Veneklasen Brick: A Family, a Company, and a Unique Nineteenth-Century Architectural Movement in Michigan by Michael J. Douma

134 Michigan Historical Review provided a framework for action. Just as Rachel Carson's book, Silent Spring, marked the beginning of a wave of reform directed at toxic chemical pollutants, theWater Quality Agreement marked the beginning of a twenty-year period of broad-based comebacks for the Great Lakes. Dempsey deals skillfully with that era, citing its goals, successes, and failures. Yet despite some progress, he concludes that the lakes are in peril. A litany of failures and the reasons why these failures occurred are cited in rich detail, and the evidence of current serious trouble is spelled out clearly. Dempsey believes that government programs need large scale funding and that the people who live around the lakes must raise their voices and exercise their power as citizens to achieve reform. On the Brink covers several centuries in only 276 pages of text, and these pages are embellished with reminiscences about life on the lakes and colorful episodes in their history. Most of the work focuses on the last half-century, and therein lies the book's major contribution: it provides a critical review of efforts to control pollution. Also important is Dempsey's broad interpretive view of how lake quality has deteriorated during the past two centuries. Wisely, he considers the lakes as a geographic unit, drawing on the history of both Canadians and Americans, and while incomplete and occasionally incorrect, the general portrait is accurate. On the Brink is a wake-up call that draws upon the work of many other scholars. The author has served as an environmental advisor in Michigan government and as a member of the Great Lakes Fishery Commission. Margaret Beattie Bogue Em?rita Professor of History and Liberal Studies University ofWisconsin, Madison Michael J. Douma. Veneklasen Brick: A Family, a Company, and a Unique Nineteenth-Century Architectural Movement inMichigan. Wm. B. Eerdmans, 2005. Pp. 117. Bibliography. Illustrations. Index. Maps. Paper, $16.00. How do we learn to "read" the historic landscape/townscape? Michael Douma's study of brickworks and brick building in West Michigan is an important reconstruction of the collective memory of a particular part of America. Indeed, anyone coming upon an antique West Michigan brick structure?sometimes deep orange, sometimes with red and white detailing?should remember the artistic and entrepreneurial genius of the Veneklasen family. Book Reviews 135 Most early industries along Lake Michigan's eastern shore were connected to the extraction of raw materials from the great white pine forests or from the lake. These products included not only cut lumber and shingles by the millions of board feet, but also hemlock for leather tanning and hardwood for boatbuilding?and, of course, the yield of the lake itself, the great Lake Michigan whitefish. Most of these products were sent across the lake to Chicago and Milwaukee, often to be exported farther west. All of this, of course, was a part of that great Chicago economy that William Cronin called "nature's metropolis" in his book Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West, which was published in 1991. Douma's book looks at another side ofthat story: the extraction of natural resources for local consumption. This is the story of the rich clay fields that lay between the Dutch setdements of Groningen and Zeeland in West Michigan's Ottawa County. It centers on how the Veneklasen family organized and carried on a notable industry. It is about the invention of a building type?the solid and respectable brick house?for an emigrant community as well as the story of the craft of brick making and an account of the growth and decline of an important labor force. Veneklasen Brick considers the early organization of the brick industry and the various reasons for the demand for bricks (class identification as well as fire protection), brick building as a construction form, labor conditions, and the architecture ofWest Michigan brick building. It was in 1851 that the Veneklasen family turned out the bricks for the area's first brick house?the Steketee/Scholten house, which still stands very near where the first Veneklasen brickyard was located in Holland Township. From this point onward in the Holland-Zeeland area brick houses became common...

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