With the proposed annexation of the Oostpolder, the expanding Eemshaven will again swallow up a large chunk of land that was conquered from the sea in the nineteenth century. A story about Christmas flood, ‘Salt marsh issue’ and fertile clay.
It’s actually a puddle of nothing. A spacious fishing pond, that’s all it is. Yet this small body of water in a bend in the centuries-old Dijkweg near Oudeschip is a historic place. Eilts Gat, also known as Aeilsgat, is a last silent witness to the devastating Christmas flood that took the lives of 2,300 Groningen residents in 1717.
It was precisely at this location that the fragile sea dike from 1630 broke on that disastrous Christmas night. The seething water swirled inwards, towards the hinterland, creating a hole that is still a reminder of that devastating storm surge to this day. Too deep to fill in once the sea had calmed down and the people of Groningen raised the dike within a year. So it was drawn in an arc around the Eilts Gat at Oudeschip.
Fight against new disasters and for agricultural prosperity
And that is how it still lies, now in the middle of the farmland that was conquered from the sea in later centuries. More than three centuries after that Christmas flood, and a long line of reclamations later, that 1717 chamber is still a historical sign in the landscape. A symbol for the struggle against new disasters and for agricultural prosperity on the fertile salt marsh clay.
The water also lives on in age-old sagas and legends in the region. According to folk tales, a mermaid became trapped when the dike was closed and raised again after the Christmas flood, under the leadership of Thomas von Seeratt, the legendary Groningen water management pioneer who has since fallen into disgrace because of his later career as a captain on slave ships.
The ‘seaweed’ would thus be doomed to spend her days in that vortex, swirling furiously around in the water, intent on revenge for her cruel fate. That would have cost the life of the young farmer Ayolt, or in Groningen: Ailt or Aeils. One night, deluded by the mermaid’s song, he rode into the wreck with a horse and cart and was never found again. According to tradition, Ailt’s sad fate would later befall even more young men, but the chamber still bears his name to this day. Just as the mermaid still has a place in the municipal coat of arms of Het Hogeland and its predecessors Eemsmond, Hefshuizen and Uithuizermeeden.
Historian Meindert Schroor knows the story. “But you shouldn’t come to me for legends,” laughs the Leeuwarden. The social geographer and landscape historian knows a lot more about the history of the Groningen and Frisian landscape. He wrote about it in a long series of books and essays. He published specifically about the Groningen coastal area created by human hands, among other things ‘Het Hoogeland – Heart of the Ommelanden’ and ‘Wotter’ an exploration of the crucial role that farmers and the water boards they run played in this from 1850 onwards.
Silted marine clay has been incorporated into the salt marshes since the Middle Ages
These themes clearly coincide in the polders around the current Eemshaven. Of course, even in the Middle Ages, the people of Groningen were reclaiming land from the sea piece by piece, from the mouths of the Lauwers and the Fivel to those of the Eems in the Dollard. The fertile marine clay that silted up on the salt marshes was rich agricultural land. As early as the thirteenth century, the new land on the northwest side of the province was bordered with the Oudedijk or Oldiek, from Hornhuizen in the west to Watum near Delfzijl. However, this was not a real sea wall. Nor did the Middendijk from 1630, as the Christmas flood made clear.
“But in the nineteenth century, the people of Groningen changed the entire medieval situation,” Schroor outlines. “A powerful provincial government led by the liberal King’s Commissioner Soetens van Roijen is tackling the entire water management in the province. There will be a strong water board for each catchment area, the Reitdiep will be closed at Zoutkamp and new pumping stations will be built. At that time, Groningen was much more modern than Friesland. Traditionally, there has always been conflict between the eleven cities, among themselves and with the countryside. With you you only had the City and Ommeland, with the city also owning half of the province. As a result, management was much more businesslike and effective. In Groningen the merchant ruled, in Friesland the pastor.”
New wave of reclamations in the nineteenth century
It led to a wave of new land reclamations in the nineteenth century. Since 1811, the Noordpolder and the Uithuizerpolder have been successively drained off the Hogelandster coast, and in 1840 the Oostpolder, which is now incorporated into the Eemshaven. The Eemspolder followed in 1878 and the Lauwerpolder in 1892.
