1800 – 1898
34 events
Draining of the peat lakes around Nieuwveen begins. Seven windmills set to work pumping the water out into the Amstel.
“A new drawing towards the drainage of the peat-dug lands”, 1742. The plan to push the water back is nearly sixty years older than the drainage itself. View larger → The Nieuwkoop and Zevenhoven droogmakerij – the drained lake-bed polder – becomes a fact. The drainage was a state undertaking.
The drainage is completed.
The Zevenhoven polder is drained by eight vijzelmolens, Archimedes-screw mills, set up in four "gangs" of two mills each, lifting the water in two stages. The original document speaks of seven mills; the difference probably lies in what exactly was counted as Nieuwveen.
The polder lies deep – the water level is 5.90 metres below NAP, the Dutch ordnance datum – and suffers badly from seepage, which makes daily pumping necessary and keeps it so.
The land won by the draining is parcelled out. For the village it is a fresh start.
The first farms go up in the drained polders. With the work the village grows too: more inhabitants, more houses.
The river Aar is substantially improved and the Aarkanaal dug. The old bridge, the Duivelsbrug (Devil's Bridge), gives way to a wooden double-leaf drawbridge that comes to be called the Kattenbrug.
The Kattenbrug over the Aarkanaal. The canal is dug in the entry beside this; the bridge still crosses it. View larger → The Duivelssluis, the lock in the Aar beside the Duivelsbrug, falls out of use. A new complex of locks at the Tolhuis in Leimuiden takes its place.
A cattle market is instituted, to be held in the Kerkstraat.
A new general village school opens beside the Reformed church on the Kerkstraat.
The schoolmaster’s house. Whether it housed the master of the school in the entry beside this, the source does not say — the house still stands. View larger → The church on the Kerkstraat, built by the Catholics in 1559 and Reformed since 1578, is pulled down.
A likely cause of the building's poor condition is the draining of the polder twenty years earlier: the church stood on the edge of the drained polder, and its foundations subsided.
The foundation stone is laid for the new Reformed church on the same site. The architect is Elsmeyer of Nieuwkoop.
Under the State Regulation of 1798 the tower had become the property of the civil municipality, and it is therefore rebuilt at the municipality's commission, to a design by Theo Molkenboer of Leiden. The cost is estimated at 2,100 guilders.
The new Reformed church in the Kerkstraat is taken into use.
The church taken into use in 1832 in the entry beside this, a little over a hundred and forty years later. View larger → Nieuwveen gets its first industry: the wind-powered sawmill De Angenieta, near the Kattenbrug, founded by Jeremias Schoenmakers — son of the Reformed minister Pieter Schoenmakers. The Zaagmolenpad (Sawmill Path) is named after this mill.
Nieuwveen too has a cholera epidemic to endure. Eighty people die of it, a tenth of the population.
The Reformed minister Pieter Schoenmakers has a large gentleman's house put up on the Dorpsstraat. Out of it grew Sassenoord, and in 1935 Huize Sint Ursula.
A two-manual organ with ten stops is built for the Reformed church by H. Knipscheer. The instrument has survived virtually unaltered; the independent pedal division is a later addition of 1968.
The interior, looking towards the organ. The instrument in the entry beside this was built in 1858 by H. Knipscheer. View larger → The Leiden firm De Volharding starts a steamboat service to Amsterdam and to Leiden, carrying passengers as well as goods. The landing stage was by the Kattenbrug.
A number of Nieuwveen Catholics petition the bishop of Haarlem to be allowed to continue as a parish of their own. Until then they went to church in Zevenhoven.
The parish of St Nicholas is founded, two years before the church building is taken into use.
Nieuwveen on Kuyper's municipal map, around 1866 — the village as it lay when the parish was founded. View larger → The village gets its first public street lighting: paraffin lanterns. A stubborn fight in the gemeenteraad, the municipal council, came first, and among the population too those for and against were sharply opposed.
The first Roman Catholic church since the Reformation opens on the Dorpsstraat. It had no tower yet; that would follow as soon as the money was there.
The Roman Catholic church on the Dorpsstraat, the first since the Reformation. View larger →
Opposite the present Raadhuis (town hall) on the A.H. Kooistrastraat, the foundation stone goes down for the small church of the Evangelisation Society.
The wind-driven drainage mills disappear one by one; steam pumping stations elsewhere take over their work.
Not all the mills go this early: the lower mill H of the Zevenhoven polder on the Ringdijk, built in 1810, stands until 1926.
A mill near Nieuwveen, from an album of 1851–1891 — the years in which the water mills were being cleared away. View larger →
The first Roman Catholic primary school opens on the Dorpsstraat, opposite the Roman Catholic church.
A great fire strikes the village. On what is now the A.H. Kooistrastraat and in the Kerkstraat, two substantial farms, a café and some ten houses are lost, and with them a large part of the municipal archive.
The first Protestant primary school opens on the corner of the Kerkstraat.
The Roman Catholic church on the Dorpsstraat, in use since 1867, gets its tower after all. The parish priest, J.J. Bruijstens, paid for it out of his own pocket.
The tower was designed by Everardus Margry of Rotterdam, who also designed the church at Hoogmade and the St Bonifatius church in Alphen aan den Rijn. Its height including the cross is 48 metres; the spire alone is 22 metres.
In the porch stand two monumental memorial stones: one of 1559, from the first Nicolaaskerk in the Kerkstraat, and one of 1740, from the old presbytery at Zevenhoven.
The tower and its entrance. The priest paid for it out of his own pocket, according to the entry beside this. View larger → Founding of the Vereniging Johannes Stichting by Dr J. Sasse.
The story begins earlier: the evangelist Smit took in children from the big cities at the Polderhuis, which stood at the crossroads in the village. Out of this came both the Marthastichting and the Johannes Stichting.
The aim was to run an institution for old and infirm people who could not keep themselves and were not cared for by their families – in its own words: "cast-out, uncared-for, dependent, old, weak or infirm persons, whether married or unmarried". Men and women lived separately at first.
The foundation stone for the Johannes Stichting is laid on the street then still known in common speech as the Dorpsstraat, now the A.H. Kooistrastraat.
Dr Sasse proposes carrying the organ of his Johannesstichting over to the school every Sunday, to accompany the singing of the gereformeerde congregation.
The Nieuwkoop steam pumping station is built at Korteraar to a design by W.C. and K. de Wit, fitted with two British Gwynnes centrifugal pumps. It takes over the drainage of the droogmakerij.
The Gereformeerde Kerk on the Kerkstraat opens.
The sawmill De Angenieta by the Kattenbrug, dating from 1846, is pulled down, timber sheds and all. Pieter Schoenmakers carries the business of the firm J. Schoenmakers on at the Amsterdam Houthaven, where it comes to great prosperity.
The Zaagmolenpad — “sawmill path”. The sawmill pulled down in the entry beside this is gone; its name is still in the street. View larger → For the first time a bicycle with pneumatic tyres is sold to someone in Nieuwveen. The buyer was the municipal clerk W. van der Vos; the supplier, the firm Stichter.
