The History of the Zaanse Schans

The Zaanse Schans is younger than it looks and older than it seems. The buildings are 17th, 18th and 19th century; the village they stand in was drawn on paper in 1946 and assembled between 1961 to 1974. Both facts are true at once, and neither is a secret.

The Kalver-Schans, 1574 — the one the Spanish never took

“Schans” means sconce: an earthwork, a redoubt. In the Eighty Years’ War against Spanish rule the Zaan region threw up about thirteen of them, and in 1574 the largest stood on the far side of the road from where the village is now. It was the only Zaanse sconce the Spanish never took.

Nothing of it survives above ground. An aerial photograph from 1944 shows the outline of its rampart as a discolouration in the pasture, reaching as far as the head of the Kalverringdijk — which is to say it ended more or less where the mills begin.

In the same year the Zaankanters beat the Spanish on Whit Monday, and marked it afterwards with a holiday called Pinksterdrie. The foundation revived it in 2013 as Pinksterzaan, which is still held on Whit Monday. The events page has this year’s date.

The crankshaft of 1594, and what it started

In 1594 Cornelis Corneliszoon van Uitgeest patented a device that turned the horizontal spin of a windmill’s sails into a vertical stroke. It sounds like an engineering footnote. It was the beginning of industrial sawmilling, and it made the Zaan rich.

Timber that a team of sawyers cut by hand in a week could now be cut by wind in a day. Building materials became cheap, ships became cheap, and a region of marsh and water turned into a factory floor.

Around six hundred mills, and 26 shipyards

At its height the Zaan region had around six hundred windmills working at once. They were wind-powered factories, and they made an extraordinary variety of things: machine-sawn timber, paper, ground spices, oil for food and for paint, dyes, all kinds of fibre, flour and cocoa powder.

The shipbuilding followed the timber. In the 17th century the Zaan became the centre of commercial shipbuilding in Europe, with 26 shipyards launching between 100 and 150 ships a year. Until the middle of the 19th century the region also held an important share of Dutch whaling.

The mills that survive on the dike are a sample of that: a paint mill, two oil mills, two sawmills, a spice mill. The windmills page takes them one at a time.

Fire contracts and shared inventions

Two habits made the Zaan unusual, and both were practical rather than romantic. Zaan millers shared their technical innovations with each other rather than guarding them, which is why new mill types spread through the region in a generation. And they insured one another by mutual agreement against mill fires — the “fire contracts” — because a thatched mill in an open field with a lightning strike in it was a total loss.

De Bonte Hen, standing since 1693, survived several lightning strikes where most of its companions did not. That is the whole reason it is still here.

Timber, teahouses and the colour of a Zaan house

The prosperity is visible in the buildings, if you know what to look at. Alongside the mills and barns, the wealthy mill owners, traders and dignitaries built timber houses on the dike beside the Zaan, which was then the region’s main traffic artery. These often had a decorated front and back facade, because both were seen.

An owner doing well would add a wellington to the house. One doing very well had an overtuin — a garden separated from the house by a road or a strip of water, used for growing vegetables, as an ornamental garden, or as a bleaching field for laundry. Several of the region’s luxurious teahouses survive.

And the colour: Zaan houses were painted in a range of greens, beiges and pale blues, inside as well as out. The dark blue-green that every building at the Zaanse Schans wears is the one that stuck.

1916: the mill that ran on diesel

The end of the wind came quietly. De Os, an oil mill dating from before 1663 and one of the oldest industrial mills the Zaan ever built, turned on wind until 1916. That year its cap, sails and stand were removed and its machinery was driven by a diesel engine instead, which it was until 1931.

The oil mills on the Zaan stopped altogether in 1936; from then it was electric motors and then petrol. Of around six hundred mills, a handful survived to be worth saving.

1946: Jaap Schipper’s plan

By the end of the Second World War the Zaan timber tradition was disappearing building by building, and the architect Jaap Schipper proposed something unusual: not a museum of objects but a working neighbourhood, reassembled. He drew the plan in 1946.

The name he chose is a metaphor. The village stands beside where the Kalver-Schans was, but the “schans” in Zaanse Schans is a sanctuary rather than a fort — a refuge for a way of building that the post-war years were destroying.

1961 to 1974: a village moved by road and by water

From 1961 the buildings arrived. Houses, barns, warehouses, workshops and mills were taken from all over the Zaan region and brought here on lowboy trailers and by boat, over thirteen years.

One move is worth telling. De Zoeker, an oil mill estimated to date from 1610, was relocated in 1968 with its cap — eighteen tonnes of it — moved in a single piece, hoisted over railway overhead lines and then floated by boat to the eastern bank of the Zaan.

The Zaanse Schans has never been inscribed on the UNESCO World Heritage List. Kinderdijk — a different windmill site, about 100 kilometres south — was, in 1997. This is a reassembled village, and its own foundation says so plainly. That is not a lesser thing; it is a different one.

Is it a real village? Yes, and people live in it

The most common thing said against the Zaanse Schans is that it is a theme park, and the answer is in the doors. Most of the timber houses are private homes with families in them, which is why the foundation asks visitors not to walk into houses or gardens. The mills are run by millers, some of them volunteers, and they sell what they make — De Kat supplies pigment to restorers, Het Jonge Schaap sells its timber.

What is undeniably touristy is the shopping around it, and plenty of visitors say both things in the same review. The reviews page keeps those in.

The whole thing on one page

The Zaanse Schans, and the region that made it

1871: Monet at Zaandam

In 1871 Claude Monet spent several months at Zaandam and painted 25 paintings and 9 sketches of the Zaan, the mills and the wooden houses. Of those canvases only four are in the Netherlands and just one is in the Zaan region — it hangs in the Zaans Museum, a few hundred metres from the water he painted.

guided Zaanse Schans tours reach all of this in an afternoon, and the guides who work here tell most of it better than a plaque does.