Probably the most influential was Phillip Hendrick Nering Bögel,

The Baron de Bastrop

the self-proclaimed Baron de Bastrop, who was directly responsible for Anglo-American settlement in the Mexican state. An arrival in Texas after 1795, the baron made friends easily and was soon a confidante of many Spanish, then Mexican, officials.

Befriending both Moses Austin and Stephen F. Austin, Bastrop convinced the Mexican government to admit the first colony of Anglos.

Other Dutch individuals were similarly notable in the Texas story. David Levi Kokernot was a Dutch Jew born in Amsterdam but raised in New Orleans. Kokernot became a warrant officer in the U.S. Revenue Cutter Service and first saw Texas as a shipwreck survivor at the Sabine River.

Kokernot apparently liked the rather vacant land. By 1832 he had settled with his family at Anahuac and enthusiastically fought in the Texas Revolution. After the siege of Béxar, Kokernot became a friend of Sam Houston and carried out special and secret missions for the general. When the general became President Houston, Kokernot was given command of a ranger company.

In 1853 Kokernot moved west and, during the Civil War, served first in Louisiana, then, at 60, as a home guard volunteer in Texas. Although a soldier all his life, after the Civil War he consolidated some of his West Texas land holdings. These grew into a half-million-acre ranch in Jeff Davis, Pecos, and Brewster Counties.

Many Dutch coming to Texas were opposed to slavery, did not sympathize with the Civil War, or liked a good fight less than Kokernot. Few came; few stayed. But by the latter 19th century, Holland was overcrowded and in an economic depression.

In 1895 the Port Arthur Land Company was formed by Dutch investors. Some 66,000 acres of land in southeastern Texas were offered for sale in Holland at $8 an acre. Advertisements showed the land as a paradise, but most of the favorable land in the area had been taken. What was for sale was low-lying marsh. Still, the land company did build the Orange Hotel, named for Holland's royal family and painted a bright orange color.

Immigrants came, most were grateful for the hotel, and many stayed.

The first was George Rienstra, who, in 1897, chose what he thought was the best available land. Joined by his sister, Fanny, and brother, Dan, he was soon raising rice. Others followed, and the settlement was named Nederland.

Even some South Africans came to the colony. All of the African Boers (the Dutch farmers) did not find the continent profitable. Some heard about Texas and tried their luck in a move. Gerritt Trewey, after trying both Canada and South Africa, came to Texas's Nederland colony. Finding the place acceptable, Trewey journeyed to Holland to marry Machteldje de Jong, and the two spent their honeymoon aboard ship bound for Texas. William de Vries, a friend of Trewey, came in 1911, worked for a time on the Galveston seawall, then moved to Nederland.

The colony only enjoyed moderate progress until 1901 when the discovery of oil, then the largest known field in the western United States, gave the colony a sound economic future.

The pattern of settlement was typical. And Nederland exists today, between Port Arthur and Beaumont.