Skip to main content

My Journey Thus Far

I was recently laid off from work, so I thought I'd start a blog to kill some time.  I wanted to highlight some of the oddities in Holland, Michigan.  Holland's a lakeside tourist town, so most of the more unusual aspects of town are already well-documented; the last remaining, fully functional, wooden windmill in the Western hemisphere, and the surrounding Dutch village, for example.  Wooden shoe factories and tulip farms; hell, even our annual Tulip Time festival make Holland unique, but I was looking for deep cuts, hidden spots, locals-only venues, and other truly weird stuff.  What I found was so much more than that.

I started my search at the library, picking up and paging through assorted books in the Local History section.  I was expecting to find a collection of 10-foot tall bronze tulips in a billionaire's backyard, evidence that AC Van Raalte was cremated and his ashes mixed in the mortar at Pillar Church, or maybe that Mad Hatter from New Holland Brewing is the same beer brought over by Dutch immigrants in the 1850's.  Sadly, none of that has come to fruition (yet).

I moved onto the local museum, the archives at Hope College, and a few online sources, including a New Deal-era book on the State of Michigan, Ottawa County property records, and a geocaching site to find out more about my first few entries:  Ghost towns and abandoned train lines, Indian villages that have been whitewashed out of history books, spite cemeteries, and (as cliche as it sounds) buried treasure.

I've got a few odds and ends to tie up, then my hope is to get some drafts written and begin a regular posting schedule.  I'm on Twitter @TulipDispatch and available at tulipcitydispatch@gmail.com.  We'll see where this rabbit hole goes!

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Eddie Bentz Bank Robbery

Prohibition is one of the most storied periods in American history. Urban myths and legends abound nationwide, with tales of folk heroes like Al Capone, Babyface Nelson, and John Dillinger. Tall tales are woven around organized crime, wild bootleggers, underground saloons, and well-dressed gangsters. There's something uniquely American about the DIY ethos of taking matters into your own hands, making illegal alcohol, and selling it through clandestine channels; stickin' it to the man like those in the illegal alcohol industry did. These stories are immortalized in movies like The Road To Perdition and Public Enemies, as well as TV series like HBO's Boardwalk Empire and, well, PBS's Prohibition. Many lakeshore towns in Western Michigan have tales of organized crime and bootlegging. Easy access to Lake Michigan meant that bootleggers had easy access to boat routes, safely out of reach of authorities. Booze was funneled in from Canada, then taken by boat to cities all aro...
Post a Comment
Read more

The Cedar Swamp Village

Holland has only been a settled city for a little over 170 years. But, it's got a dense, unique history. I took an interest in local history during my college years at Northern Michigan University, and was able to take that interest back home after graduation. Recently, I began researching for this blog, and hanging out at the library, poring through the Local History section. I found an old, forboding looking book, entitled Memorials Of The Grand River Valley, flipped open to a seemingly random page, and read the passage "The Indian village, near the southeastern limits of the city,w as also a prominent landing-place. The log-houses, built by the Indians, were of great service to the newly arrived immigrants; and, as it appears, there never has been any trouble between the Red man and the Dutchman." This piqued my interest, as I live near the southeastern limits of Holland. Was there an Indian village in my own neighborhood that history forgot? Memorials ad...
Post a Comment
Read more

XFinity Sucks. Or, Why I'm Excited For Holland BPW Fiber To Come Through Our Neighborhood

 The whole thing started in October - we hit the data cap for our XFinity plan in 2 or 3 days. I didn't know we had a data cap on our XFinity plan, so I was befuddled. Problem is, you can't just call XFinity, you must escalate your ticket up their chain of command: Start with their AI chatbot, escalate to a human typing on the other end of the chatroom, get transferred to an AI phone operator, escalate that to any number of human phone operators. Somewhere in that initial escalation, they discovered that we weren't on an actual plan from them, and the services we had weren't even offered by them anymore - our account had slipped through the cracks. Their "solution" to the massive data leak was to give sell us the premium tier service with no data cap...which didn't actually solve anything, it just passed the buck down the road. By October 6 or 7, we had blown through another terrabyte of data, so I reached out to Customer Service agai...
Post a Comment
Read more