Van den Bosch did not wait for committees. A week after he purchased the estate at Frederiksoord, he had families on the ground. The structure was simple and strange: a row of identical small houses with allotments behind them, lined up neatly along a central road that ran roughly parallel to the border with Friesland. The colonists were chosen carefully. They were the impoverished but salvageable, not the criminal or the destitute beyond rescue. After four and a half years, forty-two of the original fifty-two families were still there. Many would stay until they died. The experiment was declared a success, and over the next ninety-three years three more colonies were built along the same model. They were called Wilhelminaoord, Willemsoord, and Boschoord. About 1,400 families passed through them in total.

The Society believed that good behaviour could be taught and bad behaviour unlearned. A colonist who proved themselves through hard work could earn a bronze, silver, or gold medal, each paying out a small yearly stipend of two and a half, five, or ten guilders. A successful colonist could be promoted to renter, then to free farmer. There were schools for horticulture, agriculture, and forest management alongside the regular primary schools. There was even, briefly, a colony-only currency, which did not survive. Those who slumped into laziness were warned, then expelled. Those guilty of drinking, indecency, wastefulness, aggression, or desertion were sent to the punishment colonies at Ommerschans or Veenhuizen, which the Dutch state took over in 1859 and quietly turned into regular prisons.

There is a darker thread running through this story, and the Society itself eventually had to face it. Many of the people the colonies took in were not really volunteers. The criteria narrowed as years went on, and the line between social experiment and forced relocation blurred. Critics from the rest of Dutch society pointed out that uprooting an Amsterdam family and dropping them onto a Drenthe heath could be a kind of violence dressed in benevolent clothes. By the early twentieth century, the model shifted. The 'uncivilised', as the language of the day had it, were now to be helped in city-based woonscholen close to where they already lived. Meanwhile Van den Bosch himself had moved on. In 1830 he departed for Java, hoping to improve Dutch exploitation of its colony there. The result for the Javanese was corruption, poverty, and famine, the very things his Dutch colonies had been designed to fix.

The colonies survived, and so did much of their architecture: small private houses now in private hands, lined up along the Hoofdweg and the Koningin Wilhelminalaan, woven into the contemporary villages of Frederiksoord and Wilhelminaoord. The Weldadig Oord Foundation publishes eight cycling routes through the region, most signposted in Dutch but with downloadable GPX tracks. One of them traces the route that colonists actually walked from the cities to their new homes. Another links to Giethoorn, the canal village twenty kilometres south. Beyond the village edges lies the Drents-Friese Wold, a preserved nature area of sand dunes, heath, oak, and pine, where the quiet is the kind that arrives slowly. The peat that paid for everything is mostly gone now. The orderly rows remain.