What follows is a brief but disjointed overview of fictitious Limburg Co., scratched out because I got caught up in a fit of digression while working on something else. It’ll be worked into this book during the first revision.
In the late nineteenth century many rural areas in Minnesota welcomed the stabilizing of peace and “civilization” by strictly limited the sale of alcohol. When Limburg County had established itself, it became something of an outlaw territory. Surrounded by ultra-conservative Scandinavians, Lutheran temperance, and a deep suspicion of anything Catholic and continental, the Limburgers were everything their immigrant neighbors distrusted and despised. Unlike their Dutch countrymen to the north, the Limburg emigres were Catholic, not Calvinist. They held out against the Reformation as their Belgian kinsmen had. But the Dutch Limburgers hated the French and considered a Belgian as nothing more than a second-class Frenchman. They held any Dutchman living on the wrong side of the Maas river in the same contempt. Any Limburger would tell you that a Calvinist was a Huguenot to the core, and therefore French at heart. Those bastards from Amsterdam and the Hague were not to be trusted, and the only reason they were stuck with them was a common tongue. Limburgers identified with and were more politically aligned with their German neighbors. They were traditionally a difficult, stubborn and non-conformist breed. They carried it with them to the eastern plains of the United States.