How a death at sea set a local village’s legacy
The Great Depression was just getting underway when a farmer in Georgia decided to start growing onions in an agricultural region known primarily for pecans and tobacco.
It was a good move. Between the variety he chose as well as a lack of sulfur — the source of an onion’s pungency — in the soil around the little town of Vidalia, the onions turned out to be remarkably sweet. After a while, Vidalia wasn’t known for its other crops anymore, and in 1990, the Vidalia onion was declared Georgia’s official state vegetable. Worldwide fame and culinary appreciation followed.
Around the time of those first Vidalia harvests, a group of onion farmers in South Holland were pooling resources to ensure their crops would spread far and wide.
Called the Dutch Valley Growers, the cooperative was a key step in earning South Holland the title “Onion Set Capital of the World” decades before most people had ever heard of Vidalia.
Just as the soil in Georgia was suited for sweet onions, the clay loam of Chicago’s southeast suburbs turned out to be just right to grow onion sets — onion bulbs that gardeners plant to give them a head start in a short, northern growing season.
It helped that the farmers, mostly immigrants from the Netherlands and their descendants, had a historic association with planting bulbs, said Bill Paarlberg, one of those descendants who helped found the South Holland Historical Society more than 50 years ago.
“A lot of the people who came from the Netherlands really liked the black soil,” he said, including his family. “Most, like my dad and his two brothers, would do onions, onion sets, carrots, tomatoes, sweet corn. Some just did onion sets.
“We would plant them in the spring, little black seeds, then weed them until it was time to harvest in August, then put them in crates in the field and let them dry. All around South Holland you would see crates 12-14 feet high.”
Paarlberg said he’s “six generations away” from one of the great legends of south suburban folklore, The Widow Paarlberg. An actual person, The Widow Paarlberg became The Widow when her husband died as the family crossed the Atlantic in 1847 on their way to a new life in the United States.
After an offer from the ship’s captain for her and her six kids to return to Holland free of charge, The Widow Paarlberg is said to have replied “God will provide,” and continued on to South Holland, Bill Paarlberg said.
Divine intervention remains unquantifiable, but her decision resulted in an onion set dynasty.
“All her boys were farmers, and they got land and would take produce to Chicago and sell it,” Paarlberg said. “She was able to make it because of that.”
Bill Paarlberg worked in the onion fields and warehouses as a kid, but he decided to leave that line of work behind and become a special-education teacher, working for many years in schools in Flossmoor.
Other modern descendants of The Widow Paarlberg embraced their onion set heritage wholeheartedly, even as South Holland transitioned from farm town to suburban village in the years following World War II.
Wayne Paarlberg started farming onion sets in 1958, “and my dad and grandpa had both done it before that,” he said. “It’s always been part of our operation.”
As South Holland’s onion fields gradually were paved over by subdivision streets, Wayne and his brother, Jim Paarlberg, expanded their Paarlberg Farms operations to open areas between Glenwood and Chicago Heights.
The scores of farmers who had united to form the Dutch Valley Growers cooperative, an organization with enough clout to negotiate tax breaks for its farmers amid the Great Depression, were dwindling as one after another sold out or retired.
So Paarlberg Farms bought out the cooperative and became Dutch Valley Growers, and in 1972, moved its farming operations to acreage in La Crosse, Indiana, outside Valparaiso.
“South Holland got ate up by subdivisions, and the farming community left,” Wayne Paarlberg said. “You were either going to move or you were going to quit. You had a choice. My brother and I found these farms for sale in Indiana. And so we migrated to Indiana.”
The Dutch Valley Growers headquarters stayed on South Park Avenue in South Holland for another 30 years or so, before also moving to La Crosse.
Wayne Paarlberg is retired now, and his greatnephew Ryan Paarlberg is one of the latest generation to continue the onion set tradition that started in South Holland.
Ryan said the company sells about 60 varieties of onion sets these days, though some of the old standards remain from the South Holland days, such as yellow Stuttgarter and white Ebenezer. But he hesitated to call them heritage varieties or heirlooms, as “there’s been improvements made with breeding.”
Despite being the Onion Set Capital of the World, there never was a chance that South Holland’s onions would achieve name-brand status, like Vidalias or Walla Walla onions from Washington. When onions are trademarked like that, Ryan Paarlberg said, they often must meet rigid standards and fit under a legal description. Vidalias, he said, undergo sample testing for sweetness. And growers have to register their crops.
“You pay to be in that group,” he said, “but then you can sell under that name.”
Instead, the Paarlbergs and South Holland’s other onion set farmers offered their customers variety — red, yellow, white, which all had their uses and fans. They were selling to gardeners, whose needs would never be satisfied by a single onion type.
Plus the soil in South Holland evidently has plenty of sulfur.
The onions, Wayne said, “had quite a pungency to them.”
“They were not mild,” he said.
It was a strategy that worked when the Dutch Valley Growers cooperative was formed, Wayne said. Farming onion sets always was a niche industry, but it once occupied a much larger niche.
“During the war years, everyone had gardens back then,” he said. “Today it’s so much different. There’s only a smidgen today of what was grown then.”
Dutch Valley’s onion sets now are found in independent garden centers, as well as at big box stores, often in bins that don’t reference where the bulbs were grown.
But in the mid-2010s, interest in growing onions seemed to be waning.
“Business was really slow, and getting slower by the year,” Ryan Paarlberg said. “There was a lot of drop-off in 2015, ’16, ’17. But then the COVID era hit and it exploded. Everyone got into gardening, and onion sets are an easy crop to grow.
“Back when we were in South Holland, gardening wasn’t a hobby, it was survival. And it’s been a hobby now for quite a few years. But people are learning that when I grow it and I pick it at the peak of freshness and eat it, it’s way better than what I get at the grocery store.”
Ryan, like many other Paarlbergs before, started working with onion sets early, mowing the green tops when he was 9, removing them so “we’re not bringing all that green material in the building.”
“You cry a lot at first, but you get used to it, and you get to the point where you can’t even smell it,” he said.
As for eating them, “I don’t mind onions, but I’ve consumed enough,” he said.
Wayne Paarlberg has not.
“I love onions,” he said, noting the onions with stronger flavor tend to “cook up nicer.”
Growing up in South Holland, Bill Paarlberg was on the wrestling team at Thornton Township High School.
“When we came in for wrestling practice, they’d say ‘here comes the onion eaters,’ and we’d groan,” he said. “They’d say, ‘are you still eating onions?’ And I said, ‘no, I let my brother eat them.’
“In fact, my brother was a state champion wrestler.”
But did Bill Paarlberg like eating his family’s signature crop?
“I like onion rings,” he said. “Straight onions? I’m not into that.”
While his people may be known for growing bulbs, it’s another Dutch delicacy that brings Bill back every Labor Day to the park to South Holland that bears his name.
“The Dutch thing is the oliebollens,” he said, noting the South Holland Historical Society sold 600 of the doughnut hole pastries containing raisins and coated in brown sugar at the last Labor Day Festival at Paarlberg Park.
It’s not enough to make the village the oliebollen capital of the world, but it’s a nice start.