At the beginning of the twenty-first century there were 360,642 people in the United States who claimed Belgian heritage. Michigan, with 53,135 people who listed Belgium as their place of birth or the country from which their ancestors came, was second only to the state of Wisconsin, which had 57,808.⁴ The descendants of Belgian immigrants in Michigan are descendants of several waves of Belgian immigration to the United States. Between 1830 and 1975 approximately 200,000 Belgians immigrated to the United States. Sixty-three thousand came before 1900. Following the economic crisis of 1847 to 1849, 6,000 to 7,000 Belgians came to...

Belgium is located in Western Europe. It is surrounded by the Netherlands, Germany, Luxembourg, France, and the North Sea. Its population is divided into three official national groups, six million Flemish, four million French-speaking Walloons, and seventy thousand Germans. Belgium is an ancient land, but the independent state of Belgium is a rather recent creation. The Belgians were mentioned by Julius Caesar in hisGallic Wars.Those Belgians were a fierce Celtic people. Much of present-day Belgium was overrun and colonized by the Romans. However, in the third century Germanic Franks and other German tribes increasingly pushed into the area....

Flemish and Walloon Protestants were with the Dutch who explored and settled New Amsterdam, and Belgian Catholic clerics were among the early explorers of the area of the Great Lakes and the Mississippi basin. Friar Louis Hennepin, a Belgian from Ath, accompanied Robert Cavelier de la Salle on his quest for the mouth of the Mississippi River. Hennepin named Lake St. Claire when he passed through it in 1679 on August 12, the feast day of St. Claire. After returning to Europe, Hennepin in 1683 publishedDescription of Louisiana: Newly Discovered to the Southwest of New France by order of...

In the Flemish folk-park at Bokrijk in Limburg there has been a painstaking effort to reconstruct the social environment of Flemish peasants in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In those reconstructed dwellings from the poorest to the more prosperous the importance of religious symbolism is striking. A critic might assert that this is a modern imposition or interpretation, but there has been an effort to be true to the context of these peoples’ social lives, in fact the social environment from which many of the nineteenth-century Flemish immigrants to Michigan came. The Flemish peasants and artisans, who came to Michigan...

A depression affected Belgium from 1873 until 1886. An increasing number of Belgians left for American in search of land or work. Many purchased cheap land around Bay City, Ecorse, Monroe, and Niles. However, America also experienced a depression at the end of the 1870s. Peter De Coster, the honorary Belgian consul at the time, wrote on January 29, 1878, that half of the Belgians in Detroit were unemployed. Employment improved in the 1880s for those with skills, and many Belgians had them. They found work as carpenters, cabinetmakers, and brick makers. Flanders is a land of brick houses and...

The family and religion gave meaning to the life of the Flemish. In addition to family and immediate neighbors, for many Belgian immigrants their church and their saloon were centers of social interaction. According to Verthé, “out of those meeting places they . . . structured their social life piece by piece”⁸⁹ His depiction of the social role of the saloon captured its importance for the Flemish immigrants:

In the evening they meet in one of the Flemish saloons. Then they play cards or bowl, find out if there is any news from the old country, greet newcomers; they air...

Throughout the nineteenth century and through the first half of the twentieth century, the Flemish experienced a second-class citizenship in their own country. When the independent Kingdom of Belgium was established in the 1830s, it was dominated by a French-speaking cultural, political, and economic elite. Apart from the textile mills of Ghent, which declined as the nineteenth century advanced, and the port of Antwerp, the economic center of gravity in Belgium was in the Walloon or French-speaking parts of the country: the coal mines of Hainaut, the steel mills of Liège, the factories of Verviers, and the administrative center of...

Francis Palms has been called “the most prominent figure in the history of Michigan.”¹¹¹ While that claim is certainly debatable, he is clearly one of the more important figures in the economic and business history of the state. He was for a long time the largest landowner in Michigan and one of its most prominent business leaders. Palms was born in Antwerp in 1810. His father, Ange Palms, had served with distinction in the army of Napoleon. After Waterloo he returned to Antwerp, where he built up a substantial factory. After a disastrous fire in 1831, at the time of...

The Belgians, who came to Michigan during the height of Belgian immigration between 1901 and 1913, unless they were infants at the time, are no longer with us. Their children and grandchildren, as well as the descendants of earlier arrivals, have assimilated successfully into American society and constitute a vital segment of Michigan society. Despite assimilation there has been an effort to preserve the memory of the country from which their ancestors came and the unique aspects of its culture. Most significantly theGazette van Detroitis still being published. Its website states that the newspaper “is a bridge between...