New Groningen Cemetery / Groningen

New Groningen Cemetery is the only remnant of the dream of Jan Rabbers to establish Groningen, a commercial and industrial colony for Dutch immigrants who were not farmers. The log house and store owned by Rabbers and his wife, Cornelia, once stood on this site. In 1858, when the residents of Groningen relocated to the village of New Groningen about one mile northeast of here, the Rabberses sold the property to the churchyard association. Additional land purchases brought the cemetery to its present size. Most graves have simple headstones. Those of more prominent settlers can be identified by the large obelisks denoting family plots. Many of the oldest graves are unmarked, the wooden markers having deteriorated and disappeared. Groningen Established in 1847 as the commercial and industrial center of the Dutch colonies settled by immigrants in Ottawa County, Groningen began as a thriving village. Groningen’s founder, Jan Rabbers, was among the followers of Albertus Van Raalte who established the Holland settlement earlier that year. For his own community, Rabbers chose a site on the Black River, which he thought would became a major trade artery because of its location at the endpoint of a navigable waterway. He built a small log house and store on this site, a bridge over the river, and a lumber mill nearby. The promising village died when the bridge washed out in 1856 and a new one downstream diverted traffic to that area. Groningen’s citizens relocated their settlement to that site, which they called New Groningen.