pella Today
Tulip Time, held the first weekend of May, is the public face of the town. It started in 1935 as a one-day event built around a locally written operetta, the brainchild of Central College’s Irwin Lubbers and businessman Lon Wormhoudt during the Depression. The first festival had no actual tulips, because the bulbs had not bloomed in time, so a local woodworker carved 125 four-foot wooden tulips to stand in. By 1936 the town had planted 85,000 real bulbs. Today the festival pulls hundreds of thousands of visitors over three days for parades, Dutch dancing, a tulip queen, and the slow Saturday morning ritual of scrubbing the Square’s brick.
The Dutch surname presence is still unusually thick for an Iowa town. Scholte, Van Zee, Van Wyk, De Jong, Hospers, Vermeer, Kuyper. The Reformed Church in America still has a serious institutional footprint here through Central College and the local congregations, and the Christian Reformed Church is well represented too. People in Pella will tell you which Seceder pastor their family followed across the Atlantic the way other Americans talk about where their grandparents went to high school.
The town is also an industrial place. Pella Corporation, the window and door manufacturer founded by Peter and Lucille Kuyper in 1925 and relocated to Pella in 1926, is one of the largest privately held companies in Iowa and employs thousands of locals. Vermeer Corporation, the agricultural and industrial equipment maker, is the other anchor. The two companies, both family-controlled and both rooted in the same Dutch immigrant network, are part of why Pella’s downtown is still working rather than preserved in amber.
Des Moines has slowly sprawled east, and Pella has begun to take on some of the character of a commuter town for the capital. Newer subdivisions on the south and west sides house families who work in Des Moines and drive home for a weekend on the Square. The Dutch core has not gone anywhere, but the town is broader and younger than the postcard version. That is, by Scholte’s own logic, a fair outcome. A city of refuge is supposed to keep growing.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Dutch settle in Pella, Iowa?
Pella was founded in 1847 by Dominee Hendrik Pieter Scholte and roughly 800 Dutch Reformed Seceders fleeing harassment by the state-aligned church in the Netherlands. They chose central Iowa for its cheap, fertile prairie land and named the town Pella after the biblical city of refuge across the Jordan.
Is Pella, Iowa still Dutch today?
Yes, in a real way. Dutch surnames are still common, the Reformed Church in America and Christian Reformed Church remain prominent through Central College and local congregations, and the annual Tulip Time Festival anchors the town’s public identity each May. Pella is also a working industrial town with Pella Corporation and Vermeer Corporation headquartered there, both rooted in the same Dutch immigrant network.
What are the most famous Dutch landmarks in Pella?
The Vermeer Windmill on East First Street, at 124 feet the tallest working windmill in North America. The Scholte House Museum at 728 Washington Street, home of the town’s founder. The Pella Historical Village on Franklin Street, with more than twenty restored buildings including the Wyatt Earp boyhood home. The Klokkenspel on the Square, with its carillon and mechanical figures. And Central College, founded in 1853 with Scholte’s backing.
Where in the Netherlands did the Pella Dutch come from?
The first wave came largely from the provinces of Utrecht, Gelderland, and South Holland, with smaller groups from Overijssel, North Brabant, and Zeeland. Almost all were members of Afgescheiden, or Seceded, Reformed congregations that had broken with the state church after the 1834 Afscheiding.
When did the Dutch first arrive in Pella?
The first families arrived on August 26, 1847, after a roughly two-month Atlantic crossing followed by inland travel from Baltimore. Their first winter was spent in sod houses and dugouts that locals nicknamed the Strooienstad, or Straw City. Permanent frame buildings followed within two years.
What is Tulip Time in Pella?
Tulip Time is Pella’s annual Dutch heritage festival, held the first weekend of May since 1935. It features tulip parades, Dutch dancing in klompen, a tulip queen, traditional foods, and the public scrubbing of the Square’s brick on Saturday morning. It is one of the largest Dutch heritage festivals in the United States.
If your family’s story passed through Pella, or any of the places the Dutch Reformed Seceders made home in the American mid-west, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a parsonage in Utrecht, to a sod house on the Iowa prairie, to wherever you are now.