| Notes |
- Cornelius and Jacomina Hage.
They were the first Dutch family to come to the Sayville area, arriving in Oakdale on 6-6-1849. they came from the village of Bruinisse, which is on the island of Duiveland in the delta of the Scheldte River below Rotterdam. (In 1953 there was a terrible storm in the North Sea causing bad floods in the river mouths. Bruinisse was washed off the map, and many other island towns were destroyed partially or completely. All village records were lost, but some "county:' records are still available. To avoid a future repetition of this disaster, the government initiated the Delta Project to join the many islands and seal off the estuaries.
Cornelius Hage was a farmer for General Ludlow on the latter's estate in Oakdale. He and his family lived there until they moved to a little house on the west side of Railroad Avenue in Sayville, the next house north of the court house which was subsequently built on the NW corner of Railroad Avenue and Swayze Street. The American pronunciation of his name is H a J (long A, soft g), the Dutch pronunciation is something like aw-huh.
Cornelius Hage was a very quiet, patient man, married to a little spit-fire of a woman, Minkya van Kaze Aw-huh. He was known for his unfailing answer to her outbursts - the Dutch word for patience. (It sounds like hedeult). He and his wife were charter members of the Dutch Reformed Church in West Sayville when it was organized in 1860.
Cornelius Hage had a sister Johanna Maria Hage (1816-1894)who married Petr Henry Okkerse. They lived on Chicken Street(now West Street or Dale Drive) in Oakdale.
When the Hage family arrived in Oakdale they must already have had four of their seven daughters. Grandma Otto (Cornelia) remembers going to church services in the little chapel, St. John's Church, still standing in Oakdale, where the slaves of the Ludlow family sat in the balcony. The little girls drove the cows home from pasture to the bay carrying a forked stick to pin down snakes. A huge black snake appeared one day on the kitchen rafter above where Mother Hage was heating a large kettle of water. She dealt with the emergency at once by pushing the snake off the rafter so it fell into the pot. In their first summer the little girls had trouble learning English. The family needed a kitchen knife, so little Cornelia, who had been to school in Holland, went to the Terry store in Sayville. She saw the printed name of her need, and happily asked for a k-nifye, giving it the Dutch pronunciation. She always laughed about the laughter which greeted her efforts, but she got the knife.
Apparently while Cornelia was in her early teens she accompanied the Ludlow family to the Eastern Shore of Maryland one summer. As an old lady, she used to tell the tale (which made mine and my brothers pop) of seeing the battle of the Merrimac and the Monitor from the Maryland shore during the Civil War, but a study of dates indicates this could not have been true. When she was telling this story she was old enough to have confused this and other events from her early life.
All seven of the Hage sisters married, three of them to three Otto brothers - William and Nell, John and Cornelia, Henry and Maria.
Note 23
Cornelius and Jocomina Hage.
They were the First Dutch Family to come to the Sayville area, arriving in Oakdale on 6.6-1849. they came from the village of Briinisse, which is on the island of Duiveland in the delta of the Scheldte River below Rotterdam. (In 1953 there was a terrible storm in the North Sea causing bad flodds in the river mouths. Bruinisse was washed off the map, and many other island towns were destroyed partially or completely. All village records were lost, but some,county:' records are still available. To avoid a future repetition of this disaster, the government initiated the Delta Project to join the many islands and seal off the estuaries.
Cornelius Hage was a farmer for General Ludlow on the latters estate in Oakdale. He and his family lived there until they moved to a little house on the west side of Railroad Avenue in Sayville, the next house north of the court house which was subsequently built on the NW corner of Railroad Avenue and Swayze Street. The american pronunciation of his name is H a J (long A, soft g), the dutch pronunciation is something like aw-huh. Cornelius Hage was a very quiet, patient man, married to a little spit-fire of a woman, Minkya van Kaze Aw-huh. He was known for his unfailing answer to her outbursts - the Dutch word for patience. (It sounds like hedeult. He and his wife were charter members of the Dutch Reformed Church in West Sayviille when it was organized in 1860.
Cornelius Hage had a sister Johanna Maria Hage (1816-1894) who married Petr Henry Okkerse. They lived on Chicken Street (now West Street or Dale Drive) in Oakdale.
