The previous post in this series began to explore the various contexts in which the Molotschna Bullers lived, worked, and worshiped by examining the geography of the area. To summarize the story thus far, the Mennonite colony itself was organized into villages strung along the Molochnaya River and three of its tributaries, seeking to make the best use of both the more fertile river basins and the steppe land rising above the basins. Further, the Molotschna Mennonites had interactions with the various people groups surrounding them: the Muslim Nogai (seminomadic herdsmen) to the south, Russian Orthodox peasants to the north, Lutheran and Catholic German colonists to the northwest, and Russian religious sectarians to the southwest.
All of these groups faced similar challenges and threats to their survival: an undeveloped terrain, a fickle climate, significant distance from ready markets, and overcrowding. How each group addressed these challenges provides us greater insight into what life would have been like for the Bullers and other Mennonite families of the Molotschna colony.
The Socioeconomic Context: Village Life
When Mennonites arrived in the Molotschna region, they intended to live and work on their own independent farms (much like they later did when they came to the U.S.). However, the threat of Cossack and Nogai raids forced these early Mennonite settlers to organize themselves instead into more easily protected villages (see Staples 2000, 239). Therefore, as with most of the people-groups around them, the basic building block, or basic socioeconomic unit, of Mennonite society became the village.
When we say that the village was the basic socioeconomic unit, we should not think in terms of just a village. Rather, the village served as the hub of a agricultural enterprise that extended far beyond the village itself. Thus each village was assigned a specified amount of the more fertile river plains and the higher steppe land surrounding it. A sixth of a village’s land was set aside for population growth (surplus land); the remainder was assigned to those fortunate enough to hold a full land allotment.
For example, the village of Kleefeld was assigned 8,662 acres (ca. 13.5 square miles). The surplus land would have accounted for roughly 1,444 acres, leaving an average of 180 acres for each of the thirty-seven full-allotment holders and 90 acres each for the six half-allotment holders. These land allotments played a key role in the organization and conduct of life within the villages, to which we now turn.
As is evident in the map of Fischau (established 1804) below, these villages were not thrown together haphazardly but were carefully arranged with houses facing one another across a central avenue.
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| Map © William Schroeder, used by permission. For the original, see http://www.mennonitechurch.ca/programs/archives/holdings/Schroeder_maps/066.pdf |
As time went on, it seems that the level of organization extended beyond the macro-level to the micro-level. Thus, when the Mennonite leader Johann Cornies developed a model village for the Nogai in 1835, he specified a precise set of guidelines:
Houses were to be “precisely” aligned along both sides of a single street, “exactly” aligned with the house on the opposite side of the street, “exactly” four sazhens (about 8.5 meters) from neighboring houses, with a surrounding ditch “exactly” two arshins (about 1.4 meters) wide and 1.5 arshins deep, each yard divided into corrals, gardens, threshing yards and courtyards by ditches “exactly” 1.75 arshins wide and 1.25 arshins deep, each with a single gate “exactly” centered on the property, and so on. (Staples 2000, 238)
The same symmetrical and detailed layout is mirrored in the arrangement of Mennonite villages after that time, such as Kleefeld (established 1854), the earliest village to which we can trace our family with certainty.
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| Map © William Schroeder, used by permission. For the original, see http://www.mennonitechurch.ca/programs/archives/holdings/Schroeder_maps/073.pdf |
The holders of full land allotments were at the center of the village, both literally and figuratively. Their houses formed the core of the village, often surrounding a school building, and only holders of full allotments enjoyed the right to vote on village officers and affairs. Villagers who did not own a land allotment lived on the margins (more on them below).
Although it is difficult to determine the dimensions of a typical household plot—that is, house-barn-shed plus corral, garden, threshing yard, and courtyard—it is possible to make an educated guess.
- Houses were approximately 28 feet (8.5 m) apart (see Cornies above), so if the houses were roughly 20 feet wide (see the plan below), the entire plot was somewhere around 48 feet wide.
- The plot was a little more than three times as long as it was wide, so one can estimate that it was roughly 148 feet long.
- Thus, each plot contained approximately 7,104 square feet, which equals .163 acre.
- If the dimensions of the plan below are representative, then roughly 33 percent of the entire plot was covered by buildings; the remaining 67 percent provided space for a courtyard, a threshing yard, and a small garden.
