Exiting Waldheim 10

Just when we thought we were finished with this series, another interesting piece of evidence came to mind: the 1847 list of voters for Waldheim (extracted by Glenn Penner). This document does not fundamentally alter our reconstruction of the events surrounding the exodus from Waldheim, but it nuances how we understand the timing of what took place.

If you recall, only landowners in Molotschna were entitled to vote in local elections; those who did not own a Wirtschaft could not vote. The document Glenn provides (here) includes the Waldheim residents (i.e., landowners) who cast votes in 1847 and 1851. The first list is of most interest to us, given the timing of events surrounding the departure from Molotschna: in 1845 a number of families declared their intent to return to Volhynia; in 1848 members of that group (plus a few extras) traveled north and founded the village of Heinrichsdorf in the southern area of Volhynia. Obviously, the 1847 list falls squarely within that time frame, after the decision to depart but before the actual departure.

Comparing that list with the list of known landowners who departed Waldheim is enlightening.

Landowners Who Left Waldheim in 1848

Samuel Boese	David Koehn	Tobias Schultz
Jacob Buller	David Nachtigal	Michael Teske
Benjamin Buller the elder	Jacob Pankratz	Benjamin Unruh
Johann Ewert	Benjamin Ratzlaff	Cornelius? Unruh
Jacob Klassen	Benjamin Ratzlaff	Johann Worbel
David Koehn	Andreas Schmidt

Waldheim Voters (Landowners) in 1847

Gerhard Born	David Koehn	Peter Sperling
Cornelius Boschman	Jacob Loewen	Franz Steingart
Cornelius Braun	Dirk Martens	Gottlieb Straus
David Dirks	Andreas Nachtigal	Christian Teske
Heinrich Dirks	Benjamin Nachtigal	Benjamin Voth
Johann Dirksen	Jacob Nachtigal	Heinrich Voth
David Driedger	Peter Pankratz	Heinrich Warkentin
Dirk Dyck	Johann Penner	Benjamin Wedel
Isaac Friesen	Benjamin Ratzlaff	Cornelius Wedel
Martin Friesen	Abraham Richert	Cornelius Wedel
Jacob Huebert	Andreas Richert	Johann Wedel
Peter Huebert	Jacob Richert	Jacob Wiens
Gerhard Jost	Christian Schlabbach
Jacob Klassen	Peter Schmidt

Of the seventeen names of landowners leaving Waldheim in 1848, only three appear on the voter list for 1847: Jacob Klassen, David Koehn, and Benjamin Ratzlaff. Given the commonness of all of these names, we cannot be certain that each repeated name on the two lists refers to the same person, but we will assume so until proven otherwise.

The main conclusion to draw from this is that, by mid- to late 1847 (since the voter list was recorded in September of that year; see here), most of the landowners who in 1845 decided to leave and then actually left in 1848 were no longer landowners. Whether they sold their plots or had to turn back their plots to the village for reassignment to new owners, by mid- to late 1847 these founding fathers of Waldheim no longer held title to their original Wirtschaften.

Presumably, then, at least six months before the group departed, most of its members were landless. Given the usual agricultural cycle, it may have been even longer than that. Generally farmers do not sell or give up land with crops still standing in the field. In all likelihood, then, the land transfer took place before spring crops were planted, which would mean that the Waldheim group were landless and presumably dependent on day labor and cottage industry to earn a living for over a year. Where they lived (unless I am mistaken, specific houses were tied to ownership of a plot) is even a greater mystery. Perhaps they joined the group of renters who lived on the outskirts of most Molotschna villages.

Many details will probably remain unknown to us, but what we can know is that the Waldheim group who left—including our ancestor Benjamin Buller the elder, father of David, father of Peter D, father of Peter P, father of Grandpa Chris—were landless for at least six months and more probably a year before they finally made the journey north to found the village of Heinrichsdorf. Clearly, the return to Volhynia was not a simple matter of packing up and leaving; it apparently involved both significant delay and substantial sacrifice—even before the journey north ever began.

***

Although it does not relate directly to the question at hand in this series, it will be interesting also to compare the 1847 voter list with the original settler list here. One wonders how many original settlers who were not part of the Waldheim exodus remained in the village at the end of its first decade.

Exiting Waldheim 9

We have explored relatively completely the question with which this series began: Why did many Waldheim residents leave their village so soon after founding it? We were able not only to discount several explanations previously offered (they were not landless, nor were they tricked by Volhynian swindlers) but also to identify a highly probable reason: during the time of Johann Cornies’s greatest control over the affairs of Molotschna, the Waldheim congregation’s longtime elder was dismissed by the deputy of the Russian Guardianship Committe (possibly at Cornies’s bidding), so they and their elder, Peter H. Schmidt, left Waldheim to establish the village of Heinrichsdorf back in Volhynia, where they had previously lived.

That much of the story is fairly certain. Nevertheless, several intriguing questions remain, one of which we can answer here, two others asked in hopes that someone someday may provide insight, if not answers, to them.

1. Why did Peter H. Schmidt not resume his role as elder after the group left Waldheim? 

Contrary to what we might expect, relocation to Volhynia did not result in Schmidt being reinstated or restored to his church office. According to the Heinrichsdorf church book, when the church was in need of competent teachers, the congregation elected two candidates, who were then confirmed by Tobias Unruh, the elder of the Karolswalde church some 70 miles away (see the full discussion in the Heinrichsdorf History series here).

The church book also confirms that Peter Schmidt still was alive and in the church, but clearly he was not serving as elder. It seems, at least in this case, that Schmidt’s service depended on governmental permission to do so. Because Schmidt had been dismissed by a governmental official, Deputy von Hahn of the Guardianship Committee, he was apparently disqualified from serving even though he and his congregation lived in an area outside of the Guardianship Committee’s control (though still well within the borders of the Russian Empire).

Perhaps there is some other explanation, but none leaps to mind. The fact that Schmidt played no role in leading the Heinrichsdorf church, even when it was “weak on teachers,” as the church book has it, implies that he could not intervene in the situation, since presumably he would have done so if the opportunity had been available to him.

2. What happened to the Wirtschaften (land allotments) of those who left?

Specifically, were the landowners among the group permitted to sell their allotments, or did they have to return ownership of those allotments to the village for redistribution to other settlers? Although one might assume that the landowners owned their allotments and thus could sell them to whomever they pleased, we do not, as far as I can tell, know that to have been the case. In fact, when one recognizes that the landowners did not have to pay for their allotment (the land was granted them), it would not be shocking to learn that people who decided to move five or six years later had no right to profit from selling the land they had worked and farmed for such a short time.

At least two considerations lead one to wonder if the landowners were entitled to sell their allotments. First, leaving Molotschna colony was not an absolute right, so those leaving may have had to accept distasteful conditions in order to secure permission (a pass) to leave. Second, unless I am mistaken, we do not know for certain when clear title, so to speak, was transferred to the landowner. The latter point leads more broadly to the next question.

3. Did the Molotschna settlers granted land have to meet certain performance conditions in order to qualify for it?

We know that plots of land were granted, given, to the settlers, but I have yet to read of the conditions they had to fulfill to keep the land as their own. Perhaps an analogous situation will help us think about this more clearly.