When the Hage family arrived in Oakdale they must already have had four of their seven daughters. Grandma Otto (Cornelia) remembers going to church services in the little chapel, St. John's Church, still standing in Oakdale, where the slaves of the Ludlow family sat in the balcony. The little girls drove the cows home from pasture to the barn carrying a forked stick to pin down snakes. A huge black snake appeared one day on the kitchen rafter above where Mother Hage was heating a large kettle of water. She dealt with the emergency at once by pushing the snake off the rafter so it fell into the pot. In their first summer the little girls had trouble learning English. The family needed a kitchen knife, so little Cornelia, who had been to school in Holland, went to the Terry store in Sayville. She saw the printed name of her need, and happily asked for a knife, giving it the Dutch pronunciation. She always laughed about the laughter which greeted her efforts, but she got the k~e.
Apparently while Cornelia was in her early teens she accompanied the Ludlow family to the Eastern Shore of Maryland one summer. As an old lady, she used to tell the tale (which made mine and my brothers pop) of seeing the battle of the Merrimac and the Monitor from the Maryland shore during the Civil War, but a study of dates indicates this could not have been true. When she was telling this story she was old enough to have confused this and other events from her early life.
All seven of the Hage sisters married, three of them to three Otto brothers - William and Nell, John and Cornelia, Henry and Maria.
Note 24
Louise Hage, one of Cornelius and Minna Hage's younger daughters, married George Howell. They owned the land on Greeley Avenue immediately north of John Otto's property. They sold it to the Bezant family, who were Bohemians. They subsequently sold the property to our neighbors, Tony and Mammy Vitoch. George and Louise Howell moved shortly after 1900 to a farm in North Carolina near Morehead City.
Why did they leave Holland?
Emigration to North America
The beginning Dutch people settled in North America from 1624 onwards. When in 1664 the English captured New Amsterdam and the colony of New Netherland, the influx of new groups of Dutch people to the continent came to a halt. This did not change until the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Why emigrate?
An important motive to emigrate at that time were the adverse economical conditions in the home country. The Napoleonic Wars had left the country exhausted. The Secession War with Belgium, the burden of taxation, the potato blight of 1845-47 and the drought that followed it resulted in high food prices, causing grinding poverty in large parts of the country. The working classes in particular had a hard time of it. Even so, there was yet another reason to leave.From 1816 onwards, various government regulations were introduced that had a bearing on religious life. As a response to the government's intervention, a movement developed within the Dutch Reformed Church, pleading for a return to more orthodox beliefs. This resulted in the group's secession form the Dutch Reformed Church. They decided to leave the Netherlands and settle in new communities in America. These communities in the American Midwest exerted a great appeal on the relatives left behind in the home country.
Numbers of migrants
The size of the stream of emigrants to the New World did not depend exclusively on the situation in the Netherlands. The prospects in America played an important role as well. The outbreak of the American Civil War (1861-1865) and the attendant economic crisis immediately resulted in a drop in emigration. On the other hand, the Homestead Act of 1862, promising cheap land to immigrants, revived interest.The exact number of Dutch emigrants leaving for North America in the nineteenth century is unclear. Registers of emigrants in the country of origin as well as in the destination country are incomplete and not very well-organized. Robert P. Swieringa calculated that in the period from 1835 until 1880 between 75,000 and 100,000 Dutchmen arrived in their new home country. The peak occurred in the eighteen-eighties. These are considerable numbers seen from a Dutch perspective, though compared with the total of c. 10 million Europeans arriving in the US during the same period, the Dutch share is not very impressive.
Emigration for religious reasons
A conflict about religious doctrine
In 1814, article 133 was included in the first Constitution of the United Netherlands, stating: "The Christian Reformed Religion is that of the Sovereign." The article was removed in 1815 when predominantly Roman-Catholic Belgium became part of the Kingdom. Nevertheless, what is now called the Dutch Reformed Church remained the only recognized protestant denomination in the Netherlands for a long period of time. All governing members of the House of Orange were and still are members of this church.King William I also occupied himself with religious issues. He ordered rules governing church life to be drawn up for the Dutch Reformed Church. On 7 January 1816 these rules, the General Regulations for the Government of the Reformed Church, were approved by Royal Decree. Many protestants saw this as direct interference in their church affairs.After 1816, more government regulations followed that affected church life. The schooling and examining of ministers, for instance, were brought under state supervision.
The Secession
At the theological faculty in Leiden a group of students actively opposed the government regulations. They found their leader in Hendrik Pieter Scholte. Also after they had graduated and had been appointed as ministers, the group kept in touch and continued their opposition collectively. Among the students were future leaders of emigrant groups such as Albertus Christiaan van Raalte and Anthonie van Brummelkamp.The struggle against the enforced reformation and for the right to remain orthodox broke out after 1834, when minister Hendrick de Cock from Ulrum together with his congregation publicly seceded from the Reformed Church. In a solemn meeting the faithful signed 'the Act of Secession and Return'. Their example was soon followed by many congregations, including those of Van Raalte and Scholte.
