Warmond
When he was 6, in 1638, Leeuwenhoek's father died. He had no brothers, but he had five sisters between the ages of 17 and 3. His mother remarried in 1640 to an older man with only grown children.
According to Reinier Boitet who in 1729 expanded Bleyswyck's 1667 Beschryving der stadt Delft (Description of the City of Delft), Antony was sent to school in Warmond, a village just north of Leiden after his mother remarried. We don't know how long he stayed.
On the map, Warmond (Warmont) is at the top, about 3 km north of Leiden (Leyden) and 22 km (14 mi) north of Delft. Compared to the walled city of Leiden, Warmond was the little cluster of streets just to the left of the WAR. The streets still bend and curve just like that.
On the map, some of the straight black lines are raised dikes between the drained fields with water at the top. Others are more like ditches and explain why the Dutch needed so few fences. Remembering that this land, well below sea level, was won from marsh and swamp, the wiggly lines are more or less natural waterways that were developed into canals.
Except for asphalt poured on the tops of many dikes for auto and bike traffic, the South Holland countryside hasn't changed much in the last 400 years. What you see today is what Leeuwenhoek saw on his way to and from Delft. On the regularly scheduled canal boats, the journey from Delft and Leiden/Warmond took only a few hours, as fast as a horse could walk.
While nothing remains of the schoolhouses, probably also the teachers' homes, that Leeuwenhoek attended, many paintings of the time suggest that it probably looked something like this one in a painting by Ostade from 1662 (above right).
Warmond today. It is still a village, now about five thousand people, most of them elderly. Few buildings remain from van Leeuwenhoek's time. Jan Steen (1626-1679), the painter, lived in this house (above) from 1656-1660, a decade after Leeuwenhoek left for Benthuizen.
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