Several earlier posts touched on the U.S. Homestead Act (see, e.g., here), the federal program that granted land allotments to citizens or near-citizens who met certain requirements, the most important of which was that the homesteader had to live on the land and farm it for five years. If a homesteader filed the appropriate paperwork and fulfilled the requirements, the land became his or her at the end of the five-year period. Conversely, if a homesteader failed to meet the minimum requirements, that person lost all claim on the land.

Did the Molotschna colony operate according to a comparable approach? I do not know the answer to that, but perhaps one of Buller Time’s readers does. It is reasonable to think that anyone who owned a land allotment had to meet certain conditions in order receive clear title to the allotment. Moreover, what we learned earlier about Johann Cornies occasionally taking land from a lazy farmer and giving it to someone more worthy is consistent with the idea that landowners had to meet certain conditions not only to secure title to an allotment but also to keep that title once it had been gained.

If nothing else, the last two questions reveal how much we still need to discover about the laws and practices that governed and shaped Molotschna colony. 

Exiting Waldheim 8

We are approaching the end of the Exiting Waldheim series. Having explored various explanations of why many Waldheim residents left in the first place and then what sort of requirements had to be met before they left (i.e., securing a pass or passport), we are ready to postulate an explanation for why this group purportedly stayed away longer than other Molotschna Mennonites who left around the same time, that is, 1848.

The answer may (!) be found in the list of Mennonites who declared in 1845 their intent to leave. Steve Fast’s translation of the original document may be consulted here. The screen shot below shows how the information is organized.

Each family is numbered in terms of this list and their census number, followed by the name of the head of household, the number of males and females in the family at the last census and now, and, finally, whether the family has a written visa.

The list uses several terms to refer to the documentation that permitted the family to travel legally: visa, passport, and ticket. The latter is by far the most common. Since we do not know if the terms in the original document show the same variety as Fast’s translation, we should probably not make too much of it. Clearly the written authorization to travel to Volhynia is in view. 

These families were traveling a great distance, so they needed at least what the previous post identified as a pass. The list above explicitly indicates a length of two months for most families, which seems to confirm that a pass is in view; they would have needed a passport (which was also more expensive) only if their journey would have taken more than six months.

Note, however, that we have shifted from the language of being away for two months to traveling for two months to arrive at a new locale. In fact, the list shown above states that the thirty-three families listed were being “resettled to Volynskaia Guberniia.” In addition, later the document identifies some who did not secure the proper permission (see pages 4–5): these were “not allowed to be transferred to to Volynskaia Guberniia.” The list clearly demonstrates, in other words, that the passes discussed in the prior post could be used both for round-trip and one-way journeys such as the one undertaken by the Waldheim émigrés. 

All that is interesting in and of itself, but it is only the background for our main concern: How does the list hint at a possible reason that the Waldheim group stayed away so long? If you look closely at the document shown above, you will see that Elder Peter Schmidt appears in the second line, below his stepfather Cornelius Funk. Schmidt was apparently considered a part of Funk’s family, since he is grouped with him as family 1. What is particularly curious is that the document records (1) that Funk had a two-month passport (pass?) and (2) that Schmidt “left at night, secretly without passport.” On the one hand, Schmidt is grouped with Funk in terms of the list; on the other hand, Funk’s passport did not suffice for Schmidt, who clearly left illegally under cover of darkness. Other multigeneration families (see, e.g., our own family at number 24 on the list) seem to have been covered by a single passport/pass. Schmidt was not, which requires some explanation.

Another oddity about the list begs attention as well. The list itself is dated to 27 September 1845, but we know that the Waldheim group did not actually leave until sometime in 1848. This raises the obvious question of how an 1845 list can report someone sneaking away in the night three years in the future. The most logical answer is that the list was probably created in 1845, then updated and supplemented in 1848, after the group had actually departed.

Ultimately, we do not need to know with certainty when Schmidt’s name was added to the list; all that really matters is the clear evidence that he left Waldheim and Molotschna illegally—and therein may lie a clue to at least one reason why the Waldheim (soon-to-be Heinrichsdorf) group stayed away longer than other Mennonites who left Molotschna.

As Moon noted in the previous post, there was lax enforcement of the passport system in the Russian frontier, which certainly included Volhynia. Consequently, the Volhynian officials would have been unlikely to do much, if anything, if they ever discovered that Schmidt had traveled there illegally. As long as he was a productive member of the community, they would have cared little about his past.

Schmidt’s real difficulties lay back in Molotschna, where he had been removed from his position as elder. Not to heap suggestion on supposition, but one wonders also if Schmidt had applied for a pass and been turned down, simply because he was a known troublemaker (in the eyes of the governing authorities). Schmidt’s unauthorized departure, therefore, was both a reaction to his troubled life in Waldheim and a source of even greater trouble. He could ill afford to return to Molotschna, lest he be called to account for his unauthorized departure. In fact, Schmidt never did return, as shown by the record of his death, on 21 May 1866, in the Heinrichsdorf (Volhynia) church book.

Still listed under his stepfather Cornelius Funk (Funck), who also remained in Heinrichsdorf until his death (1859), Schmidt and presumably many who had some connection to him or felt loyalty toward him did not return to Waldheim. An interesting study would be to identify exactly who stayed and who returned and when. For example, we believe that David Buller and family returned sometime in the early 1850s, that is, within a few years of leaving Waldheim in the first place (see here). Who else stayed, and who else left?

As a guiding hypothesis, one might suspect that the congregants whom Peter Schmidt had led in their first sojourn in Volhynia, before that group and several others moved to Molotschna and founded Waldheim, were likely to have stayed with their spiritual leader for the duration. That is a reasonable guess, but it remains just a guess until we can identify more accurately who stayed and whether they were part of his flock early on.

All that is fun exploration for another post. For now it is enough to be aware of one possible reason why Schmidt and many other ex-Waldheim residents did not return south once Johann Cornies’s passing relaxed his iron grip over the people’s lives. Schmidt left illegally in the middle of the night, essentially burning a bridge behind him. The only rational choice for him was never to return. For good or for ill, that choice apparently affected many other lives as well. 

Exiting Waldheim 7

We know what likely motivated many Waldheim residents to leave their new home in 1848, and we even have learned a fair amount about the person who apparently stood at the center of the storm: Elder Peter H. Schmidt. What we have yet to uncover is why the Waldheim residents who departed did not immediately return, as apparently many others did (per John Staples), when Johann Cornies’s control over the lives of the Molotschna Mennonites ended with his death.

The circumstances of Schmidt’s own departure from Waldheim may offer a hint, but first we should learn more about travel within the Russian Empire during this time. Our guide is someone from whom we have already gained much: David Moon, the author of The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914. For this post we turn to his essay “Peasant Migration, the Abolition of Serfdom and the Internal Passport System in the Russian Empire, c.1800–1914” (2002).

Moon sets the broad historical context for the regulation of travel within Russia’s boundaries, and his entire essay is well worth reading. To summarize, historically Russia sought to control the movement of its subjects, especially peasants, in order to ensure that nobles and government officials did not have to worry about its labor force moving away and to guarantee that there were adequate bodies to be conscripted into the army.

