Helenaveen is a village in the high moor area of the Peel, located in the southeast of the municipality of Deurne, in the Dutch province of Noord-Brabant.
Quick Facts
History
Helenaveen was founded in 1853 by Jan van de Griendt, Jan van de Griendt, the Bossche supervisor of Water Management, whose wife was called Helena Panis. Together with his brother Nicolaas van de Griendt, and G.W.J. Carp from Arnhem he bought 610 ha of peat soil, which here was 3-7 meters thick. The Helenaveen Company had a private canal, the Helenavaart, dug. The black peat that was extracted here could be transported there to the Noordervaart. Later on peat litter was also produced and the concession was expanded. There was even a floating peat litter factory in Helenaveen. The peat litter was exported all over Europe and was used to replace straw in the London and Paris horse stables for army and tram.
Side channels (districts) were dug. Roads and houses were also built for the workers. Originally, these were partly straw straw chains. This is how Het Helena-Veen, nicknamed Het Strooijen Dorp, was born. The houses were also given a piece of land on which the residents could practice agriculture and horticulture.
Helenaveen eventually became a horticultural village. The dyeing continued until the 1970s.
In the village, both a reformed (Protestant church) and a catholic church (Sint-Willibrorduskerk) were founded, because the population, largely from Drenthe and Overijssel, was strongly mixed with religion. That is also the reason that so many 'non-Brabant names' come from Helenaveen, such as Ugen and Schonewille. The Catholic church, which burned down in 1944, was an early creation of the master church builder Pierre Cuypers, who renovated the St. Willibrord Church of Deurne, among other things.