There were small settlements here in Roman times, and by the 10th century a stone church anchored a cluster of hamlets that would eventually swallow neighboring villages whole. Parts of present-day Nijkerk and Voorthuizen were once Putten land, until they spun off as independent communities - Nijkerk in 1530, Voorthuizen later. The shoreline mattered too: until a sea dyke was built in 1356, the old Zuiderzee periodically reclaimed the western fields. The dyke held, mostly. It broke spectacularly more than once, and as late as 1916 a North Sea storm sent water surging across the lowlands. Only with the closing of the Afsluitdijk in 1932 did the inland sea finally become a freshwater lake and stop threatening the cows.

Agriculture has always paid the bills in Putten, but it was never the only trade. From the 17th through the 19th century the village ran paper mills, taking advantage of the clean streams running off the Veluwe sand. When the railway arrived in 1863, Putten suddenly had a different export: peace and quiet. Tuberculosis patients from the cities began coming up to convalesce in boarding houses and small sanatoria, breathing the pine-scented air the doctors of the time prescribed. The village suffered, too - burned to the ground at least five times in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries by armies passing through on someone else's business. The Veluwe has always been beautiful and inconveniently located.

One date dominates the village calendar. On 1 and 2 October 1944, in retaliation for a Dutch resistance ambush near Nijkerk, the Wehrmacht surrounded Putten and deported almost every man between 18 and 50 - 602 of them in the end - to concentration camps at Neuengamme and elsewhere. Only 48 came home. Two German officers were eventually tried and convicted after the war, but no court could undo what had happened in the church and the schoolyard that week. Every 2 October the village still holds a silent commemoration at the Vrouwtje van Putten Herdenkingshof, the Little Lady of Putten Memorial Garden, beside the Oude Kerk. The statue of a widow in traditional Veluwe dress, sculpted by Mari Andriessen and unveiled by Queen Juliana in 1949, looks across the square toward the church from which the men of Putten were marched away.

Daily life in modern Putten is, mercifully, less dramatic. Agriculture still matters, but the service sector dominates now, and tourism leans hard on what's around: the Veluwe, the largest national park in the Netherlands, rolling out to the east in heather and ancient woodland; the long sandy beach at Strand Nulde on the Veldmeer to the west. The biggest weekly event is the Wednesday market on the square, the largest in the northwest Veluwe - cheese, smoked sausage, fresh fish from the IJsselmeer, flowers, and the kind of unhurried catching-up that small Dutch towns specialize in. The A28 motorway runs by to the west, the train line between Utrecht and Zwolle stops at the local station, and most everyone in town has been to school with most everyone else.

Putten's home-grown roster is small but eclectic. Hendrik van Boeijen, born here in 1889, served as a national politician and Minister of the Interior during the years just before the war. The trance and electro producer Ummet Ozcan, born in 1982, grew up in Putten before turning into a regular at Tomorrowland and the Amsterdam Dance Event. The American-Israeli show jumper Danielle Goldstein lives in town and rides under the Israeli flag at the Olympics. And on autumn Sundays at SDC Putten, the local club, you can still find Sander Duits in the squad - a defender who, after some 400 club appearances elsewhere, came home to finish his career on familiar grass. A village this size doesn't need many stars to feel populated.