In the early eighteenth century (30 October 1719), Peter the Great both expanded and regularized the law “by introducing a system of internal passports for the entire population” (Moon 2002, 326). The phrase entire population is key here. Although the peasantry provided the impetus for the new legal constraints and the internal passport system, the entire population were governed by them—including foreign colonists such as the Mennonites. Moon explains that the “fundamental principle” of the 1719 law was simply: “No one may leave their place of permanent residence without a legitimate permit or passport” (327, quoting article 1 of the Digest of Regulations concerning Passports and Fugitives, which was volume 14 of the 1857 edition of the Digest of Laws of the Russian Empire).

Moon then discusses the lengths to which the Russian government went to enforce the law and what consequences law-breakers suffered (military service, hard labor, often exile to Siberia). Moon also notes that enforcement was not as rigorous in frontier regions such as New Russia (aka Ukraine), since labor there was in short supply and officials were more likely to welcome “illegal” migrant workers. The latter may be of significance for our interests.

Something that obviously was relevant for the Waldheim residents who left was the passport system itself. Moon explains that there were three types of internal passports, each appropriate for a different type of travel (Moon 2002, 327–28).

1. “A written permit (vid) was sufficient for peasants traveling inside their own districts or less than 30 versty [ca. 20 miles].


2. “Peasants traveling further than 30 versty but for less than six months needed a pass (bilet) written on official stamped paper.”


3. “Finally, passports were required if peasants were traveling further than 30 versty and would be away for more than six months, up to a maximum of three years.”

The latter two documents were not free. Moon explains that “a one-month pass cost 15 copecks, … a two-month pass, 30 copecks, and … a three-month pass, 60 copecks.” The longer-term passport, not surprisingly, cost more: “A six-month passport cost 85 copecks; a passport valid for a year, 1 rouble 45 copecks; and a full three-year passport, 4 roubles 35 copecks.” Given the fact that the average annual poll tax for a male peasant at this time was 95 copecks, the cost of any type of passport was comparatively expensive.

The three types of papers (permit, pass, passport) were also distinguished in other ways. Permits, for example, were issued to peasants by their owners, stewards, or village elders or officials, passes by “estate owners, their managers, or local state authorities.” Finally, passports all originated from the “district offices of the state treasury, which were to keep a record of them,” although village were allowed to keep already-approved blank passports to issue as needed (Moon 2002, 327–28).

What relevance does all this have for the Waldheim residents who resettled in Heinrichsdorf in 1848? First, it should be clear by now that these Mennonites, although free (relatively speaking) colonists, not indentured peasants, still had to abide by Peter the Great’s law: it applied to all members of the population. Consequently, the Waldheim group needed permission to relocate north to Volhynia. They could not simply pack up and move.

Second, their journey was not a jaunt to a nearby market to sell grain (a common use of the permit) but a lengthy journey to a destination hundreds of miles away. Clearly, each one leaving had to secure either a pass (from the local state authorities) or a passport (possibly from the village mayor). Each person would have to pay some amount for the privilege of moving to another part of the empire.

Of course, the fact that they were moving, not merely traveling somewhere and back, introduces a complication: How did the internal passport system work for those who wished to relocate? Moon does not address this question directly, but he offers enough evidence that we can suggest a probable (or at least reasonable) explanation.

Moon mentions that “peasant migrant laborers were obliged to present their documents to the police when [they] arrived at their destinations” (2002, 329). The Waldheim Mennonites obviously were not peasants or migrant laborers, but the same principle probably applied.

Specifically, one imagines that each head of household wishing to leave not only had to apply for permission to travel to Volhynia but also was required to list the names of all those who would travel with him or her and state the purpose of the journey, in this case, to live in Volhynia. The granting of permission would thus cover both the journey and the outcome: relocation. Once the head of household reached the destination, he or she would check in with the police (or local authorities) and present the pass/passport to prove that the journey and its purpose were authorized. The Volhynian official would then certify that the holder of the paper had full permission to remain in the new home. To repeat: we do not know that the system worked precisely as described, but this scenario seems to correspond well to all that we do know about Russia’s internal passport system.

Why this long detour? Now that we have adequate background to the lived reality of the Waldheim group (which, we should remember, included our own ancestors Benjamin and Helena and their son David and his wife Helena and even their son Peter, who was born in 1845), we can examine with increased understanding and insight a primary (i.e., contemporary) source that records important data about the group who left. We will pick up the story at that point in the following post.


Work Cited

Moon, David. 2002. “Peasant Migration, the Abolition of Serfdom and the Internal Passport System in the Russian Empire, c.1800–1914.” Pages 324–57 in Coerced and Free Migration: Global Perspectives. Edited by David Eltis. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.

Exiting Waldheim 6

Now that we have identified what appears to be a significant factor in the Waldheim group’s decision to leave, we should learn more about the person who stood at the center of the controversy: Elder Peter H. Schmidt.

Once again, John A. Boese offers us a clue that we can pursue: “He and his wife joined the group that went back to Volhynia in 1848 and his wife was the first one to be buried on the new cemetery plot in Heinrichsdorf” (see here for Boese’s full statement).

If Boese is correct and Schmidt and his wife joined the group moving to Volhynia, we should find this recorded on the 1845 “List of Mennonites Moving from Waldheim back to Volhynia” that we have consulted in the past (see Steve Fast’s translation here).  Indeed, on the very first page of that list we see a Peter Schmidt listed under (and numbered with) Cornelius Funk. Schmidt’s family is reported to have comprised four males and one female, the latter presumably Schmidt’s unnamed wife.

Since no other Peter Schmidt appears on the list, this one is likely to have been the Waldheim elder. That he was, in fact, the elder, is confirmed by his entry on the 1850 Heinrichsdorf census and Glenn Penner’s identification of that Peter Schmidt within the GRANDMA database (see here). The census entries for the males and females are given below.

Peter Schmidt (GM 81992) was listed under Cornelius Funk because he was Funk’s stepson. This explains the earlier listing under Funk on the emigration list. At the time of the census, Schmidt was fifty-six years old and had two grown sons and two young sons (his firstborn had died in 1840).

The right side of the census lists the females of the family: the only one of interest here is the first Helena listed, who was Peter Schmidt’s wife. The fact that she was twenty-two at the time, the same age as Schmidt’s second living song, clearly indicates that she was his second wife. The GRANDMA database confirms this, as seen below in the entry for Peter Schmidt 81992 (the number provided by Glenn Penner).

There are many details we might explore (GM seems to have some dates incorrect), but our primary focus should remain on Peter Schmidt himself and what we can trace of his life. First, we note that he was born in Jeziorka, a small village in the Schwetz area where a number of Bullers lived in the later eighteenth century (see the Jeziorka series of posts in November–December 2015). Checking the Przechovka church book, we see that Peter Schmidt was a member of that church, as were our own ancestors.

A second thing to notice is that Peter Schmidt’s father was named Hans, which corresponds to several references to him as Peter H. (for Hans) Schmidt. Interestingly, the GRANDMA entry for Hans indicates that he was an elder of the Przechovka church, although I have not yet been able to confirm that. If the report is accurate, then the son apparently followed in the father’s footsteps.

The place of birth of Schmidt’s first three children is also of interest. According to GRANDMA, they were born in Volhynia, which means that Schmidt was among the Przechovka members who moved to Volhynia in the first two decades of the 1800s and then to Molotschna, just as Benjamin Buller and family did.

