For the Radio Drenthe program Drenthe Then we meet three gentlemen from the Historical Association Zweeloo at the coffee table at Hegen in Wezup, while it is still possible (Hegen recently announced the end of the café-restaurant-hotel). Roelof Schuiling, Rein Tromp and Henk Reinds joined. The latter gives us a lesson ‘Zweeloo for beginners’.
“Zweeloo consists of the main village of Zweeloo, Aalden, Benneveld, Meppen, Wezup and Wezuperbrug. When people settled in permanent residences, around 944, there were villages of three or four farms. The beginning of the villages that later became the Kerspel Zweel and later still formed the municipality of Zweeloo. People had to organize themselves to survive in a gradually expanding world.”
Reinds himself is retired and Zweeler is. “Not born, but raised.” Import? “Yes, if you can speak of that when you are four years old and you go from one village to another, then you are ‘import’, but I really feel Zweeler”, he says with a big smile.