Stevensbeek

Stevensbeek is a reclamation and church village in the municipality of Land van Cuijk, in the Dutch province of North Brabant. The village has 715 inhabitants. Together, they live at 249 residential addresses. In 1910, the municipality of Sambeek sold 455 hectares of wasteland to the Maastricht entrepreneur J.H.B. Klijnen. He had the heath fields developed by the Heidemaatschappij and built a model farm, which he called Lactaria, with three double workers' houses. After a few years, the farm was sold to the Protestant nobleman Willem de Blocq van Scheltinga. This was not to the liking of the mayor of Sambeek, Piet Stevens. When the nobleman died in 1933, the municipality wanted to repurchase the estate to establish a church village and settle a number of farmers there. Since the heirs may not have wanted that, the municipality used a straw man and indeed acquired the lands, revealing the true motivation for the purchase: We, on our part, feared, and not without reason, that our Catholic Unity would be broken here and this had to be prevented at all costs. The Catholic South must remain Catholic.

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