Confirmation of Schmidt’s Volhynian presence may be offered by John Boese, who notes in his account (see the full context here) that “Schmidt was the leader at Zabara-Waldheim.” It is important to point out that this Waldheim was not the one in Molotschna but the original Waldheim in Volhynia, the one after which the Molotschna village was named. As Martin H. Schrag explains, during the first quarter of the nineteenth century a group of Mennonites “settled in two villages 20 miles south­west of Novograd Volynski, named Waldheim (Waltajem) and Zabara (Dossidorf).” The villages can be seen in the center right of the map below.

What can we draw from all this, and why should we care about any of it? Peter Schmidt was already a leader (possibly an elder) of one group, or congregation, of Mennonites in Volhynia. Beginning in the late 1830s, these same Mennonites joined several other groups of Volhynian Mennonites to form the Molotschna village of Waldheim, a new village named after the one that some of them had left behind in Volhynia. 

At some point—whether in Volhynia or in Molotschna, we cannot say where and when (although I suspect it was the former)—Peter H. Schmidt became elder of his congregation. As their spiritual leader, he baptized many of the church young adults and offered spiritual guidance to the flock as a whole. Schmidt had history with the congregation, beginning in Volhynia and then continuing into Molotschna.

When Deputy von Hahn of the Guardianship Committee removed Schmidt from being elder, he was attacking not just some replaceable religious official but a long-time member of the community whom the others members loved and on whom they depended. The bonds between elder and church had been forged over several decades of living, working, and worshiping together. Such bonds could not easily be broken.

One imagines that those who left did so, not merely to escape an intolerable situation, but also out of a sense of loyalty to Schmidt. Others, of course, chose to stay. We will never know why either group chose what they did, and we should not pretend that one choice was morally superior to the other. All we really can say is that the removal of Elder Schmidt apparently served as the primary cause for a large portion of the village—that is, the congregation—to leave their Molotschna village within the first decade of its existence.

Many of the group eventually returned, but not as soon as others of the 1848 exodus did (according to Staples’s account). Why they delayed may be hinted at in the circumstances of Schmidt’s departure, but that is a subject for another post.

Work Cited

Schrag, Martin H. 1959. Volhynia (Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Exiting Waldheim 5

Thus far this series has explored a number of possible explanations for the decision by more than half of Waldheim’s residents to leave their land and lives behind and relocate hundreds of miles to the northwest. We first investigated John Boese’s claim that that those who left had been kept landless and subservient by the long-established settlers. That explanation did not fit the facts. 

We then considered the possibility that, in the wake of a serious drought in 1848, unscrupulous politicians and land agents tricked a number of Mennonites into moving north to and buying land in the Kiev and Volhynia guberniias. True though that probably was for some who left Molotschna, it was not the experience of the Waldheim group, who planned their departure years before the drought and then leased, but did not buy, land on which to found their new village: Heinrichsdorf.

Finally, the last post suggested that those who left may have been doing so in order to escape Johann Cornies and the strict control of the Agricultural Society. Although that motivation may have played a role with many of the Mennonites who left in 1848, the fact that the Waldheim group did not return in 1849, after Cornies’s death, implies that there may have been some other factor at work as well.

This post will explore a final factor that likely contributed to the Waldheim group’s decision to leave, that possibly played the most crucial role of all. This final factor is not an alternate explanation to the others that we have already considered. Rather, it complements some of them and provides a fuller picture of the situation in Waldheim in the early 1840s.

We begin this post by returning to the focus of the previous one: Johann Cornies and the Agricultural Society. The conflict between Cornies and some Molotschna Mennonites did not remain within the realm of of farming, construction, work ethic, and the like. It eventually bled over into all areas of life, including the church. 

At first, Staples explains, 

Cornies still operated within the congregational system.… Bernhard Fast, Peter Wedel, and other leading figures in the Old Flemish congregation remained his close allies, and he relied on their support to implement the policies of the Agricultural Society. However, it was Cornies and not the congregational elders who now provided leadership. (2003, 119–20)

In time, this subtle but important shift in power led to serious disputes.

By 1845 Cornies had altogether abandoned any pretence at enforcing his actions through congregational channels. In 1836 he had appealed to congregational officials for cooperation; now he issued decrees backed when necessary by the ready support of the Guardianship Committee [the Russian governing body]. Always a decisive and domineering figure, Cornies had become authoritarian and even dictatorial in his actions, provoking bitter opposition from leaders of conservative congregations. (2003, 129–30)

One of Cornies’s primary opponents was the elder of the influential Flemish congregation centered in Lichtenau-Petershagen. One of the members of that congregation, Johann Regier, was both district mayor and a loyal supporter of Cornies. Unfortunately, he was also, by all accounts, an alcoholic, so Warkentin sought intervention from the Russian Guardianship Committee to remove Regier from office. Needless to say, Cornies did not appreciate this attack on one of his allies, and he responded in kind, ultimately convincing the governing authorities to side with him against Warkentin.

So it was that on a tour of Molotschna in 1841, the deputy of the Guardianship Committee accused Warkentin of making false accusations against Regier and dismissed him from his position as elder. As shocking as this action was, the deputy was not finished: he also divided the Lichtenau-Petershagen congregation into three smaller ones, “each with its own elder” (Urry 1989, 129). 

Obviously, the pressing need for these congregations was to secure new elders. Unfortunately, only an existing elder could ordain a new one, and the ruling authorities were making it difficult for the congregations to make a connection with one. Eventually Peter H. Schmidt, the elder of Waldheim (!) church, ordained Heinrich Wiens as elder of the Gnadenfeld congregation, and Wiens then ordained “Dirk Warkentin to head the Lichtenau-Petershagen congregation and Heinrich Toews to the Pordenau group” (Urry 1989, 130).

At long last we arrive at the real point of this story: during the early 1840s, serious conflict among Mennonites in Molotschna colony led both sides to invite intervention by the Russian authorities. The governing authorities accepted Cornies’s invitation and decisively rejected Warkentin’s, leaving him without a church position and dividing his church into small, more easily controlled groups. Most important of all, once the ice had been broken, the authorities were more likely to intervene again—and so they did.

James Urry offers a long introduction to Elder Peter Schmidt and the Waldheim congregation, which no doubt included our ancestors Benjamin and Helena Buller and their family; it is worth quoting in full: 

Peter Schmidt … was elder of a congregation formed by a new group of migrants who had come to the Molochnaia in 1836 from Volhynia, a province of Russian Poland. In Molochnaia they established the village of Waldheim in the east of the colony, close to the Russian village of Chernigovka. Like the earlier settlers who had founded Alexanderwohl, the Waldheim group were followers of the Groningen Old Flemish persuasion and they had been preceded in 1835 by yet another group of the same affiliation. This congregation of Groningen Old Flemish did not come from Poland, but from Prussian Brandenburg, and they formed their own congregation centred on the village of Gnadenfeld. Molochnaia now possessed three independent congregations of Groningen Old Flemish, although historically all were linked to the same congregation in West Prussia and many of their members were distantly related. However, each community maintained its independence in Russia as their different experiences since the eighteenth century in Prussia and Poland set them apart from each other as well as from ocher groups in the colony. (1989, 130).

