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.