Klokkenspel: Anticipation mounted in our small group of onlookers in front of the brick facade and decorated neck gables of the Pella klokkenspel. Some had seen it before and assured those who hadn’t that the figures would first emerge from behind the curtained glass on the north side. Sure enough, at 1pm sharp, the Dominee (pronounced DOE-muh-nay) Scholte (the sch pronounced with one of those impossible Dutch guttural G’s that sound like you’re clearing you’re throat), Separatist founder of Pella, reverent in glasses and wisp of a smile, baptizes an infant in a long trailing Christening gown. Act two in the window to the right: dark-haired Dominee’s wife Mareah breaks down in eternal tears, grieving the loss of her fine Delft blue china broken in transit from the Netherlands. She holds a broken piece of Delft in her left hand. Luckily the hanky she holds in her right hand is a large one. After Mareah’s tears have been spent, a youthful blacksmith pounds forever on his anvil, representing the work ethic of this community. Shades of the Wild West! – it’s Wyatt Earp – this famous lawman spent some of his boyhood in Pella. He’s cleaning his Winchester rifle in the last window of the north-facing klokkenspel.
Sunny side up:We all make our way quickly to the sunny south-facing windows as the curtains close on Wyatt. The first figure to appear, his face half hidden in shadow, is another youthful laborer, this time the wooden shoemaker. He saws into the log on the table at which he’s working, surrounded by the finished product - wooden shoes. In the center window, let’s hear it for Tulip Time! A mother holding a bouquet of purple tulips and her daughter in front of her both wave to the crowd – us. The final curtain parts to reveal another couple, a milkman carrying two buckets yoked across his shoulders, and next to him, a woman with a broom, the street sweeper, reminding us of two important life’s necessities, sustenance and cleanliness. The klokkenspel has played itself out once again; the little crowd applauds and scatters. It’s quite a good introduction to Pella . . .
Unrest in the Netherlands, mid-1800s: Other white settlers had already begun farming the fertile land between the Des Moines and the Skunk Rivers when a group of Afgescheidenen Dutch, literally "those who are separate or apart from," arrived there in 1847. The industrial revolution in the Netherlands, failure of successive crops of rye and potatoes, and mass migration of farming people to European cities all contributed to unrest. When a group of religious fundamentalist Separatists broke away from the mainstream Dutch Reformed Church, King Willem I suppressed their meetings and had some leaders fined or imprisoned. A mass of Dutch immigration (a quarter of a million people) came in the 1840s. 
The Dutch come to Marion County: One Separatist group, some 800 strong, led by Hendrik P. Scholte, a minister, founded the town of Pella in Marion County, Iowa. Pella is named after the Decapolis city in Jordan, which was the birthplace of Alexander the Great. Currently called Tabaqat Fahl, the city after which Pella, Iowa is named, it is a very ancient one, occupied since Neolithic and possibly Paleolithic times as long as 100,000 years ago. But the reason Pella, Iowa was so named is because Pella, Jordan was the city to which many Christians of Jerusalem escaped, finding refuge when Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans in 70 AD. Scholte’s group was well off enough financially to buy out earlier settlers to the Iowa area they desired for themselves.