An old map of this place called it Locus Deserta Atque ob Multos Paludes Invia - a deserted land, impassable for its many swamps. The Latin is dramatic. The land, in the 17th century, was not. It was wet, dark, low, and worth almost nothing until somebody noticed that the brown rotting plant matter underfoot was fuel. In 1625 a Dutch nobleman named Roelof van Echten bought a tract of this swamp from local farmers and announced that he would drain it, dig it, and sell what came up. Hoogeveen began as a hole in the ground.
Peat is compressed bog vegetation, half-fossilized, and for centuries it heated Dutch houses, cooked Dutch meals, and ran small Dutch industries. To harvest it efficiently you needed water - canals to float the heavy blocks out, parallel ditches close enough together that a single worker with a wheelbarrow could reach any face of the diggings. So Hoogeveen was built as a grid of canals. The main one, the Hoogeveense Vaart, ran toward Meppel. Smaller canals called wijken branched off it every 160 meters - the practical maximum distance for a man pushing peat in a single load. At the central intersection, called the Kruis, the shopkeepers and craftsmen arrived, and a town crystallized around the trade. The grid was not designed for beauty. It was designed for haulage. The fact that it eventually held churches and factories and football clubs was incidental.
In September 1883, Vincent van Gogh - thirty years old, broke, fresh from a failed attempt at family life in The Hague - took a train and a barge into Drenthe, looking for cheap lodging and motifs to paint. He spent about three months in this region, much of it walking between Hoogeveen and the hamlet of Nieuw-Amsterdam. He wrote his brother Theo long, lonely letters about the light over the heath, the silence of the peat cutters, the dark huts of Zwartschaap on the road toward Pesse. He painted some of those huts. The pictures are small and brown and almost defiantly unbeautiful, and they are the missing link between his early Dutch peasant paintings and the explosive color he would discover in France. He left in early December because he could not bear the isolation, and went home to his parents. Drenthe was a failure, in his telling. The paintings disagree.
Hoogeveen has a quieter heroism in its history. Soon after the German occupation began in 1940, the town became a center of Dutch resistance, partly through the work of Reverend Frits Slomp, who helped channel persecuted people - mostly Jews fleeing the western cities - into hiding places in the surrounding countryside. The underground newspapers Trouw and Vrij Nederland were distributed from here. In July 1943, after resistance members assassinated the Nazi-aligned mayor of a nearby village, German police raided Hoogeveen and rounded up dozens of suspects. Three of them were executed in a holiday camp north of town called Noorderhuis. In February 1944, with the help of a clerk named Henk Raak, the resistance robbed the Hoogeveen post office of 13,000 ration cards - food and clothing for those in hiding. Raak was caught and executed. The work continued.
By the 1960s the canals had outlived their purpose. Trucks had replaced barges, and most of the old wijken were filled in - paved over for streets and parking. Only a few villages around Hoogeveen, including Elim, Fluitenberg, and Noordscheschut, still carry water through the old grid. Philips and Fokker established plants in town. The expected boom to 100,000 residents never quite arrived; growth flattened in the 1980s around 45,000. Hoogeveen is a hub now more than a destination - the A28 and A37 motorways cross at its edge, the Meppel-Groningen railway runs through its 1984 station, and the local airport keeps the longest grass runway in the Netherlands, a 1,200-meter strip that draws weekend pilots and gliders. The town also hosts an international chess tournament every fall, which began in 1997 and has attracted world champions to a place most of the chess world cannot pronounce.
Hoogeveen has produced a striker who scores more international goals than anyone else in Dutch history. Vivianne Miedema, born here in 1996, is the all-time top scorer for the Netherlands national team across both the women's and men's squads, and the all-time top scorer in the English FA Women's Super League. The town also produced the speed skater Piet Kleine, gold at Innsbruck in 1976, and the cyclist Erik Dekker. And it was the final home of Hendrikje van Andel-Schipper, who was born in 1890 in the nearby village of Smilde, lived through both world wars and the entire industrial reinvention of her country, and died in Hoogeveen in 2005 at the age of 115 - the oldest person ever recorded in the Netherlands.
Located at 52.72 N, 6.47 E in southern Drenthe. From altitude, the town is recognizable by the A28/A37 motorway interchange on its western edge and the long single grass runway of Hoogeveen Airport just south of town. The terrain is dead flat - reclaimed peat polder - so visibility ground references are limited. Nearest airports: Groningen Eelde (EHGG, 50 km north) and Lelystad (EHLE, 80 km southwest). The airport itself (EHHO) accepts general aviation but has no scheduled service.