Ministers in revolt
The Dutch government tried to force the secessionists back into the bosom of the Reformed Church. This was done through a special interpretation of the Constitution, by stating that the freedom of religion, included in the Constitution of 1814, applied only to existing denominations. This made it impossible for the secessionists to appeal to the Constitution. When this did not produce the desired outcome, the government proceeded to dig up some old articles from de Code Napoleon, in particular those articles specifying that to organise and hold meetings of more than twenty people, government permission was required. Referring to these articles the police could legally swoop down on church services on a regular basis and arrest the ministers and their followers.After the abdication of King William I (1840) the persecution diminished, and even came to a complete stop after 1848, when a new Constitution was introduced. Nevertheless, for many secessionists this came too late. They had already decided to leave the oppressive conditions in the Netherlands behind them. They wished to establish new communities and found that America offered the most favourable opportunities for this. They were supported and inspired in their aspirations by a brochure entitled: 'Why do we promote emigration to North America and not to Java?'. In this brochure Van Raalte and Brummelkamp justified their choice.To realize their ideals the two militant ministers founded the 'Christian Society for Emigrants to the United States of North America'.
In search of freedom
The adverse economic conditions in the Netherlands helped to remove any doubts people might still have had about trying their luck elsewhere. In some cases part of a local congregation decided to book their passage, embark and leave for America together. In this way the ministers hoped to prevent the faithful becoming 'distracted'. By acting collectively they could, once they had arrived at their destination, support each other and hear the Gospel together in their mother tongue.This was a variant on the old Dutch proverb 'eendracht maakt macht' (Union is Strength).Thus the ministers' followers settled closely together in the states of the Midwest. Even to date Dutch sounding family names and place-names bear witness to this.The secessionists did not make up the majority of migrants leaving in the nineteenth century. Most of the c. 100.000 migrants trying their luck in America during this period were not involved in the church secession. They dispersed, with or without their families, across the vast continent and merged into the immigrant society.
From here to there
Flying high above the Atlantic Ocean, it is hard for a modern traveller on his way to America to imagine how people crossed the ocean one hundred and fifty years ago.Emigrants in the nineteenth century crossed the ocean under often atrocious conditions. Nevertheless, millions of Europeans left for the New World, more than one hundred thousand of them from the Netherlands.
History of Dutch Immigration to America in the 1800's: The Seceder Movement
A new religious movement called the Seceders emerged in 1834 prompted by a deep concern for the creeping liberalism in the Protestant Dutch Reformed Church that was moving away from its deep commitment to Calvinism. The Dutch government attempted to repress the pious Seceder movement and religious persecution led to a great wave of immigration to America. Total congregations settled in the farming regions of the mid-west favoring Wisconsin, Iowa and Michigan. They were led by men such as Albertus Christiaan van Raalte (1811-1876) and Henry Scholte (1805-1868), the founder of the Holland Colony of Marion County. Nearly half of the Dutch immigrants between 1845 and 1849 belonged to the dissenting Protestant Seceder movement.
Dutch Immigration to America in the 1800's:
Catholic immigrants led by Theodore J. van den Broek
In 1848 Father Theodore J. van den Broek (1783-1851) led a large group of Catholic Dutch emigrants who settled in the areas around the communities of Little Chute, Holland Town, and Green Bay in Wisconsin.
History of Dutch Immigration to America in the 1800's: The 'Hungry Forties
'Holland, like many other European countries, suffered from serious crop failures including the potato blight (1845-1849) which led to great poverty, hunger, disease and destitution, referred to as the ' Hungry Forties'. Dutch Immigration to America increased again following the European Revolutions of 1848 as peasants remonstrated against the terrible conditions. The failure of the Dutch revolutionists led to a small wave of political refugees who fled to America.
History of Dutch Immigration to America in the 1800's: The Second Wave of Immigration
During the second wave of Dutch immigration during the mid 1800's over 250,000 Dutch immigrants entered the United States - it was called the Great Migration. Among Dutch emigrant family heads, 60% were farmers and agricultural laborers. Holland had been hit by the agricultural revolution and the influx of cheap American wheat leading to a massive decline in grain prices. The flow was halted by the outbreak of the American Civil War. Those who came after the Civil War tended to be individuals who were stimulated by letters from family and friends already established in America. Up to this period there were no immigration restrictions in America.
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1812 - 1894 (81 years)