We will return to this paragraph in due course; for now the end of the story awaits:

If Gnadenfeld was progressive, Waldheim was more conservative. In 1844 their elder, Peter Schmidt, was removed from office by Hahn for baptizing outsiders—without permission of the authorities—specifically people banned by the Gnadenfeld congregation and a Lutheran youth. (1989, 131).

In 1844, deputy of the Guardianship Committee Evgenii von Hahn, a governmental official, removed the Waldheim elder from his church position due to the latter’s baptism of banned Mennonites and a Lutheran youth. On the one hand, Schmidt was culpable for violating the law (as much as we might disagree with that law today). On the other hand, yet another governmental intrusion into Mennonite religious affairs, presumably with Cornies’s full approval, if not prompting, sent a clear message of what Waldheim residents could expect in the future. Is is not surprising, then, that the following year over half of Waldheim’s landowners and many of its original settlers signed their names to a request to leave Molotschna and relocate hundreds of miles away. The juxtaposition of events seems more than coincidental: Schmidt was dismissed in 1844, and by 1845 a sizable group had decided to leave.

The dismissal of elder Schmidt was likely the determinative factor that led over half of the village to leave Molotschna so soon after they had arrived. In fact, John Boese mentions the elder in his own explanation, although his facts differ from those given by Urry:

While Elder Peter H. Schmidt was the leader at Zabara-Waldheim, and appeared to have had good training and was a very able speaker, the residing ministers did not seem to want to tolerate him and with all this resistance he decided to resign.

Whichever account is correct (Urry is likely the more trustworthy), Schmidt’s leaving of the ministry seems to have played a central role in the Waldheim exodus from Molotschna. But more than this one event, the decision to leave was probably motivated more by what the event signaled: the startling expansion of control exercised by Johann Cornies, who could call the governing authorities to do his bidding even if it meant intruding in church affairs. If he could have elders deposed for resisting him, there really were only two options for all citizens: comply or leave. The Waldheim group chose the latter course.

We are not yet finished with this series, as other questions and curiosities await. For example, who was Peter H. Schmidt, and what more can we say about him? Moreover, why did the Waldheim group not return shortly after Cornies’s death, as other émigrés apparently did? The story is mostly told, but, as usual, it leads to other paths that we can and will enjoyably and profitably explore. 

  

Works Cited

Staples, John R. 2003. Cross-Cultural Encounters on the Ukrainian Steppe: Settling the Molochna Basin, 1783–1861. Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Urry, James. 1989. None but Saints: The Transformation of Mennonite Life in Russia 1789–1889. Winnipeg: Hyperion.

Exiting Waldheim 4

Why did more than half of the early residents of Waldheim leave within the first decade? It was likely not due to financial or social oppression, since many of the group leaving were landowners, and some were Waldheim’s original settlers. Further, although the Molotschna Agricultural Society claimed that unscrupulous politicians and land agents from the north tricked many Mennonites into leaving that same year (1848), the Waldheim group apparently was not so victimized, since they they had been planning their departure since 1845, and they ended up leasing land, not purchasing it, as the others Mennonites had done. The search for the cause or additional contributing factors goes on.

Although the last post did not highlight it, John Staples’s closing sentence merits special attention: “Apparently by the end of 1849 they [those who had left] had indeed returned to Molochna, but there is no further reference to them in statistical reports or Agricultural Society correspondence” (Staples 2003, 126). This statement does not relate directly to the Waldheim group, since most of them did not return in 1849, but it does hint at a possible contributing factor for why Mennonites first left and then returned in 1849 and after. More on that later.

First, however, we will consider another possible factor that prompted the Waldheimers (and others?) to leave Molotschna: the Agricultural Society. Space does not permit a full discussion of the origins of the Agricultural Society; suffice it to say for the moment that the Agricultural Society was created in 1836 as heir to two earlier advisory, and sometimes ruling, boards: the Sheep Society and the Forestry Society. (This and the following draw upon Staples 2003, 118–23; Urry 1989, 109–19, 126–37.)

The Agricultural Society was established by the Russian governing authorities but was managed by Mennonites, especially in the person of its chairman for life: Johann Cornies. “With the establishment of the Agricultural Society,” Staples writes,

Cornies entered the most important phase of his campaign to transform Mennonite society. He focused his activities on three principal themes: (1) more efficient allocation of limited Mennonite resources, (2) more efficient exploitation of those resources, and (3) rural industrialization. … He confidently believed that if the Agricultural Society “steadfastly directed its own business and tended to the well-being of its brothers,” the end result could only be “morality, industry and love of orderliness … upon which prosperity must follow.” (Staples 2003, 119)

Lofty goals indeed. Unfortunately, noble ends do not justify any and every means, which is precisely where many found Cornies lacking. Some of the Society’s actions were nonthreatening, to be sure. For example, “With members of his Committee, Cornies inspected agricultural activities in the colony, recommending and advising the farmers on new crops, techniques, and ways to improve livestock” (Urry 1989, 112). Moreover, many of Cornies and the Society’s policies led to remarkable increase in Molotschna productivity. Most notable of these was the introduction of a “four-field rotation system … with fields being sown in alternate years with barley, then wheat, then rye or oats, and finally being left fallow. The fallow was not left idle. The earth was deep-ploughed, thus exposing the soil to air and moisture” (Urry 1989, 115).

Other activities were not so benign. During Cornies’s chairmanship of the Forestry Society, Staples reports,

the society looked to reallocate existing farms more efficiently. Forestry Society regulations threatened that people who disobeyed society orders would be dispossessed of their land, and their farms would be given to young families willing to follow directives. On this basis, in at least one instance, Cornies apparently succeeded in convincing the district administration to evict a householder, seventy-year-old Cornelius Fast, from his farm. Cornies justified the eviction on the grounds that “Fast could not have maintained himself further on his farm, even without the [matter of] his not fulfilling the plantings, in that he is a man of almost 70 years without means.” A second important factor in the decision was that “a good, industrious farmer came along,” willing to take over the farm and work it properly. (Staples 2003, 120)

This action was a precursor of things to come.

Once the Agricultural Society was created, Cornies expanded his efforts to evict inferior farmers from their land and replace them with younger families that promised to abide by society policies. Farmers who failed to keep up the condition of their farms, whether as a result of alcoholism, marital problems, sloth, disease, or age, were pressured to turn over their land to younger families. These, it was expected, would be better able to meet the demands of Mennonite society as expressed by the Agricultural Society. (Staples 2003, 120–21)

Although one might excuse such actions as unfortunate but justifiable for the sake of the greater good, Cornies made matters worse by acting in a tyrannical way. According to Urry, Cornies “possessed a short temper and was not above physically assaulting recalcitrants. The obdurate nature of many Mennonites, however, was matched by Cornies’ own intolerance and seeming disregard for Mennonite traditions” (1989, 126). Cornies was, if nothing else, a polarizing figure who was loyally loved by some but disliked in every way by others.

