N.C. Highway Historical Marker Commemorates Jewish Agricultural Colony

A community of Jewish immigrants was recruited to settle in rural eastern North Carolina at one of six colonies envisioned and financed by Wilmington’s Hugh MacRae, beginning early in the 1900s. He hoped to recreate the close-knit rural communities of Europe.

One of them was Van Eeden, first settled by Dutch immigrants and then by Jews escaping Hitler’s Germany in 1939. A N.C. Highway Historical Marker will be dedicated to commemorate that settlement Wednesday, April 18, at 2 p.m., at Mount Holly Baptist Church in Burgaw.

Problems soon emerged for the colony, as the resettlement of urban sophisticates with little farm experience to rural North Carolina proved challenging. Crops suffered. There were snakes and mosquitoes. They made the best of a bad situation, but as historian Leonard Rogoff has written, “Burgaw was not Berlin.”

Of the six colonies MacRae established, three were successful: Castle Hayne, Dutch settlers; Saint Helena, Hungarians; and Marathon, Greeks. Van Eeden was again abandoned after resettlement by Jews. The name was derived from Dutch writer and physician Frederik Van Eeden. By 1943 the Jewish homesteaders moved for other opportunities in Wilmington or in the Northeast.

The commemoration program will begin with light refreshments at 1:30 p.m., followed by the 2 p.m. program at the Pender County Public Library, 103 S. Cowan St., Burgaw, N.C. Guests will travel five miles to the marker location after the ceremony for the marker unveiling.

For additional information on the program, please contact Mike Taylor at mtaylor@pendercountync.gov or (910) 259-5113.

For additional information on the N.C. Highway Historical Marker Program, please call (919) 807-7290. The Highway Marker Program is a collaboration between the N.C. Departments of Transportation and Natural and Cultural Resources.