This afternoon I walked through the city and my eye was caught by a building I had never noticed before. When I searched it on the web, it proved to have an interesting history. It was the building of the first cooperation in the Netherlands (where the idea started a bit later than in the UK).
The building is called 'De Toekomst' (the Future), and it was built in 1887, primarily to provide a meeting place for worker organisations, that had a hard time renting meeting places with commercial landlords.
It also housed a cooperative bakery, and two homes.
The cooperation was organised by the head of public works of the city of Groningen, Joan Nieuwenhuis. A year earlier he had started a socialist newspaper and wanted to resign from the city, but the (conservative) mayor convinced him to stay on.
His newspaper was financed by a rich farmer, Derk Roelof Mansholt, grandfather of Sicco Mansholt, who would become one of the founding fathers of the European Economic Communion, and architect of the (infamous?) common European agricultural policy.
For the cooperation the collateral was interestingly provided by the biggest factory owner and grand entrepreneur Jan Evert Scholten, and the nobleman Jhr.Mr. W.C.A. Alberda van Ekenstein, Dutch parliamentarian.
So although relations between workers and employers could be harsh in 19th century Groningen, there was also a genuine recognition and even assistence by those employers of the worker organisations.
An interesting thing I learned at the Day of the Archeology in April 2013 was the way our local geography was formed.
The yellow-red piece of highground in this elevation map is essentially the province of Drenthe, with the City of Groningen at the Northern tip.
The most obvious features here are the parallel ridges running from SSE to NNW on the East side of the plateau. The Easternmost being called the 'Hondsrug'.
But on the West side of the plateau a much finer grid of ridges running SSW to NNE can be recognised.
These latter ridges were formed during the Salien (238.000 - 128.000 BP) when an ice sheet scraped towards the SSW.
At the end of that ice age an enormous melting lake formed in the area of Münster in the Westphalian Lowland.
This made the ice sheet flow very fast (for an ice sheet) towards the SSE, carving the major structure into the earth. At that time there were parallel ridges for 100 km towards the East, but then the lake near Münster broke through towards the North Sea area in a giant flush, washing away anything in its path East of the last ridge on this map.
The Westphalian Lowland is surrounded by low mountain ranges in the South and East, and by the ice sheet on the West and North, so a tremendous amount of water could be locked up there.
Thus the bed of the river Ems would be formed for the future.
Directly to the East of the 'Hondsrug' ridge, a 80 metres deep valley was formed, that would become sea in the upcoming warm period, and would be filled with sand by the wind during the last ice age, when the ice didn't reach all the way here.
In 1898 the first Dutch vehicle license was issued to the Groninger W.A. van Dam.
Two ladies drive the car in the village of Zoutkamp.
The car was made by the "Groninger Motorrijtuigen Fabriek" (Groninger Motorcarriage Factory) of brother Johannes van Dam, who registered the second Dutch car for himself:
The cars were produced with a German Lutzman patent, and when that patent was acquired by sewing machine factory Opel, Van Dam changed to a patent by Bentz.