What does this have to do with the decision of many of Waldheim’s early residents to leave within the first decade? Perhaps a great deal. As we noted long ago (here), Johann Cornies was vitally involved in the founding of Waldheim. Not only did he provide the village land from his lease holdings and give the town its name; he also managed the actual creation of the village. Staples elaborates on the sort of role that Cornies played:

Cornies drafted contracts defining the duties of families taking over farmsteads and pressed congregational officials to insist that such families sign them. When the Guardianship Committee placed Cornies in charge of establishing the new villages of Waldheim and Gnadenfeld (1835) and Landskrone (1839), he used the opportunities to rigorously apply his new standards to the new villages. (Staples 2003, 121)

The final clause is particularly arresting: “he used the opportunities to rigorously apply his new standards to the new villages.” The Mennonite ethos was usually not receptive to those who sought to exercise rigorous control, even when the controlling person was another Mennonite. By virtue of his role as the founder of the village of Waldheim, however, Cornies was in a position to enforce such control on the village residents.

I know of no extant record that directly supports this theory, but it seems plausible that some in Waldheim (and the other villages) left Molotschna in order to escape Cornies’s control. Resistance to Cornies would have been futile, of course, given Cornies’s record of seizing and redistributing property. There really were only two options: comply or leave.

We do not know that the scenario outlined here was actually the cause of the great Mennonite exodus of 1848, but it seems as plausible an explanation as any. Perhaps if we can access the Kammeral Liste that Staples cites (see the previous post), we can determine in which villages the ninety-nine families who left Molotschna originally lived. If the villages were largely those over which Cornies exercised great control, then the theory gains further credibility.

One final piece of evidence: the year 1849. Why might those who had left have begun to return so soon after leaving? Staples hints that their expectations of cheap land were disappointed and that they returned defeated. That may well have been the case. Nevertheless, another explanation is equally plausible: they returned because the reason for their leaving was now gone. That is, Johann Cornies died on 13 March 1848, and the news of his passing may have prompted those who left on account of him to return to a place they had never really wanted to leave in the first place.

To be clear, Staples’s theory and this one can both be correct at the same time; one does not exclude the other. That being said, neither of these explanations seems entirely accurate for the Waldheim group, since most of them did not return in 1849 or immediately after. Thus we still lack a sufficient explanation for the departure of the Waldheim group. They may well have decided to separate from Cornies and the Agricultural Society rather than comply with their demands, but some other reason must also have been in play. We will explore one final possibility in the following post.

Note

For a laudatory obituary for Cornies, see Harvey L. Dyck’s translation of the piece written by an agronomist named Gavel. Originally published in a supplemental issue of the Unterhaltungsblatt für deutsche Ansiedler im südlichen Rußland (October 1848; see here for the original), the translation can be accessed online here.

The Cornies family has its own blog here. Interestingly, John Staples left an extensive comment on the blog in which he discusses his own work on a biography of Cornies (here). It will be well worth reading once it sees the light of day.


Works Cited

Staples, John R. 2003. Cross-Cultural Encounters on the Ukrainian Steppe: Settling the Molochna Basin, 1783–1861. Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Urry, James. 1989. None but Saints: The Transformation of Mennonite Life in Russia 1789–1889. Winnipeg: Hyperion.

Exiting Waldheim 3

Why did over half of Waldheim’s early settlers leave the village? We do not yet understand why, but we do know that it was probably not due to an inability to secure their own land, since more than half of the group were already landowners. Social conflict may have been involved, though there is no clear evidence of the severity of conflict that would have warranted relocation. Thus we continue to look for possible causes.

John Staples, author of Cross-Cultural Encounters on the Ukrainian Steppe: Settling the Molochna Basin, 1783–1861, mentions in passing a possible contributing factor for the exodus that interests us.

The drought of 1848 temporarily increased the urgency of land shortages in Molochna, and that year ninety-nine families left Molochna and purchased land in the Kiev and Volyniia guberniias. The Agricultural Society vehemently protested such out-migration, complaining to the Guardianship Committee that unscrupulous Kievan and Volynian officials were luring Mennonites away with unfulfillable promises of cheap and plentiful land. Such Mennonites, the society complained, would soon return to Molochna, impoverished by this ‘swindle,’ and the Mennonite settlement would be forced to support them. What became of these migrants is unclear. Apparently by the end of 1849 they had indeed returned to Molochna, but there is no further reference to them in statistical reports or Agricultural Society correspondence. (Staples 2003, 125–26)

Staples is a careful scholar, so we should give this brief paragraph a close and careful reading to mine it for every detail that we can. That being said, we need not accept every claim that Staples makes, as the ensuing discussion will reveal.

1. The first detail that jumps out is Staples’s reference to ninety-nine families who left Molotschna in 1848. As we noted in the last post, the Waldheim–Heinrichsdorf group numbered around thirty-five families. What are we to make of the difference in numbers?

First, it is important to note that Staples cites his source, the Kammeral Liste (chamber list?), which appears in file 1392 in the Peter J. Braun Russian Mennonite Archive, 1803–1920. The file is titled: Statistical Summary of the State of the Molochna Mennonite District, as of January 1, 1849—Population, Trades, Agriculture, Etc. Although we cannot say for certain without seeing the list itself, this is presumably a collection of official statistics for the year and thus reliable.

Why is this important? If ninety-nine families left Molotschna in 1848, then the exodus of our thirty-five was part of a larger trend. The Waldheim–Heinrichsdorf group was not alone; other Mennonites left Molotschna around the same time.

2. This conclusion receives additional support from another detail, namely, the statement that those who left purchased land in the “Kiev and Volyniia guberniias.” The out-migrating Mennonites did not settle all together but rather moved to several different locations. The two provinces mentioned were next to each other, with Kiev on the east and Volhynia on the west; Heinrichsdorf was close to the border between the two but on the Volhynia side. More important than geography, however, is the fact that the Waldheim group was not alone in moving back north at this time. Multiple groups moved to multiple locations in the Volhynia–Kiev region.

3. Staples seems to link the out-migration with the drought of 1848 (that is one to add to the list for the Russian Steppes series!), but this is doubtful. As we have already seen, the Waldheim group had been planning to leave at least since 1845. Common sense also leads one to think that none of these families left on the spur of the moment. There was property to sell and to pack, provisions to collect for the journey and the first weeks and probably months in the new locale. In all likelihood, those who left in 1848 had decided at least a year before then (before the drought) to return to the north.

4. Skipping over the Agricultural Union’s protests (that Cornies-led organization merits much fuller discussion than we can provide here), we note that Staples introduces another set of actors we have not previously encountered: “Kievan and Volynian officials … luring Mennonites away with … promises of cheap and plentiful land.” The idea that agents were recruiting Mennonite settlers is not surprising, since the same process led to Mennonites moving to New Russia in the first place. This does, of course, introduce another possibility of our understanding of the Waldheim group’s decision to leave. They may have been recruited to move by an agent from the Volhynian province.

In fact, an earlier post about Heinrichsdorf (here) provides evidence that this explanation is probably valid for the Waldheim group.  Specifically, the Heinrichsdorf church book reports:

Permission was granted to them [those who wanted to leave] by the board of the Molotchna Mennonite District in 1845 to look for a place or residence. In 1846 under the Proprietor Arilnitzky they were granted a plan for leasing land for the purpose of founding the above mentioned colony. In 1848 they received permission from the welfare committee of the state council. Boron and Rohen received the preferred plan from Arilnitzky and drew up the final plans for resettling in 1848. In the following year, 1849, their colony was founded and formed.

