Colonies of Benevolence

I visited in April 2024 the town of Frederiksoord. I parked my car to the Museum de Proefkolonie which was going through renovations at the time but the museum and its restaurant were fully operational. I decided to skip the museum exhibition but I went to ask help for exploring the town. The staff at the museum were very helpful and provided me with a map of different walking and cycling routes around Frederiksoord and Wilhelminaoord and a small booklet about the history of the free colonies. The staff recommended the green route which was titled "Sterrebosroute" and the route seemed to go around the whole town and all the sights of interest so I decided to follow the recommendation.

The walking routes were well marked so it was easy to follow them. The day was warm and sunny spring day so it was a perfect day for a leisurely stroll. I explored the horticultural school garden which was still quite dead in April but the horticultural school (pictured) next to it was a beautiful building. Across the school is the hotel of Frederiksoord and the old post office which are also both very beautiful buildings. The hotel is still in operation so you can also stay in Frederiksoord if you want. Along the route there were information signs of all the sights of interest both in English and Dutch which was very helpful. The route mostly zigzagged through the Sterrebos forest that was not very interesting except that …

I visited the three component sites in the span of around a month in late summer/early fall 2021. I had good experiences in all three sites and will recount those in this review with my walking and beverage recommendations. 

Wortel

We spent a beautiful late summer night camping in the Wortel Kolonie after visiting Gorinchem and Woudrichem (two fortress towns from the 2021 extension of Dutch Water Defense Lines). It's possible to reserve part of the small primitive campsite there managed by the Flemish agency Natuur en Bos. From the parking area we walked the 500 m to the campsite tucked away behind a forested lane (one finds it by walking straight then turning right 90 degrees, thereby appreciating the orthagonal layout so prized in the OUV). Natuur en Bos provides a fire pit and wood and in the morning we were treated with some beautiful light through the trees. After breaking camp and grabbing some pastries at a nearby bakery we returned to the main parking area to begin our walk around the colony. Unlike the other sites, little remains architecturally from the original settlement except for some of the large institutional buildings. The scenery is pleasant enough for walking, however, and our route weaved in and out of cultivated fields, areas that have been reforested, across the Dutch border and back and past the paupers' cemetary. There is a small visitors center above the cafe by the parking lot, but all the text there is in …

I was in Frederiksoord just two weeks ago. It's certainly not very spectacular to see, but I found the story behind it very interesting. I may be a bit biased because it's part of my own country's history. I do hope that being a WHC will create a broader awareness for this part of our history. 

A new visitor centre opened here in 2019. It had to close just a few months later and just reopened now. It tells the story in a modern, audiovisual way. After that, while taking a walk, or better the tramride, through Frederiksoord/ Wilhelminaoord you really get a good feeling for the story. A volunteer on the tram, born here in the final days of the colony, talked about growing up here and told stories about her grant parents etc.

The visitor centre explains all in English, as do many signs in front of a number of buildings. On the tram, the story was told in Dutch, but there were no international visitors (mainly due to the covid situation, I guess). Perhaps, if visitor numbers and tramrides increase, this can/will be done in English as well. 

The former Colonies of Benevolence will be on the agenda of the WHC 2020 meeting. This Dutch-Flemish serial transnational proposal had been referred in 2018 due to doubts about the selection of sites included. Subsequential discussions with ICOMOS and the World Heritage Centre, advising to “take a little more time” than usually after a Referral, has led to a reduction of the proposed locations from 7 to 3. On the Dutch side, Ommerschans and Willemsoord are omitted and Frederiksoord and Wilhelminaoord are combined. In Flanders Merksplas has been dropped, leaving only Wortel.

I had already visited the Dutch part (notably Veenhuizen) in 2011 and the Belgian part in 2016. With the full, amended nomination dossier now available I decided to have a closer look at the Frederiksoord-Wilhelminaoord component. It is also about the only (T)WHS related place which I have not reviewed before that I can reach at the moment – I am eagerly awaiting the lifting of the non-essential travel ban to Germany for example, for some more low hanging TWHS fruit.

