Antje Paarlberg

Antje Paarlberg née Waagmeester (16 February 1808 – 28 October 1885) is known as the inspiration for the novel So Big, which won the Pulitzer Prize. Chicago area author Edna Ferber used South Holland, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and its pioneers and onion farms as background for her 1924 novel about an ambitious widow in a Midwestern Dutch American farming community. The resilience of Antje Wagemeester Paarlberg, a widowed immigrant and determined pioneer, was allegedly the inspiration for the main character Selina Peake DeJong.

On 26 April 1835, Antje Waagmeester married Klaas Paarlberg in their birthplace of Warmenhuizen and settled as farmers in nearby Spanbroek where they would have eight children. In 1847 Klaas and Antje and their seven surviving children set off on a voyage from the Netherlands to America in search of better fortunes on the ship Doggersbank. They felt that the State Church was too liberal and the taxes unfair. The taxes in the Netherlands were high; there was blight in the potato crop, and disease among the cattle. The couple heard about wonderful opportunities in America. They left North Holland, a province of the Netherlands with their seven children, the oldest being seven years old and the youngest three months old.

Klaas died of pleurisy during the voyage and was buried at sea. He was 43 years old at the time of his death. Antje Paarlberg continued to America with their children with this single thought in mind, De Heere zal wel zorgen or "the Lord will provide".

The ship's captain offered to take Antje Paarlberg and her children back to the Netherlands but she refused to go. The determined 'Widow Paarlberg', as she is referred to in South Holland, persevered even after the youngest child also died. The baby was buried in a small cemetery near Lincoln Park. Antje and her remaining six children settled near other Dutch pioneers 20–30 miles south of Chicago, buying eighty acres of land at seven dollars an acre by Thorn Creek. There she built a log cabin plastered with clay near what would become the village of South Holland, Illinois. Eventually all of her children acquired land in the area and developed farms. Antje Paarlberg died of a stroke in October 1885 at the age of 77.

Ferber highly fictionalized Antje's life and the Paarlberg family believes that she is somewhat misrepresented in So Big.

A branch of the Peter Paarlberg family continues to farm in Kankakee County, 30 miles south of the original homestead which is today surrounded by suburbia. A second branch of the family farms in LaPorte County, Indiana.