Pella

Pella announces itself well before you reach downtown — a genuine working windmill, Vermeer Mill, rises on the edge of town, its sails turning slowly against a horizon otherwise defined by corn and soybeans. Lia and I parked near the central square and found ourselves surrounded by step-gabled brick facades, the whole block built to evoke the Dutch towns that some eight hundred religious dissenters left behind in 1847 when they founded Pella on the open Iowa prairie. It’s a town that could easily feel like a theme-park version of heritage, but the effect instead felt sincere — these buildings house real hardware stores, real dentists’ offices, alongside the bakeries clearly aimed at visitors.

Dutch letters and the Klokkenspel

We spent a happy half hour in line at Jaarsma Bakery for Dutch letters, the almond-paste pastry shaped into an S that’s become Pella’s signature export, warm and flaky enough that we ate them standing on the sidewalk before we’d even left the shop. At the top of the hour, the town’s Klokkenspel — an elaborate animated clock tower on the square — put on its short mechanical show, wooden figures gliding out to tell a piece of the settlers’ story to a crowd of tourists and clearly unbothered locals alike. Lia filmed the whole thing, delighted, while I people-watched the mixed crowd of Sunday-dressed families and cyclists passing through on the Volksweg Trail.

Tulip Time and the Scholte House

Pella is best known nationally for Tulip Time, a three-day festival each May when the whole town plants and parades around hundreds of thousands of tulip bulbs, its residents in wooden shoes scrubbing the streets in mock-Dutch tradition before the parade passes. We visited outside festival season, but the beds around the Scholte House — home of the town’s founding dominie, Hendrik Pieter Scholte, and now a museum — were still tended with obvious pride, and the house’s period rooms gave a clear sense of just how deliberately this community preserved its founding identity across nearly two centuries on the American prairie.

Getting There

Pella sits about 40 miles southeast of Des Moines, an easy 45-minute drive on Highway 163, making it a common day trip from the state capital. Des Moines International Airport is the nearest major airport, with direct flights from cities across the country. There’s no rail or transit service to Pella, so a car is necessary, but once downtown the square, windmill, and historic sites are all within easy walking distance of one another.