I arrived early on a Sunday morning in Wilhelminaoord, where I parked my car to begin the 11km long “Monuments walk”. It nicely covers the Frederiksoord-Wilhelminaoord component and its main monuments. They are really prepared here for WH status and more international tourists: every building of some interest has an information panel in front of it. The panels give a comprehensive explanation of what you’re looking at, both in the Dutch and English language. Up …

In March 2020 I visited the Belgian locations of this transnational tentative WHS nominated by Belgium and the Netherlands. From a visual point of view, what I experienced was a similar landscape of Beemster or the Par Force hunting landscape with a hint of the Belgian béguinages. The central focus of this tentative nomination is not religious though, it's agriculture.

Around 1818-1825, when Belgium and the Netherlands formed the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, Johannes van den Bosch put forward the idea of fighting poverty with agriculture which gave way to the construction of 7 agricultural colonies. There were so many paupers or vagrants at the beginning of the 19th century, that their size was that of sizeable hamlets or villages with their own chapel or church, pond, cemetery, housing and even their own mint.

The Merksplas colony, the last pauper colony built in 1825, was the only farm in the region to have more than 100 hectares of farm land. It also had a very large pigsty for as much as 95 pigs, which has recently been converted into a free informative visitor centre (top left photo). The various videos in Flemish with English subtitles were fundamental to help give context to the information I read in the nomination dossier. I parked my car for free at the parking lot near the huge church which has been converted in a prison museum. From Merksplas, I headed to my next destination, the Wortel colony built in 1822. On …

Visited September 2017

If you’re looking for perfect photo opportunities, this is not the sites for you. It is just a countryside. But the value of this nomination lays in its history. I have visited 3 (Frederiksoord, Wilhelminaoord, Willemsoord) of 7 components, all not very far from Steenwijk, the town that can be reached from Amsterdam by train. I think the best way is to start in Frederiksoord (take the bus 19 from the Steenwijk train station) where a small museum is open. The museum itself is a bit disappointing, ‘cos they have only one small building with some expositions, mostly with pictures, but at least you can hear and watch an audio-visual presentation about Johannes van den Bosch and the beginning of the colonies. Another bad thing is that they do sell only Dutch publications and nothing in English. After visiting the museum I made a tour of the first colony – Frederiksoord; it is where everything started. Among others you can see here Westerbeek house, the headquarters of the Society of Benevolence from 1818 till now. (The building itself is older the Society, it was constructed in XVII century for Jean François van Westerbeek, the commander of the fortress in Steenwijk, and then it passed to the van Royen family (silk traders) before being sold to van Bosch.) The other interesting buildings are two schools: forestry and horticultural, Frederiksoord hotel (which was built before the Society’s guests started coming to visit the area) and de Bakkerij (now B&B); …

Between 1815 and 1830, the current states of the Netherlands and Belgium were united for a short period in the ‘United Kingdom of the Netherlands’. They are now working on a joint nomination for 2018 to highlight a specific experiment of that era: the efforts of the so-called ‘Society of Benevolence’ to “improve the inhumane conditions suffered by many of the poor”. The Society established domestic colonies to reeducate paupers (tramps, orphans, down-at-heel families) by means of land reclamation and agricultural innovation.

The Dutch part of this nomination covers 6 separate locations in 3 clusters, all in the northeast of the country known at the time as the ‘Dutch Siberia’. I visited most of these already in 2011, when I did a whirlwind summer tour along the sites on the Dutch Tentative List. The best known of the colonies is Veenhuizen, a name tied to its large prison that can hold 1,000 inmates (nowadays filled for 25% with prisoners 'on loan' from Norway by the way). An impressive square former prison building holds the disappointing Prison Museum. Walking around town, the most remarkable sights are the edifying nameplates on the houses of the former guards. They hold slogans like "Order & Discipline" or "Work & Pray".

Last weekend I decided to visit the Belgian part of this nomination. It consists of two locations, Merksplas and Wortel, two villages just south of the Dutch-Belgian border. They’re not as remote as the Dutch sites, but driving along the cobblestoned access avenues does …