The name first shows up in writing in 1036, attached to a man called Fredericus van Coevorden - Frederik from Coevorden. The van is the Dutch tussenvoegsel, the small connector that simply means 'of' or 'from.' Sometime in the medieval centuries, a branch of the family drifted to England, where the place name softened on English tongues into something more pronounceable: Vancouver. Centuries later one of their descendants, a Royal Navy officer named George Vancouver, sailed up the Pacific coast of North America in the 1790s charting harbors and islands. The cities of Vancouver, British Columbia, and Vancouver, Washington, both took his name. The pleasing closing of the circle came in 1986, when the city of Coevorden gave Richmond, British Columbia, a replica of its castle for Expo 86. It stands today in a place called Fantasy Gardens. The original castle is still in Coevorden.

Coevorden is the oldest city in the province of Drenthe and was for centuries a fortified town that mattered out of proportion to its size. It sits on the historical route between Groningen and Munster - a trade road that became, in wartime, a supply road. Whoever held Coevorden held the gate to the northern Netherlands. In 1141 a bishop of Utrecht named Hartbert van Bierum installed his own brother as the hereditary viscount, expecting a quiet vassal. The brother's descendants did not stay quiet. They became the powerful Lords of Coevorden, who fought wars against their nominal bishop-masters, controlled the courts of all of Drenthe, and at their height held influence as far away as Borculo and Diepenheim in Germany. The dynasty lasted until 1402, when the bishop of Utrecht finally finished what previous bishops had only attempted - he stripped them of their hereditary castle. Coevorden received formal city rights six years later, in 1408.

The most famous episode in Coevorden's long quarrel with the bishops of Utrecht came in 1227, when Bishop Otto van Lippe rode into Drenthe to enforce his rights and was killed - along with most of his army - in a swampy disaster called the Battle of Ane. The Drenthe peasants, fighting under Rudolf II van Coevorden, used the marshland against the heavy horse of the bishop's knights and slaughtered them. It was one of the great peasant victories of the medieval Low Countries. The reckoning came three years later. The next bishop, Wilbrand of Oldenburg, hunted the Drents down and finally defeated them at Peize. Rudolf II was lured to Hardenberg Castle, captured, tortured, and murdered on July 25, 1230. The castle that the bishop built in response was named Hardenberg - hard hill - and is the reason that town exists. Coevorden, in other words, accidentally founded its closest rival.

The star-shaped layout you see in Coevorden today is older than the modern country. It was the standard answer of Renaissance and early-modern Dutch military engineers to the new threat of cannon: build outward pointing bastions so that defenders could fire along the wall instead of just out from it. The pattern, known generally as the Old Dutch System and made famous by other Dutch fortresses like Bourtange and Naarden, made Coevorden one of the strongest places in the northern Netherlands. The town was besieged and changed hands repeatedly through the Eighty Years' War and was, by the 19th century, no longer needed as a fortress. The walls became parks. The moats became gardens. The radial streets remained, and the castle - Kasteel Coevorden, much restored - still anchors the center.

Coevorden today is a comfortable small city of about sixteen thousand people, the rest of the municipality bringing the total to around thirty-six thousand. Its postwar decades were difficult; the neighboring town of Emmen grew faster and absorbed businesses and institutions that had once been Coevorden's. The reversal began in the 1980s and 1990s with the construction of a NATO depot - now used by the Dutch army - and the cross-border industrial park called Europark, which straddles the German line. The city has produced a Dutch governor-general of the East Indies, a registrar of the International Criminal Court, an astronomer specializing in galaxies, and the electronic dance music producer Don Diablo. The star bastions are still there. The bishop's road to Groningen is now a four-lane highway. The name that gave the world two Vancouvers is still etched onto the train station sign.