“... a Van Eeden brochure promised the moon ...
but the reality was a far-cry from the dream.”
Q
Cornelius ‘Casey’ Swart, son of
Cornelius Swart Sr., who emigrated with
his family to the Castle Hayne area when
he was just a boy, says that a Van Eeden
brochure promised the moon, luring his
grandfather and his family to the United
States, but the reality was a far cry from
the dream. When they reached Van
Eeden, every few yards they found pine
stumps the diameter of truck tires. The
land lacked drainage and the pines had
spoiled cultivation.
“The soil was so acidic you couldn’t
plant. It was disastrous farming,” Casey
Swart said.
In the 1910s Dirk Swart I was a
bridge tender near Zaandam, Holland.
He had little money. A small inheritance
had afforded him a home in which he,
his wife Grietje and their eight children
had settled. Swart, sure that the political
and economic situation in Holland
would only worsen, had considered emigration
for some time. When he saw the
Van Eeden brochure and finally spoke
to Van Eeden himself, Swart sold their
home, built in 1710 and still standing
today, to pay the $1,100 it would cost
for the family to board The Rotterdam en
route to Ellis Island.
40
WBM november 2011
In May of 1912, just weeks after The
Titanic sank, the ten of them traveled
across the Atlantic, sharing two rooms
and four single bunks. From Ellis Island
they took a train to Watha and days
later settled into a three-room home on
a 10-acre tract in Van Eeden in hopes
that they could work off payments over
the next few years. They made mattresses
out of cornhusks, slept off the trip as best
they could. Then they began the work.
After two and a half years of clearing,
struggling to grow anything and working
for Hugh MacRae building crossties, the
Swarts were overwrought.
Susan Taylor Block, in her brochure
XLI, entitled Van Eeden, writes of the
Dutch settlers’ predicament:
Their affection for Dr. van Eeden and
the allure of America caused them to
leave damp farmland in a country filled
with dikes and dams only to claim raw
damp farmland in turn-of-the-century
Pender county.
Although Van Eeden would eventually
fail as a turn-of-the-century farming
community and the Swarts would move
on to pursue more self-sustaining endeavors
in the richer Castle Hayne area soil,
June Tilden, daughter of Dirk Swart II