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| Mennonite house-barn-shed floor plan. This particular house-barn-shed was built in Hochfeld, Kansas, but was patterned after the typical Molotschna design. The house is 20' x 42' + one bedroom; the barn and shed are 25' x 62' minus one bedroom. Drawing after Schmidt 1985, 14. |
Of course, there was not strict uniformity of plot sizes from village to village or of house sizes within the same village. Further, houses within the same village did not conform to a standard pattern. Some families had house-barns as pictured on the left rather than house-barn-sheds, while others lived in house-barns with a shed to the side to form an L-shape.
Further, villagers who did not own livestock but who earned a living through some other means no doubt lived in houses designed for their particular needs, perhaps with a shop or other work area in place of a barn or even a simple cottage all on its own.
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| Model of an L-shaped Molotschna colony house constructed by B. B. Neumann (1947). |
As a largely self-sustaining socioeconomic unit, the village also provided places for its citizens to conduct day-to-day business, to worship on Sundays, and to gather together in order to decide the questions that faced them as a community.
Thus one might imagine, in addition to the household plots and schoolhouse already mentioned, home-based shops and work areas for blacksmiths, cobblers, woodworkers, tanners, spinners, weavers, tailors, and other artisans, as well as a general store where villagers could buy products that they could not make for themselves. One wonders if villages typically had a market area as well, where villagers could buy, sell, and exchange food items or the products of their own cottage industries. Finally, many Mennonite villages had a separate church building where the community gathered for worship and special events.
As alluded to earlier, the quality of life in the village depended to a great extent on whether or not one owned a full land allotment. The thirty-seven larger rectangles in the Kleefeld map represent the village plots of the thirty-seven Kleefeld residents who owned the rights to a full land allotment of 65 desiatinas (ca. 175 acres). Except for a few exceptions, the smaller rectangles on the two ends of the village represent the 50 percent of the population who did not own the rights to any land.
This half of the village population fell into two categories:
- The Anwohner owned their own houses. Some of these individuals accumulated significant wealth as traders or store owners, but the majority were not so fortunate.
- The Einwohner, or cottagers, rented their homes and worked as servants or laborers, whether in the homes of the more well-to-do or in the fields.
According to John Staples, “in 1860, 69 percent of the landless families were Einwohner and 31 percent were Anwohner” (2007). For Kleefeld, then, one might suggest the following demographic breakdown:
| holders of full allotments | 37 families |
| holders of half allotments | 6 families |
| Anwohner (house owners) | 12 families |
| Einwohner (renters) | 26 families |
The socioeconomic stratification could not be clearer: the two largest groups (both of which were larger than the two middle groups combined) were at the two ends of the economic spectrum. Further, because only holders of full allotments had the right to vote, they controlled who could rent the surplus land that belonged to the village as a whole. Not surprisingly, they rented it to members of their own group. As a result, all of the Einwohner and many of the Anwohner eked out a meager living working as laborers for their more wealthy neighbors, with little or no hope of improving their lot in life.
To bring this all home, it seems reasonable to conclude not only that Peter D was landless but that he also was one of the Einwohner. He was, to be sure, related by marriage to a landowner, having married Sarah Siebert, daughter of Johann, who held a full allotment in Kleefeld (see here), and he may have worked on his his father-in-law’s assigned fields. However, the fact that Peter D moved his family twice during the first five years of marriage (Kleefeld to Alexanderkrone to Kleefeld) implies that he probably did not own a house in either village (he was not one of the Anwohner) but rather rented a cottage on the edge of town.
With no hope of inheriting or buying his own land allotment in Moltschna (more on that in the next Bullers in Molotschna post), it is no wonder that Peter D and Sarah (then pregnant with their seventh child) made the decision to seek new opportunity on the Nebraska plains.
Sources
Neumann, B. B. 1947. Grandfather’s Home: Replica of a Mennonite Farmyard in Russia. Mennonite Life 2.1:46.
Schmidt, Richard H. 1985. The Hochfeld Village. Mennonite Life 40.1:12–16.
Staples, John R. 2000. “On Civilizing the Nogais”: Mennonite-Nogai Economic Relations, 1825–1860. Mennonite Quarterly Review 74:229–56. Online here.
———. 2007. Putting “Russia” Back into Russian Mennonite History: The Crimean War, Emanci-pation, and the Molochna Mennonite Landlessness Crisis. Mennonite Life 62.1. Online here.
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