Mulder

Mulder is the old Dutch word for the man at the mill, the form standard Dutch replaced with molenaar and the eastern, Saxon-speaking provinces kept. In 2007 there were 38,207 Mulders in the Netherlands, the twelfth commonest surname in the country; Belgium made the same trade into De Mulder, the miller. A second and unrelated origin sits behind the same letters: in German the name is from Middle High German mulde, a bowl or trough, and means a maker of wooden bowls rather than a grinder of grain.

What follows from a trade name is that there is no Mulder family. Every settlement with a mill had a man at it and the byname stuck wherever it happened, so the tens of thousands of Dutch Mulders descend from many unconnected millers rather than from one. The north and east had other machinery for making names, the Frisian suffixes -ma and -stra and the Low Saxon -ing and -ink, which produced Dijkstra and Hesselink. Mulder took none of them: it is the job, said flat.

A watermill is an argument about gradient. It presupposes water going somewhere on its own, and the western Netherlands had none. The Dutch mill had to be a wind machine, and the Low Countries were there at the invention: the vertical windmill, sails turning on a horizontal shaft, is a 12th-century development of the triangle of northern France, eastern England and Flanders.

The earliest type was the post mill, whose whole body turned on its post to face a north-western wind that will not hold a direction. Windmills spread across Europe in the 14th century wherever water was short, rivers froze, or the land lay too flat for a river worth damming; the Netherlands is the third case in its purest form.

The invention that changed what a Dutch mill was for is a small one. In a hollow-post mill the post carrying the body is bored out to take a drive shaft, so the mill can turn machinery standing below or outside itself while the body still rotates into the wind. Hollow-post mills driving scoop wheels were used in the Netherlands to drain wetlands from the early 15th century onward. That is where the miller's trade stops being about food and starts being about ground.

Sails turn the windshaft, the brake wheel drives the wallower at the head of the upright shaft, and in a grist mill the great spur wheel below turns the stone nuts. A drainage mill takes a second set of gears off the bottom of that same shaft to drive a scoop wheel or an Archimedes screw, lifting water from the low side to the high: same wind, same man, and the product is dry field rather than flour. Of the 10,000 windmills working around 1850 about 1,000 still stand, many of the drainage mills appointed as backup to the modern pumping stations.

By the end of the 13th century the masonry tower mill turned only its cap instead of its whole body, so the structure could go taller and the sails longer, working in light airs. The tower had two drawbacks that mattered more in Holland than anywhere: it was expensive, and it could not be raised on wet surfaces.

The Dutch answer, introduced in the 17th century, was the smock mill: brick below, and above it a wooden framework, commonly octagonal, the tower sloped to add strength. It was light enough to stand on unstable ground, and what it drove was not only stones: wind was put to sawmills, paper mills, threshing, oil seeds, wool, paints and stone. The Zaan district has been called the first industrialised region in the world, with around 600 wind-powered industries working by the end of the 18th century.

The sails were a lattice frame with cloth spread over it, and the miller set the amount of cloth by the wind and the power he wanted. In every case the mill had to be stopped to do it.

Because a mill stops in a position the whole district can read, the Dutch made a language of it. Sails halted at 3-6-9-12 meant open for business; halted in an X, closed or out of order. A slight tilt with the top blade at one o'clock announced joy, a healthy child born. A tilt to 11-2-5-8 meant mourning, or warning, and it served as warning during Nazi operations in the Second World War, including searches for Jews. In 2014 mills across the Netherlands stood in mourning for the Dutch dead of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17.

Mills went up in the Cape Colony in the 17th century, but the early tower mills could not survive the gales of the Cape Peninsula, so in 1717 the Heeren XVII sent out carpenters, masons and materials to build a durable one. Completed in 1718, the Oude Molen stood between what is now Pinelands Station and the Black River; it was demolished long ago and its name survives as that of a technical school in Pinelands. By 1863 Cape Town had 11 mills strung from Paarden Eiland to Mowbray.

The surname reached the Cape too, and stayed. It is Afrikaans now, and it surfaces most often in sport: Japie Mulder, born in 1969, and Hendrik and Dikkie Mulder in rugby, and Wiaan Mulder, born in 1998, in cricket. That is not one family reaching the southern hemisphere but a very common trade name moving with ordinary Dutch emigration.

The earliest Mulder the sources can date is Joseph Mulder (1658-1742), an engraver and printmaker of the Dutch Republic. Catharina Mulder (1723-1798) was an orangist and a riot leader. Samuel Israel Mulder (1792-1862) was a Dutch-Jewish educationist. Gerardus Johannes Mulder (1802-1880) was a Dutch organic chemist and his son Eduard (1832-1924) a chemist after him, one of the few places where the record shows two Mulders of one household.

Anthonie Rouwenhorst Mulder (1848-1901) was a Dutch engineer and a foreign advisor in Japan. Jacob D. Mulder (1901-1965), a surgeon and podiatrist, developed the physical examination still known as Mulder's sign. Jakoba Mulder (1900-1988) was an architect and urban designer, Elisabeth Mulder (1904-1987) a Spanish writer and poet, and Anneke B. Mulder-Bakker, born in 1940, a historian.

In sport the name is thick on the ground: Jan Mulder, born in 1945, who played football and then wrote, and his son Youri, born in 1969, who played and then managed; the twin speed skaters Michel and Ronald Mulder, born in 1986; the American baseball pitcher Mark Mulder. The De Mulders keep their own column, among them the Belgian racing cyclist Frans De Mulder (1937-2001) and the French war photographer Françoise Demulder (1947-2008).

Beyond those few households, nothing in the record joins any of these people to any of the others, and that is the name working as designed rather than a hole in the evidence. What the Mulders hold in common is not an ancestor but a machine, and in the Netherlands that machine had an unusual job. Elsewhere the miller fed the parish. Here he also kept it above water.