Proprietor Arilnitzky, Boron, and Rohen were involved in the process but obviously were not part of the group leaving. What roles did they play? The plan to relocate was granted under Proprietor Arilnitzky, which might imply a governmental role; however, one might also imagine Arilnitzky as the owner of the land that was to be leased. We simply cannot know.

Boron and Rohen seem to have been more implementers than planners or negotiators. The fact that they received a plan and worked out the details for its execution makes them sound like agents. We are probably safe to think that these two men were the middlemen between the Volhynian landowner and the Waldheim Mennonites.

Whatever the details might have been, Staples’s description seems to find confirmation in the account of the Heinrichsdorf church book: agents were involved in facilitating the Mennonite exodus from the Molotschna—with one important exception: Staples writes of the out-migrating group purchasing land in the north; according to the church book, the Waldheim–Heinrichsdorf group leased their land.

Why is this important? As noted in the previous post, over half the group owned land in Waldheim. Their move north was not a lateral one, so to speak, exchanging land ownership in one place for land ownership in another. Those who owned land and moved north were returning to a tenancy status. This is an important consideration, since it hints that the move for the Waldheim group was likely not motivated by financial ambition. These Mennonites were not lured away “with unfulfillable promises of cheap and plentiful land.”

In the end, Staples helps us understand the specifics of the situation a little better, but his explanation does not provide a complete, or even a completely accurate, answer for the Waldheim group. From him we learn that the Waldheim exodus was apparently part of a larger movement out of Molotschna back to the north, as around sixty non-Waldheim families moved the same year. The Waldheim exit was not unique.

From Staples we also learn that the move north did not take place in a vacuum. Governmental bodies and private individuals—officials, landowners, and agents—were also involved. The testimony of the Heinrichsdorf church book attests to that activity.

Finally, Staples’s account also helps us to discover how the Waldheim group was different from the other émigrés. According to the Agricultural Committee statement cited by Staples (see Works Cited), the Mennonites leaving had been lured away by fantastic promises of land ownership. That may well have been true for many of the families relocating north; according to the Heinrichsdorf church book, it was not true of the Waldheim group, since they merely leased their land. Clearly, something other than financial opportunity was driving the Waldheim group to pack up their homes and relocate hundreds of miles away. We continue to search for that something other.

Works Cited

Agricultural Committee. 1849? Notizen wegen der Bittschriften einigen Mennoniten sich nach dem Kiewschen und Wolynischen Gouvernement zu ubersiedeln [Comments on the Petitions of Certain Mennonites to Settle in the Kiev and Volhynian Gubernias]. File 1429 in the Peter J. Braun Russian Mennonite Archive, 1803–1920, labeled Mennonites Wishing to Migrate to the Kiev and Shitomir Gubernias: Policy Recommendations.

Staples, John R. 2003. Cross-Cultural Encounters on the Ukrainian Steppe: Settling the Molochna Basin, 1783–1861. Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

Exiting Waldheim 2

The previous post provided the necessary background to the question why a majority of Waldheim’s original settlers chose to leave not many years after settling there. This post turns to possible explanations. We begin by considering again the reasons given by an amateur Mennonite historian named John A. Boese. The term amateur is not used pejoratively but rather to signal that Boese’s approach is more that of a tradent, someone who passes on (generally oral) tradition, than that of a historical researcher.

Boese wrote a short book titled The Prussian-Polish Mennonites Settling in South Dakota 1874 and Soon After (1967) in which he recounted the memories of and stories told by his ancestors, some of whom lived in Heinrichsdorf, the village established by the group who left Waldheim. Given his family’s association with Waldheim and then Heinrichsdorf, it is not surprising to see Boese offering his explanation of why the exodus took place.

Boese begins by observing that the some residents in Waldheim “found considerable disagreements in the church there and also in the village management,” then continues:

It appeared that the more well-to-do element of the village or colony desired to keep this new group, because they were poor, as a laboring class. So they would not allow them to own land. Village and church management appeared to dictate that the children of this new group should be placed in homes to serve as help. Our group was not accustomed to such idea and wanted to keep their own children in their own homes. All concerned could come to no agreement.

While Elder Peter H. Schmidt was the leader at Zabara-Waldheim, and appeared to have had good training and was a very able speaker,  the residing ministers did not seem to want to tolerate him and with all this resistance he decided to resign. He and his wife joined the group that went back to Volhynia in 1848 and his wife was the first one to be buried on the new cemetery plot in Heinrichsdorf.

This group that planned to return to Volhynia had elected Benj. P. Schmidt, (a son of Peter H.), as minister. They now applied for permission by authorities to migrate back to Volhynia. This was granted and so they returned in 1848 to an area that they had passed thru on the way to the Molotschna. This was a wooded area with the possibility of clearing enough ground for cultivation and pasture. The soil here was quite promising and the area was near good markets for their products.

Here the village of Heinrichsdorf was established. Since they had no Elder they joined the church activities of the Ostrog area where Benjamin Dirks was Elder. Later Tobias A. Unruh was Elder there and he also served this group. These church servants were still active when this group left for America.

Judging by the experience that this group had at the Molotschna, one would probably not just want to claim that “politics” had entered into the management of affairs there, but it appeared that those belonging to the more well-to-do class possessed the ruling element.

As noted in the first post containing this account (here), Boese identifies at least two, possibly three, causes for the decision to return. He claims that those who left for Heinrichsdorf were not allowed to own land and were kept in the position of laborers, that the village and church leaders dictated that their children of the landless families should be placed in homes as servants, and that this group’s religious leader, Elder Peter H. Schmidt, was resisted to point that he resigned in frustration. 

The same explanation is promoted by Martin Schrag: “Not all were satisfied with their new home, Waldheim, in the Molotschna settlement. Religious and economic misunderstandings arose between the older settlers and the newcomers (Schrag 1959, emphasis added). Each of these explanations should be considered on its own merits; we will address the two economic ones in this post and return to the religious one in a later post.

Economic Oppression

According to Boese, those who left Waldheim did so because “the more well-to-do element of the village … desired to keep this new group, because they were poor, as a laboring class. So they would not allow them to own land.” In Schrag’s terms, this was a dispute between “the older settlers and the newcomers.” Because we know the names of the forty original landowners in Waldheim and of the thirty-three heads of families who decided to leave Waldheim for Volhynia, we can perform a simple comparison to determine if these claims hold up. The original post with this material (here) contains a longer analysis of the evidence and conclusions summarized below.

1. In 1845, thirty-three heads of families placed their names on a list indicating their intent to leave Waldheim to establish the Volhynian village of Heinrichsdorf (for Steve Fast’s transcription of the list, see here). These heads of households were:

Cornelius Funk	Tobias Schultz	Andreas Schmidt
Cornelius? Unruh	Andreas Koehn*	Benjamin Buller the elder
Benjamin Ratzlaff	Samuel Boese	David Koehn
Jacob Buller	Benjamin (Peter?) Janz	Cornelius Balzer
Jacober Buller	Johann Ewert	Johann Worbel
Peter Buller	Heinrich Funk*	Jacob Pankratz
Heinrich Nachtigal	Heinrich Wedel the elder*	Friedrich Kunkel*
Cornelius Unruh	Widow Maria Ratzlaff	Michael Teske
Benjamin Unruh	Jacob Boese	David Nachtigal
Cornelius? Funk	Benjamin Ratzlaff	Widow Wilhelmina Bayer•
David Koehn	Johann Voth	Jacob Klassen

The four names marked with an * (Andreas Koehn, Heinrich Funk, Heinrich Wedel, Friedrich Kunkel), we learn later, remained in Waldheim, so they should be excluded from consideration. We are also told that Widow Wilhelmina Bayer (marked with a •) did not go to Volhynia, even though her son Georg did. This leaves us with twenty-eight names. If only a few of them were landowners in Waldheim, then Boese and Schrag’s claim gains plausibility; if a large number of them were landowners, that claim must be called into question.

