Maya Hilty|Sheboygan Press
SHEBOYGAN - On an evening walk around Christmas 2020, Joske Meerdink stopped at a large monument in a cemetery in her hometown of Winterswijk, in the Netherlands, and began to read the story of the Phoenix.
She walked home and Googled the story for about four hours straight.
“I was immediately captivated by the story,” she said.
Meerdink set to work on a year-long podcast about the sinking of the steamship and teamed up with Dutch filmmaker Diny van Hoften, who is making a documentary on the story.
The Phoenix was carrying more than 225 passengers, a majority of whom were Dutch immigrants headed for Sheboygan, when it burned to the water line on the early morning of Nov. 21, 1847, only miles from shore, according to the monument on Sheboygan's North Point.
The disaster killed all but about 45 people on board — becoming one of the deadliest shipwrecks on Lake Michigan, said Sheboygan Falls genealogist and historian Mary Risseeuw.
Meerdink and van Hoften visited Sheboygan in late July to interview people of Dutch descent in Sheboygan and Manitowoc counties, including descendants of people who survived the sinking of the Phoenix.
Dutch immigrants came to Sheboygan seeking 'a better life'
Meerdink and van Hoften’s podcast and documentary will not only tell the story of migration from the Netherlands in the mid-1800s, personal stories of passengers on the Phoenix and accounts of the ship's sinking but explore connections among descendants of survivors.
After beginning her work on the podcast — with the help of Risseeuw, an expert in 19th- and 20th-century Dutch immigration to the Midwest — Meerdink discovered she is related to six of the 10 survivors from her hometown in the Netherlands.
“So my podcast is also about my search for family members who are still alive,” Meerdink said, standing at Sheboygan’s North Pier in late July. “I’m talking to them this week.”
Van Hoften does not have a personal connection to the story but has long been interested in Dutch migration.
“Stories about immigration to the U.S. fascinateme because I can’t imagine doing it — leaving all your family behind,” van Hoften said.
“Most people didn’t choose a better life for them, but for their children,” she said. “What’s fascinating about the Phoenix is people were wanting to give their children a better life, but a lot of children died on the Phoenix, so it’s a really tragic story.”
One factor driving Dutch emigration in the late 1840s was a potato famine in the country. Crop failures were making it incredibly difficult for farmers to make a living, Risseeuw said.
The desire for religious freedom, after a split in the Dutch Reformed Church called the Secession of 1835, also drove people to immigrate to the U.S., she said.
“The immigrants who came specifically to Wisconsin did not come with a minister in the same way they did to Michigan and Iowa, but for many of them (a reason for immigrating) was religious freedom as well,” she said.
Colonists organized Sheboygan County around 1838 and the county grew rapidly in the 1840s, from 133 white settlers in 1840 to more than 1,600 by 1844. The first group of Dutch settlers arrived in the county in 1846, according to a 1920 clipping of the Sheboygan Press.
More: Cedar Grove Holland Festival honors Dutch culture with events this weekend.
More: Sheboygan native Tim Jacob was part of the expedition that found Ernest Shackleton’s sunken ship, the Endurance, off Antarctica.
People have kept the story of the Phoenix alive for 175 years and counting. Here's why that matters.
In 1997, around the 150th commemoration of the Phoenix’s sinking, a Dutch TV station made a six-part documentary about the disaster, Risseeuw said.
The documentary and podcast now being created for the 175th anniversary of the sinking of the shipare significant because they show a new effort is being made to keep the story alive, she said.
“A new, younger generation that potentially hasn’t heard the story will now know it, and hopefully there will be new people to carry it on,” she said.
Some younger people in Sheboygan said they only knew about the Phoenix because of the monument on North Point, Meerdink said.
“I thought, ‘That’s the same way I know the story also, by a monument,’” she said. “The challenging thing is to spread the story to a new generation so it didn’t get lost.”
Some people wonder why it is necessary to keep telling the story.
Risseeuw’s response is there are a lot of people out there, some of whom may not have even been born 25 years ago, who may not know the story of the Phoenix is part of their own history.
Risseeuw lectures periodically about the ship and has heard from people that, for one reason or another, only recently found that they were descendants of survivors from its sinking.
“They’re beside themselves that they are part of that story,” she said. “And they get to find out more information about it.”
The name of the Phoenix is interesting considering its end, Meerdink said.
“We end up putting our own spin on it,” Risseeuw said. “You think about, you know, a phoenix rising from the ashes. One way to look at the name and its relationship to the story is the people who rose out of the ashes of that burning ship and lived were able to create lives in Sheboygan County.”
“I sit with a smile from ear to ear after enjoying a trip to Sheboygan, Wisconsin USA,” Meerdink recently posted on Facebook. “For 9 days we were away from home, almost 6500 kilometers away, but it felt like coming home.”
The first episode of the podcast and documentary will both be released around Nov. 21 through Omroep Gelderland, the provincial broadcast station where Meerdink and van Hoften work.
Reach Maya Hilty at 920-400-7485 or MHilty@sheboygan.gannett.com. Follow her on Twitter at @maya_hilty.