Further east in the province, the Reiderwolderpolder, the Johannes Kerkhovenpolder and in 1924 the Carel Coenraadpolder were created on the Dollard around the same time. More towards Friesland, the Westpolder is constructed at Vierhuizen, cradle of Groningen gentleman farmer dynasties such as the Mansholten and the Louwesen, which produced great administrators such as European agricultural commissioner Sicco Mansholt.
Another important difference with Friesland: in Groningen, land reclamation is an exclusive farming affair. This has everything to do with the applicable Ommelander law. This stipulates that farmers or ‘riverbank owners’ have the right of ‘expansion’ or ‘accretion’ for land that silts up on the drying salt marshes in front of their land. This is a provision from old Frisian law, but abolished in that province itself around 1500 when the province fell into the hands of Duke Albrecht of Saxony. It allows the fertile salt marshes off the North Frisian coast to be reclaimed, and in Groningen there is all new land for the farmers. They make money on the rich clay.
‘Finally acquired the right’ to ‘give birth to these on this ground’
Very different from Groningen, this difference creates villages such as Sint Annaparochie and Sint Jacobiparochie in the North Frisian polders. In Groningen, farmers develop the salt marshes from their house plots on the old land, and they continue to live there. Houses are not built on that valuable agricultural land. Grain and other profitable crops, that is what the land that was conquered from the turbulent waves is all about. This is also underlined by the lyric poem on a plaque at the Goliath polder mill in the Eemspolder, close to the current Eemshaven:
‘After twenty-four years
They finally got the right
on this ground of the waves
Thus the goal has been achieved
has been proposed to us for a long time
and shows off the waving grain
soon on this new field.’
So people don’t live in the polders. Only in the Uithuizerpolder, also near the Eemshaven, did the hamlet of Valom arise. But this northernmost place in the Netherlands never became more than a row of farms. “Although there was a report in 1951 to turn it into a village with a hundred houses for six hundred inhabitants,” Schroor says. “The expectation at the time was that they would be desperately needed for work in the fields. The increasing mechanization in agriculture quickly put an end to this.”
But while the farmers are becoming extremely wealthy and the polders are bringing great prosperity to the province (albeit largely at the expense of the agricultural workers), the national government is planning a trick to share in the profits. French rule, of all things, provides The Hague with an instrument for this. Under French law, all new land belongs to the state. The Domains Service claims ownership of the fertile mud in front of the dike and that is the starting point for the ‘Salt Marsh Issue’, a conflict that will ultimately last a hundred years.
Salt marsh issue: Groningen farmers have been fighting with the state for a century
The Groningen farmers are completely unwilling to give up even a strip of clay. They resist with all their might and receive help from a Warfumer doctor. This Rembertus Westerhoff discovered that this French provision does not apply to land accretion in rivers, but only in the sea. He argues that the entire mudflat is actually a estuary: Van Eems, Lauwer and Fivel. The sea only begins above the islands, Westerhoff states in his argument ‘The salt marsh issue explained in more detail’ .
This means that the Groningen farmers’ association Pro Excolendo Jure Patrio is right in court and the State is left empty-handed with every new attempt. Ultimately, it will take until 1950 before the farmers lose their right of access. Although the State managed to make an advance there, thanks to yet another occupier. Officials in The Hague convince the Germans that new land is needed for food supply: in 1944 the Emmapolder was constructed near the current Eemshaven area, although it was of course only given that name after the liberation.
The farmers are left slightly bitter, and that is the case now that the province and the municipality of Het Hogeland are preying on the Oostpolder. Loss of this highly productive clay soil means a huge financial blow for the seed potato growers in the area. As a farmer told the Groningen States: “This is the Rolls Royce of Dutch agricultural land.”
Loss of ‘right of access’ still haunts farmers
In any case, the loss of the old ‘right of extension’ still stings a bit. In the impressive television series The Earth Shakes , about the earthquake problem, farmer Reint Meijer looks eagerly over the already heavily silted salt marsh land in front of ‘his’ Bokumer-Ikemapolder near Kloosterburen. “In the light of history, we would have turned around our piggy bank a long time ago and built a dike around it with a group of farmers here. But that is no longer allowed.”
Because nowadays the government is in charge of the salt marshes and, to the dismay of the farmers, prefers to turn them into natural land. “Maybe one day we will need that land again for farming,” says Meijer, almost wistfully. “But I won’t experience that again.”