Forgotten Crafts: Peat Diggers
Photograph Beroep in Beeld
Could you imagine having a job that required you standing in a wobbly boat bending over to dig out heavy mud out of the water for sixteen hours a day, six days a week and sleeping in a damp, dirty tent for six weeks a year?
Would you do that to earn a salary that could barely feed your family? Peat diggers did!
Digging For Fuel
If your ancestors are from the province of Groningen or Drenthe, it is not unlikely that you will find that one of them was working in the peat industry. Both provinces had large reserves of peat.
So, what is peat anyway and why would people go through the trouble of digging it up: hard, backbreaking work?
Peat is formed when dead plant material –especially from mosses– accumulates over time. When compressed and dried, it becomes turf, which makes excellent fuel. It burns slow and heats well without much smoke. Peat is also used as potting soil and as a raw material for producing activated coal, a key ingredient for certain medical and chemical industries.
There are two types of peateries: bog and fen. Fen is an alkaline or neutral soil type made of a moss called sphagnum. It can be easily exploited when drained: the dried peat can then simply be dug out with a spade. Bog is an acidic soil type that is much harder to exploit. Since it cannot be drained as easily as fen, the peat must be dug out from underneath the water with a special spade. Diggers could only do so by standing in the water or in a boat.
The Swamp Gold Mine
Since turf has long been the main fuel, the peat industry dates back as far as the 15th century. During this time peat digging was mainly done on a small scale near monasteries or small cities to both provide fuel and reclaim land from the marshes.
In the western Netherlands –where cities grew fast– the relatively small amounts of peat in the marshes around Amsterdam were used up by the 17th century. The peat extraction had left deep scars in the landscape still visible today: the lakes of Vinkeveense Plassen, Nieuwkoopse Plassen, and Haarlemmermeer are the result of massive peat extraction.
When the west ran out of peat they turned to the Dutch Outback. In the 17th and 18th century the northern and eastern parts of the Netherlands were little more than a really big swamp with some small towns and cities built on what little dry land could be found. For centuries this part of the country had been seen as completely irrelevant and backward. But now, all of a sudden it became a gold mine, for large parts of swamp in Groningen and Drenthe contained huge amounts of peat.
Peat Bosses
Rich citizens of the big cities founded peat-investing companies, the so-called veencompagniën. The capital raised was used to buy big pieces of marshland in the East of the Netherlands, dig canals to drain the peat and invest in the necessary tools to extract it. The actual exploitation of the peateries was outsourced to small independent merchants called veenbazen (peat bosses) or turfboeren (turf farmers). These veenbazen were often farmers or shopkeepers that exploited the peat for an extra seasonal income. The veenbaas would lease or buy a piece of marshland from the veencompagnie and pay them toll for the use of the canals. The veenbaas was responsible for hiring workforce and selling the turf.
Turf Makers
The veenbaas would usually employ two or three turf makers. A turfmaker had a steady job with the veenbaas. He was responsible for stamping down the wet peat the diggers had spread out on the land, then cutting it and preparing the dried turf blocks for shipping. Often he was helped in these tasks by his wife and children. Being a turfmaker was the best job you could get in the industry after being a veenbaas. It was a steady job, that paid well and the work was not as backbreaking as digging.
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Tags: forgotten craft, peat, peat colony
