David Zwart hadn't even finished introducing himself as the keynote speaker for "The Dutch -American Story in the San Joaquin Valley" at the UC Merced event on July 14 before he'd found a connection in the audience.
"Any connections?" the historian and associate professor at Grand Valley State University asked, rattling off the years he'd spent teaching in nearby Visalia in the late 1990s. An audience member called out a name he recognized. It's a parlor game Zwart calls "Dutch Bingo," a version of six degrees of separation that, among Dutch Americans, usually takes one or two.
The moment set the tone for "Communities of the Valley," a new lecture series made possible through a generous gift from longtime UC Merced supporter and former U.S. Rep. Tony Coelho, who hopes that the university continues serving as a bridge between the region's ethnic communities and higher education.
The series’ inaugural installment focused on the history of Dutch American settlement in the Central Valley, opening with a keynote from Zwart, a historian of Dutch migration, followed by a panel discussion with community members from throughout the region.
Zwart traced how the Dutch American population in the Valley grew from failed 19th-century farming colonies into one of the region's most enduring immigrant communities, as families who had first settled in the Midwest later relocated to the Valley in search of land and religious community.
That migration accelerated in the early 20th century as Dutch settlers in Hanford, Ripon and Modesto recruited relatives and acquaintances through Dutch-language newspapers. Zwart cited a 1905 advertisement placed by early Modesto settler Egbert Stevens, who urged fellow Reformed families to join him because the community needed more members "in order to organize a congregation." The pattern repeated for decades, Zwart said, as word spread through family networks and church publications.
Within the Valley, Dutch settlement concentrated in Kings, San Joaquin and Stanislaus counties, anchored by Christian Reformed and Reformed Church congregations in Hanford and Ripon organized in the 1910s that went on to plant new congregations in Modesto, Escalon and Fresno through the 1960s. Zwart said that growth was sustained less by the size of the migration than by the density of institutions that bound Dutch American families together across generations. "Dutch American identity is more than windmills, wooden shoes and lawn ornaments," he said, noting that religious institutions gave the community a durability that outlasted its visible markers of ethnic heritage.
