Feerwerd (Dutch: [ˈfeːrʋərt]; Gronings: Fiwwerd) is a village in the municipality of Westerkwartier in the province of Groningen in the Netherlands.

[1] Feerwerd is a small village in the Middag [nl] region, between Ezinge, Garnwerd, and Aduarderzijl.

Most of the houses are located north of this canal and mainly date from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century.

These closely spaced brick houses with their corresponding roofs along Valgeweg, Aldringaweg, and Oosterweg together form the compact old village centre.

Until the early 19th century, the thoroughfares through Feerwerd mainly ran along the higher places in the landscape and avoided the watercourses where possible.

These were the Meedenerweg to Aduard, located further south, the Lucaspad and the Allersmaweg to Ezinge and the Zijlsterweg via Aduarderzijl and the Antumerweg to Garnwerd.

Until the Second World War, a transport service (beurtvaart) was carried out over the canal from Ezinge via Feerwerd and Garnwerd to Groningen.

[6] An older hypothesis of Kuhn (1968) is that it goes back to the Old Frisian faþr and is therefore related to the river names Pader and Po, which he himself later dropped.

These wierdes are located on a salt marsh wall that runs from Panser [nl] to Wierum.

Remains of human presence have been found on the southern wierde from about 400 BC (Middle Iron Age) and on the central mound from ca.

This high clay area (valge) was probably on the eastern bank of the Feerwerdertocht between Feerwerd and Aduarderzijl.

[11] The Middag landscape in which Feerwerd is located was embanked in the 12th century (High Middle Ages).

In 2018, the 3-hectare southern wierde was purchased by Het Groninger Landschap Foundation, which wants to turn it into a flower-rich grassland.

In the 17th century, the owners of these borgs clashed several times before the Aldringaborg came into the hands of the same family through sale.

The village was also one of the schepperijen (parts of the predecessors of current-day Dutch water boards) of the Aduarderzijlvest [nl].

It later became part of the Ezinge schepperij, within which it formed the middle kluft, which drained via the Feerwerdertocht into the Aduarderdiep.

From the start, several attempts were made (in vain) to move the town hall from Ezinge to Feerwerd: in 1832, 1866, 1898, 1899, and 1915.

The most important change was the digging of the Oldehoofsch canal in 1827, which created a road connection south of the village, on which a mill and a café were built.

[19][20] With the exodus from agriculture, many residents left to look for work elsewhere, after which the vacant cheap homes were taken into use by city people, particularly in the 1970s.

After the Middag-Humsterland [nl] National Landscape was established in 2005, the residents increasingly began to identify with this area.

[23] According to the schoolmaster's report of 1828, the 'crafts' in Feerwerd at that time consisted of, among other things, 'smithing, baking, carpentry, cooperage, tailoring, and shoemaking'.

[25] The village had a loading and unloading area on the Oldehoofsch canal, where, among other things, peat was supplied and from where the fertile mound soil was also removed around 1900.

After the Second World War, the business of the middle classes quickly declined with the outflow from agriculture and the rise of the car.

For a long time, an important employer for the village was the brickworks of the Kamerlingh Onnes family near Schifpot.

The church has been designated as a resting place and has been a permanent part of the annual Summer Jazz Bicycle Tour since the beginning.

According to Olthuis, this was because there were too few children in Ezinge, but it also played a role in the fact that employment at Aduarderzijl virtually disappeared due to the decline in agricultural employment at the beginning of the 20th century, which meant that the number of children who went to school from there in Feerwerd also declined sharply.

[32] Along the Valgeweg are a number of partly neoclassical rentier houses with hip roofs from the third quarter of the 19th century.

[33] The Mentaheerd (Mentaweg 2) is located on the north side of the road from Ezinge to Feerwerd and is accessible via its own drawbridge over the Oldehoofsch canal, which follows the course of the former Peizerdiep.

[34] The head-neck-rump farmhouse Groot-Beswerd at Meedenerweg 23 near Beswerd, south of the village, dates from the first half of the 19th century in its present appearance.