When Geert Schuurman (81) walks through his village, he is a little disappointed. The dam that cars now drive over used to be a folding bridge. “I’ve experienced that,” he says, smiling. “And then came the stone bridge. Now it’s just a dam. It’s a shame that the canals have disappeared. That will never come back.”
Together with his sister Jantje, Schuurman worked for fourteen years on a book about the origins of 2e Exloërmond. It was their second joint project, they previously wrote a book about a hundred years of village interests.
“After that first book we got the hang of it,” says Schuurman. “We wanted to know how it all started and we dove into that.”
It was a regular occurrence every Thursday. “We went together to the archives of the Hunze en Aa’s water board. We sat there for hours looking through old maps and minutes. We had no idea what we would find, but the more we read, the more curious we became.”