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Yet within this sample these festivals are quite diverse in terms of size, their emphasis on heritage, and their purpose. To capture this diversity, I will investigate five festivals: (a) Holland, Michigan’s Tulip Time, a huge festival with many types of events; (b) Pella, Iowa’s Tulip Time, much like Holland’s, though on a smaller scale; (c) Orange City, Iowa’s Tulip Time, a still smaller, though important regional, festival; (d) Edgerton, Minnesota’s Dutch Festival, a small festival seemingly far less concerned than Holland, Pella, or Orange City with accuracy in costumes or exhibiting its heritage; and (e) Fulton, Illinois’ Dutch Days Festival, a festival with a more recent, and somewhat different, origin from the other four.
I also focus specifically on Dutch heritage celebrations because three of them—Holland’s Tulip Time Festival, Pella’s Tulip Time Festival, and Orange City’s Tulip Festival—are among the earliest examples of towns capitalizing on ethnic heritage to draw attention and tourists to themselves. These three festivals were started between 1929 and 1936, a decade or more before similar festivals celebrating other ethnicities began to emerge (Danielson, “St. Lucia” 188). Thus, these Dutch festivals are interesting as the precursors to, even prototypes for, subsequent ethnic pride festivals, whatever the ethnicity celebrated.
The fact that the Tulip festivals in Holland, Pella, and Orange City were among the first outward-directed annual celebrations of ethnic heritage make the dearth of scholarship on these events unfortunate. To date, Suzanne Sinke and Deborah Che have published articles about Holland’s Tulip Time, and Lisa Jaarsma Zylstra recently completed a Master’s thesis that addressed Pella’s Tulip Time, but only up to roughly 1947. Janet Sjaarda Sheeres has also written a conference paper overview of Dutch Festivals in the United States (“Klompendancing Through America”),1 and Ellen Van’t Hof has delivered two conference presentations on the wooden shoe (klompen) dances performed during Holland, Michigan’s Tulip Time (“The Netherlands/West Michigan Connection;” “The Klompendance of Holland, Michigan”).