In 1848 Jan Veneklasen and his family emigrated from the Netherlands to Zeeland in Michigan’s Dutch Kolonie. A brickmaker by trade, he founded a brickyard within a year of his arrival and eventually operated several in Michigan, including the one formerly at this site. The mainstay of the Veneklasen Brick Company was its architectural bricks, whose red, white, orange, and brown colors reflected the local clay where they were made. The brickworks operated under several names over the years and remained a family business, with Jan Veneklasen’s descendants involved, until it ceased operations in the mid-1920s. Michigan’s historic Dutch Kolonie became home to a distinctive style of brickwork informally known as Veneklasen, named after the company. These buildings are notable for decorative facades that typically feature cream-colored brick patterns against contrasting red brick backgrounds. In building forms typical of nineteenth-century American Midwestern architecture, this polychromatic brickwork carried on masonry traditions from the Netherlands and was used in the houses of Dutch immigrants as well as churches, schools, civic buildings, and institutional buildings including Van Vleck and Voorhees halls at Hope College in Holland.