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I sat on a piece of plastic so that the “grass” didn’t get onto my costume, although a photograph reveals that, during at least one of the parades, I had restationed myself atop the bridge. I can recall our float getting pulled down the route both Dutch Festival evenings and looking out into the crowd, several rows deep on each side of the street, and seeing a variety of audience members wearing Dutch costumes of one sort or another, with various degrees of detail.
Apart from a few isolated memories of rides and individual floats, this is my earliest sustained memory of the Edgerton Dutch Festival. Accordingly, I have an image of the Dutch Festival incorporating many Dutch elements into it: costumes, tulips, wooden shoes, windmills, architectural depictions, and so on. The 1984 Dutch Festival, however, was an exception rather than a rule: Few Dutch Festivals since that time have done much in the way of keeping “Dutch” elements (costumes, food, dances, etc.) in the Festival.
Orange City, Iowa’s Tulip Festival, held each year in May, presents a markedly different picture. Since the early 1970s, at least, Orange City has gone out of its way to introduce more and more “Dutch” elements into the May festival. Costumes from many different Dutch towns and villages, most of them painstakingly researched by local individuals, have been in evidence for many years. Orange City is only an hour and a half to the south of Edgerton, and much of my mother’s family lives in and around Orange City, so, on several occasions, my family attended the Orange City Tulip Festival. On one such occasion, I remember watching a group of dancers performing a folk dance. Many of the dancers were dressed in Volendam costumes, but at least one was dressed in a very different-looking costume, which I now know to have been a costume from the village of Marken. I remember asking my dad why that one dancer wasn’t wearing a Dutch costume; he responded that that was a different kind of Dutch costume, but it was just as Dutch as the others. This would have been in the mid-1980s. When I returned to Orange City’s Tulip Festival in 2006, an even greater variety of costumes were worn by folk dancers and audience members. If Edgerton’s Dutch Festival has little that is “Dutch” about it, Orange City’s Tulip Festival tries to exhibit many different examples of Dutch dances, songs, and costumes.