Village plot sizes 2

An earlier post suggested that the typical village plot was about 48 feet wide (see here), but that was really just an educated guess based on Johann Cornies’s specifications of the distance between houses and an average house width of 20 feet.

Heinrich Goerz’s The Molotschna Settlement offers a different view:

The villages were established in an orderly, systematic manner according to German practice. The earlier ones consisted of 20 farmsteads with yards located on both sides of the street. Each farmstead was forty Faden wide [one Faden equals 2.1 metres or seven feet]. The house stood back 14 Faden from the street so that there was room for a small garden in front. Farmsteads in the later villages were considerably wider. (1993, 10)

Thus, according to Goerz the early village plots (or farmstead) were, on average, 280 feet wide, or over five times as wide as suggested earlier. This is hard to imagine for several reasons.

1. If, as everyone agrees, the typical village included twenty plots on each side of the street, not to mention the house owners and the renters on the ends of the village, then a village would have extended over a mile from one end to the other (20 x 280 = 5,600). Although this is possible, it seems difficult to imagine.


2. If farmsteads in later villages were “considerably wider,” then just how far did a village such as Kleefeld or Alexanderkrone stretch from one to end?


3. If each lot was roughly 280 feet wide and contained a house 30 feet wide (to assume for the sake of argument Goerz’s later statement; see the diagram below), then the houses would have been 250 feet apart, which is much farther apart than what Cornies specified: houses were to be exactly 4 sazhens (about 28 feet) from each other (see the earlier post). One wonders how Cornies’s specifications could be so far off from the reality.


4. If a house stood 14 Fäden back from the street and that area was devoted to a garden, how could one describe a garden potentially 100 feet by 280 feet (that is, basically two-thirds of a football field) as “small”?

“Plan of a Mennonite farmhouse in southern Russia. The dimensions of an average house were about
10 metres by 17 metres. … Photo: Mennonite Heritage Centre Archives” (Goerz 1993, 58)

Although one should not discount Goerz’s testimony (he spent his early years in the Molotschna colony, from 1890 until the mid-1920s), it is difficult to see how all the pieces fit together. A Russian sazhen (“fathom,” the unit of measure used by Cornies) is approximately the same as a German Faden (also “fathom,” used by Goerz), so we are left with the question of whether houses were 4 sazhens (= 28 feet) or 35.7 Fäden (= 250 feet) apart, whether Cornies or Goerz gives the more accurate picture—or whether we are misunderstanding one or the other or both. Just one more thing to check if anyone from the family ever makes it back to Molotschna.

Source Cited

Goerz, Heinrich. 1993. The Molotschna Settlement. Translated by Al Reimer and John B. Toews. Echo Historical Series. Winnipeg, MB: CMBC Publications and Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society.