2. The following table highlights in red those who were Waldheim landowners:

Cornelius Funk	Tobias Schultz	Andreas Schmidt
Cornelius? Unruh		Benjamin Buller the elder
Benjamin Ratzlaff	Samuel Boese	David Koehn
Jacob Buller	Benjamin (Peter?) Janz	Cornelius Balzer
Jacober Buller	Johann Ewert	Johann Worbel
Peter Buller		Jacob Pankratz
Heinrich Nachtigal
Cornelius Unruh	Widow Maria Ratzlaff	Michael Teske
Benjamin Unruh	Jacob Boese	David Nachtigal
Cornelius? Funk	Benjamin Ratzlaff
David Koehn	Johann Voth	Jacob Klassen

Seventeen of the twenty-eight, or 61 percent, were Waldheim landowners. This makes it difficult to believe that economic oppression was the primary motivation for this group’s decision to leave Waldheim. The returnees included more landowners than landless; if anything, most of the returnees may have been making a financial sacrifice to leave, not looking to escape an economically oppressive situation. 

3. An additional observation weakens Boese’s argument further. Boese distinguishes between the landowners who were already established in Waldheim and this “new group” whom the landowners sought “to keep … as a laboring class.” In fact, three of Waldheim’s original eight settlers (Michael Teske, Johann Worbel, Benjamin Ratzlaff) were among the returnees, and a fourth original settler (Friedrich Kunkel) initially declared his intent to leave but later reversed course and decided to stay.  In other words, half of Waldheim’s founding fathers initially decided to leave. This fact clearly is at odds with a simple division of the community into wealthy oldtimers who stayed and oppressed newcomers who left.

Forced Servitude

Boese’s second explanation has both financial and social aspects: “Village and church management appeared to dictate that the children of this new group should be placed in homes to serve as help. Our group was not accustomed to such idea and wanted to keep their own children in their own homes.”

It is difficult to know what to make of this claim. On the one hand, we have already seen that the group who left was not by any means new, unless Boese means that village and church leaders from outside of Waldheim sought to impose this arrangement on Waldheim. Given what we know about the independence of Mennonite villages, that seems unlikely. Moreover, I am unaware of any other evidence that servitude was forced upon any Mennonite families in an attempt to create a servant underclass within the broader society. The very notion seems at odds with the egalitarian ethos that we generally observe among Mennonites.

On the other hand, we know from reading Baron von Haxthausen that it was a common practice for Mennonite children to serve in the houses of others. Indeed, von Haxthausen quotes Cornies as saying:

With us it is a rule that every one, even the son of the richest peasant, should live as a servant for a few years with one of the neighbours; service therefore with us does not constitute the occupation of a class, but is one step in life, a school; one of my younger brothers was for some time a servant with me, and he is now my superintendent. We pay our men-servants and girls very high wages—from thirty to seventy silver roubles—and keep this custom up strictly, which is found to bring us no loss. In this way even a poor man has an opportunity of accumulating a small fortune, and here, where there is plenty of fertile waste land, of establishing a small farm and becoming a peasant himself. It is by no means unusual for the daughters even of rich peasants to marry a servant of the house, however poor, provided he is worthy and industrious. (von Haxthausen 1856, 1:428–29)

The use of the word rule is curious, and it could imply that the practice was a social expectation for all Mennonite children. That being said, Cornies does seem to be exaggerating somewhat, since there is no evidence known to me that Cornies’s daughter ever worked as a servant, and we know that his son went away to school and an apprenticeship, which is not exactly the same as being a man-servant.

In light of this mixed evidence, it seems best to conclude that, although there may be some truth to Boese’s claim, the nature of the problem was probably more a difference in social expectations and practices than active oppression of one group by another. It may well be that the Waldheim settlers were unaccustomed to having their children serve in the homes of others (even for pay) and balked at the thought that free people should be subservient to anyone. It may even have reminded them of the servitude they owed to nobles whose lands they had rented (but not owned) back in Volhynia.

It is impossible to determine at this late date just how much of a factor this social difference played, although I confess that it strikes me more as justification offered after the fact than reason leading to the decision.

To sum up, thus far we have found little credible evidence that financial factors played a significant role in the decision to leave Waldheim. Of course, that is not the end of the story, as we will discover in the next post, where we take up John R. Staples’s comments regarding this critical decade in Waldheim’s history.

Works Cited

Boese, John A. 1967. The Prussian-Polish Mennonites Settling in South Dakota 1874 and Soon After. Freeman, SD: Pine Hill Press.

Haxthausen, August von. 1856. The Russian Empire: Its People, Institutions and Resources. Translated by Robert Farie. 2 vols. London: Chapman & Hall. Available online: vol. 1, vol. 2.

Schrag, Martin H. 1959. Volhynia (Ukraine). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Exiting Waldheim 1

We will return to the Russian Steppe series as soon as time permits further research into the likely incidence of droughts in Molotschna colony, and we will begin the Searching for Benjamin’s Father series in due course. For the moment, however, we will pursue another trail, since recent reading has revealed possible answers to a question posed some time back.

As discussed in detail in the Waldheim Settlers series (see the blog archive to the right for October–December 2016), the village of Waldheim was established in 1838 by Mennonites moving south from the region of Volhynia. Over the course of four years (1838–1841), the village was populated by forty-plus Mennonite families (see especially here). Numbered among that group, of course, were Benjamin and Helena Buller and their son and his wife, David and Helena Buller.

The following Heinrichsdorf History series (December 2016–January 2017) continued the story. If you recall, a large number of Waldheim residents—thirty-three families comprising 276 individuals—decided in 1845 to leave their Molotschna village and to return to Volhynia. Surprisingly, just seven years after the founding of the village, a majority of its residents—including Benjamin and Helena and David and Helena—left to found a new village roughly four hundred miles to the northwest.

The obvious question is, Why? Why did so many who had uprooted their lives to move hundreds of miles southeast to found the village of Waldheim, who built houses and established homes, who plowed the steppe and planted crops, want to leave after only seven years, just when their hard work was likely to begin bearing fruit? People today do not move hundreds of miles on a whim, much less peasant farmers of the nineteenth century. The question of why many of Waldheim’s original settlers left begs to be answered.

The Exiting Waldheim posts that follow will explore possible answers to that question. We will begin by revisiting an earlier explanation that was considered and discounted, then turn to new explanations hinted at or argued for in several works relevant to the history of Molotschna. One point needs to be made clearly at the outset: there was probably no single cause for the exodus from Waldheim. Rather, it seems most likely that a combination of causes, or at least contributing factors, led to such a significant and serious decision. To be clear, this series will not so much seek to identify the answer to the question as it will use the question to explore all the possible factors that led to this momentous decision.