In 1847, 800 Dutch Reformed Church dissenters founded Pella, Iowa.
Since then, it’s had a few claims to fame: It served as the childhood home of Wyatt Earp, the infamous lawman who survived the deadly gunfight at O.K. Corral, and is the hometown of Dave Keuning, the lead guitarist and founding member of The Killers who wrote the music for “Mr. Brightside.”
But its most lasting legacy hearkens back to its Dutch roots.
Each May, the city welcomes thousands of visitors to its annual “Tulip Time” festival, which began in 1935 as picnic gatherings between descendants of Dutch provinces as Pellans yearned for community through their shared histories.
“I really think during the Depression, a lot of these were people who were kids and grandkids of people who had come over in the 1840s and ‘50s. And I think they missed some of that Dutch heritage because Scholte was very much — he really pushed becoming an American,” Valerie Van Kooten, former executive director of the Pella Historical Society, said. “So they crowned a queen for the first day.”
“Scholte” is none other than the Dominie Hendrik Peter Scholte, who had led the dissenters from the Netherlands to Pella.
“It was Scholte’s great-granddaughter who was the first Tulip Queen. And people around were so interested in what they were doing that the next year, they decided to kind of open it up, advertise it. And it just became a huge festival,” Van Kooten said.
And “huge” isn’t an overstatement: Approximately 350,000 tulip bulbs usually bloom in tandem with the festival, Van Kooten said. It now also features Dutch dancing, food, costumes and parades, as well as period- and province-specific dress.
But all this started with an act of dissent and a few dozen farms.
Led by Dominie Scholte, a group of Dutch citizens had bristled against the state’s involvement in the church and eventually left the Netherlands to seek refuge in America. They were drawn to what is now Iowa after hearing of newly available land.
“They immediately bought 18,000 acres from the government and they bought out 35 farms that were already in the vicinity,” Van Kooten said. “By August of 1847, most of them had come up to Pella — what is now Pella.”
Many of the farms sold to the dissenters were available because the Dutch immigrants’ arrival coincided with the Gold Rush in California and Oregon, Van Kooten said. Existing settlers were headed west.
Nonetheless, Pella was sparse. According to legend, when Dominie Scholte’s reluctant wife Maria first glimpsed the stick marking its location, she asked, “Where’s Pella?”
“There was one log cabin there — very close to what’s now our Central Park — and she and her family were in that cabin. She was very unhappy. And she was waiting desperately for her prized Delft collection to come, which are blue and white dishes. And they came about four months later, and she very excitedly opened them with her maid. And they were all broken except for five of them. So she ended up making a path from the door of the log cabin to the door of their new home, which was about 50 yards away, with the broken Delft,” Van Kooten said.
A few years after establishing Pella, Dominie Scholte gave land to begin what is now Central College. Originally founded in 1916 as a Baptist institution — the religion of the “Americans” who resided in Pella — the college was bought by the Dutch Reformed Church, with which it remains affiliated today.
“When Scholte died in 1868, most of his congregation went back to the Dutch Reformed church and started one in Pella,” Van Kooten said. “He did establish a town and worked very hard to establish the town, but the church that he founded is no longer in existence.”
Following World War II, about 10 to 12 families migrated to Pella from the Netherlands, bringing with them a new influx of Dutch influence. As they have aged — and even though many of the descendants of Pella’s founders still reside in or around Pella — Van Kooten said she worries about what Pella might lack without present-day Dutch immigration.
But in recent decades, Pella has begun to more intentionally embrace its Dutch heritage.
Beginning in the 1970s, the city of Pella began renovating many of its buildings’ facades to resemble that of architecture seen in Dutch cities like Amsterdam. In 2001, it opened Molengracht Plaza, which features canals reminiscent of those in the Netherlands.
Today, although there is no official political relationship between the two, Pella and the Netherlands encourage interchange through other avenues.
In 2002, Lukas Verbij of Hoogmade in the Netherlands built Pella’s windmill — the tallest working windmill in the United States. As a working windmill which grinds wheat, Pella utilizes what it produces, with Jaarsma Bakery selling windmill bread made from a portion of the flour, with the remaining flour sold at the historical society.
According to Van Kooten, the recent arrival of a couple from the Netherlands has spurred a resurgence of interest in learning the Dutch language. They both taught a Dutch language course at the Windmill Winterim, a series of educational classes, and have continued teaching beyond that forum.
Residents of Pella have passed down Dutch words and phrases through generations, and the dialect spoken today in the city is known as “Pella Dutch” or “Yankee Dutch.”
“To be honest, a lot of these words I’d never realized weren’t English words until I got to college,” Van Kooten said. “I told my roommates I said, ‘Well get your throop out of the bathroom.’ And they’re like, ‘What?’ — ‘Your throop, your junk, your stuff’ … They looked at me like they had no idea. And I thought ‘Okay, maybe this isn’t a word everybody uses.’”
Although the city sees a lot of tourism because of its Dutch heritage, it has a diversified economy also dependent on manufacturing and academics. Central College, Vermeer Manufacturing and Pella Windows provide hubs of employment for Pella.
“We have a very strong manufacturing base here, so we have a lot of people moving into Pella. And even if they’re not Dutch, they get caught up in it and get excited about it just as much as everybody else,” Van Kooten said.
Academically, Pella maintains close ties to the Netherlands. Van Kooten said she was surprised when she learned of scholars in the Netherlands whose sole focus of study is on Pella and Dominie Scholte. In 2018, Pella held a conference commemorating Scholte’s death, and in 2022, Van Kooten was invited to the Netherlands to discuss her experience as a Pella resident.
For Van Kooten, there’s not any dissonance in finding this Dutch haven in the middle of America.
“I grew up on a farm. And so for me, I have always had a hard time, kind of differentiating between farm culture and Dutch culture,” she said. “The Dutch are known for being very hard workers, as are people in the Midwest. I think the Midwest values of thrift and making your money go a long way.”
Even still, there is something special about the Dutch treasure hidden away in Iowa.
“We still have coffee time every day at 9:30 and 3:30, just like they do in the Netherlands. And we still have all those words and we still eat; I go over to my folks and they’re making milk pop or some other Dutch food,” Van Kooten said.
For its residents, Pella’s Dutch heritage is not a tourist attraction or novelty, but a thread that has run through generations.
“I just see so much of that carry down, even though we’re Americans and we’re Iowan and the farm community has its own kind of set of traditions,” Van Kooten said. “I still see a lot of Dutch tradition running through Pella in a very, non-commercial-y way — just in an everyday way.”
This story was updated on Jun. 10, 2025, to correct the relation between Scholte and the first Tulip Queen
