Bolks Apartments to be dedicated

Bolks Apartments

Northwestern College will honor one of its founders, the Rev. Seine Bolks, by naming a student apartment complex after him. The Seine Bolks Apartments will be dedicated at 12 noon on Tuesday, April 5.

The apartments, on Colorado Avenue, frame the western edge of the campus and provide housing for about 150 students. The first building of the complex was completed in the summer of 2001; the other two units were finished two years later.

Designed to complement the exterior of Stegenga Hall, the three-story buildings contain apartments housing four to six students each. Each apartment includes a living room, kitchenette, bathroom and two bedrooms. The air-conditioned rooms also offer computer access.

Each building has a computer lounge and laundry facilities. The middle building has a community lounge.

The apartments’ namesake was the initial pastor of Orange City’s First Reformed Church. Bolks was among a small group of men who met in the church’s consistory room in 1882 to draw up articles of incorporation establishing Northwestern Classical Academy, the precursor to the college. Bolks served as the first president of Northwestern’s Board of Trustees.

Born and educated in the Netherlands, Bolks led a large group of immigrants to America in 1847. He served pastorates in Wisconsin, Illinois and Michigan before moving to Iowa. Long a proponent of Christian education, he indicated the prospect of establishing an academy in Orange City was one of the reasons he accepted the call to First Reformed Church in 1871. Bolks died at the age of 80 in 1894, the year Northwestern’s board—in a meeting at his home— decided to build Zwemer Hall.