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A state road sign, two buildings, an abandoned church and an old cemetery stand as the only traces of Friesland, Minn., the centerpiece of a former Dutch colony that failed in the early 1900s while others succeeded.

"Successes are easy to see because their fruits tend to endure. Failures tend to fade with time, but when failure was an exception to the rule, maybe there's more to be learned from the exception," said Robert Schoone-Jongen, who is studying the colony's demise. "And that's what I believe the case is with Friesland. It may have been a little town that couldn't, but that doesn't mean it can't teach us something about the era."

Schoone-Jongen is a former teacher at Southwest Minnesota Christian High School in Edgerton. He resigned this year to work on a doctorate in 18th and 19th century U.S. history at the University of Delaware. First, he is culminating 10 years of independent research on Friesland as a summer fellow at the Center for Rural and Regional Studies at Southwest State University in Marshall, where he recently presented some of his research on the former Pine County colony.

His interest stems from wanting to know more about his new surroundings when moving to southwest Minnesota from New Jersey 26 years ago to teach at the Edgerton school. He soon came across the name Theodore F. Koch, a Dutch immigrant who arrived in America in 1885 and colonized Montana, Texas and Minnesota, including the counties of Kandiyohi, Chippewa, Renville, Bigstone, Sterns, Pine and Murray.

"One way or another, Koch was responsible for every one of the Dutch colonies north of the Minnesota River," Schoone-Jonge said. "In every one of them, except Friesland, he succeeded in putting people on the land and keeping them there."

Koch measures success by whether land was passed from father to son, and whether a church was maintained for two generations.

Today, the former colony is mainly woods. An old commercial building that Schoone-Jonge believes originally was the blacksmith shop still exists, along with the former Friesland Reformed Church. The old school house, which someone converted to a home, is the only occupied building. A cemetery also stands, and new headstones replace old ones periodically, presumably the work of family members who no longer live in the area.

The land initially was owned by the Duluth and St. Paul Railroad, which valued its pine forest. When the 1894 Hinkley fire also took the forest, the railroad worked with Koch, one of its middlemen, to sell the land for between $3 and $6 an acre, Schoone-Jonge said.

"By the time Koch started to operate in this region, he'd been in business for more than 10 years and had a very good track record," Schoone-Jonge said. "He's not a fly-by-night, he's not a con artist, but he's in over his head when it comes to this colony, because this time he tried to plan a colony in a woods."

Koch began selling land at Friesland in 1896 through advertisements, noting that the fire had improved the land's quality. According to a copy of an ad in Schoone-Jonge's possession, prospective buyers were to arrive at Union Station in St. Paul wearing a small Dutch flag in their lapels, where Koch would meet them and provide escort to the colony.

"By the hundreds, people came up to see this colony, and in 1896 and 1897, well over 100 families moved into Pine County," Shoone-Jonge said. "None of them were direct immigrants. They came almost exclusively from Wisconsin, Iowa, southeast Minnesota and a few from Kandiyohi County, the Dakotas and Nebraska."

The colony tried to tap into the Minneapolis market with cabbage, rape seed, chickens, and dairy ventures, Schoone-Jonge said. But based on correspondence attached to land contracts of farmers experiencing financial trouble, at least some of the land was of poor quality for agriculture. A railroad investigator's letter described one parcel as "undulating to slightly rolling clay and gravel soil" and "very stony." He rated the property as "fair" compared to other plots in the colony.

"Koch poured a lot of money into this colony to make it work. He built a barracks basically for the people to live in - he called it a hotel - until they could build their own houses," Schoone-Jonge said. "He bought land himself and he used that land as a demonstration farm. He built warehouses. He at least encouraged, if not bankrolled a creamery that was started in Hinkley.

"For about a year or two, it looked like it was going to work. But in about 1899, 1900, it began to disintegrate. People started moving, fast. By 1903, two of the four churches were gone. Somehow the normal glue that usually held the colonies together - the family, church -did not hold them."

A third church closed in 1917, and a fourth -- in the Town of Sandstone and technically outside the colony -- closed in 1929. The post office closed in about 1917 and the railroad pulled its agent out at about the same time.

"For the most part, these people would go where there was a church that spoke their language, that was part of their denomination where they could sing their old songs," Schoone-Jonge said. "For a colony that did have the churches to break up - what happened?"

To find the answers, Schoone-Jonge plans to spend the summer translating issues of an old Iowa-based Dutch newspaper in his possession that carry news of Friesland. He also plans to look at old tax records to study annual assessed land rates and personal property to determine the colony's economic status.

"Did people leave because they saw their investments failing, or leveling off, or did they leave to cash in on their profits and take their capital elsewhere?" Schoone-Jonge said.

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