Alexanderwohl 36

The last two posts demonstrated that it is both plausible that Alexander I could have encountered the Przechovka Mennonites on their journey to Molotschna (Alexander was, after all, not merely tsar of Russia but also king of Congress Poland) and reasonable to think that Alexander did, in fact, meet the group just outside of Warsaw (contemporary accounts place him in Warsaw at the exact time that the Mennonites camped outside of the city). This post picks up at that point in order to reflect on several important details of the etiological account, with particular interest in what Alexander is reported to have said to the church leaders and what the district official Fadeyev said when he gave the village its name. For ease of reference, I repeat the relevant portion of the community report:

When this community, which had existed as a church in Prussia for over 200 years, emigrated to Russia under the leadership of its church Ältester (elder), Peter Wedel, they rested for two days on the south side of the city of Warsaw. Tsar Alexander I—may he rest in peace—and a segment of his troops were outside the city engaging in field manoeuvres. We waited anxiously when the tsar, who had been alerted by several passing generals, stopped his carriage and beckoned with his right hand. Several church leaders ran to him and were asked where we came from and where we were going. When he heard we were going to Molotschna in southern Russia the tsar said: “I wish you luck on your journey. Greet your brethren for I have been there.” This happened on September 14, 1820.

When we arrived in Molotschna these greetings were promptly conveyed by Peter Wedel, our Ältester, to the congregations gathered in the churches. When the office in Ekaterinoslav heard of this extraordinary event, the chief judge Fadeyev immortalized it by naming the colony Alexanderwohl because, as he said, “Tsar Alexander has wished you well.”

1. Alexander I

Alexander’s quoted dialogue is only two sentences long, but each is worthy of notice. We begin with the second sentence: “Greet your brethren for I have been there.” Alexander’s statement is no throw-away line. In fact, Alexander had visited Molotschna colony just two years prior. Peter M. Friesen’s The Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia (see the link to an online copy in the Online Resources section to the right) includes a first-person account from the Mennonite head of the household that Alexander visited: David Hiebert of Lindenau, Molotschna (Friesen 1980, 173–75).

His Majesty ate with apparent appetite, drank beer and coffee, and, while eating enquired as to our circumstances in the most affable manner: how long we had been in his empire, how we liked it and whether or not we had any complaints about anyone. To this we answered: “No, but we would like to thank Your Imperial Majesty for his great mercy and gracious reception. We would also like to request grace and Your Majesty’s protection for the future; not only for ourselves but also for our brothers-in-the-faith in Prussia, who because of the great and difficult war, have come into dire straits, so that they too might find acceptance and support here.” Thereupon the emperor said to my wife: “Yes, dear child, it shall be done.” (175)

Although we cannot verify the details of the story—the Hieberts’ request on behalf of the Prussian Mennonites who were expected to make their way to Russia or Alexander’s promise to give aid and support to future immigrants—we should note that this account is entirely consistent with the second sentence of Alexander’s comment: he had personally visited Molotschna, so he asked the traveling group from Przechovka to greet their fellow Mennonites when they arrived at their final destination in Molotschna.

The first sentence merits close scrutiny as well, since it may affect how we understand and interpret the etiology of the village name. Alexander begins his dialogue with a simple statement: “I wish you luck on your journey.” Note first that Alexander expressed a wish; he did not make a promise or offer concrete assistance. Second, his wish was for the journey, not for their lives once they arrived in Molotschna. We might speculate on why he limited his wish to the journey, but for now we simply note it as potentially important for our understanding of this tale. Third, Alexander wished them luck, or Glück in German, an important word choice in light of what follows.

2. Fadeyev

Now that we have observed exactly what Alexander said, we can read with greater insight what the district mayor Fadeyev said when he named the village. We begin by noting first that the Przechovka group did exactly what Alexander asked when they arrived: they conveyed the tsar’s greetings to all their fellow Mennonites. Then we are told that the district office in Ekaterinoslav heard of “this extraordinary event,” Fadeyev “immortalized” it by giving the village (colony in the terminology of that day) a particular name.

At the risk of sounding cynical, I find the characterization of the tsar’s wish as an extraordinary event a bit of a stretch. Alexander wished the party good luck on their journey, in other words, safe travels. He also asked them to greet people he had previously met. Neither of these qualify, in my view, as anything out of the ordinary; they are, rather, niceties that one would hope are more mundane than spectacular. Certainly one would not expect a wish for someone to have safe travels to be immortalized in a village name.

We should also note that Alexander did not wish the Przechovka Mennonites well (German wohl), as Fadeyev claims in this account; in fact, he wished them luck, Glück. One must wonder why the village is not more accurately named Alexanderglück, to immortalize what Alexander actually said. Something is wrong with this picture; the details at the end of the account seem at odds with those at its beginning. 

We have established thus far that it is both plausible and highly likely that Alexander encountered the Przechovka Mennonites south of Warsaw. The report of their encounter, with its wish for safe travels and a request to greet the Mennonites whom Alexander had met just two years previously, also has the ring of truth to it. Still, when we get to the whole point of the tale, an explanation of what the village name means, the internal logic of the story starts to fall apart and makes much less sense. 

This leads me to wonder whether, although the larger story of the encounter is historically accurate, the precise explanation given for the naming is somewhat less than true. I am not suggesting that the Alexanderwohl settlers made anything up, but I do think we should ask whether there may be a better explanation for the village name than the one that Fadeyev supplied and the townspeople adopted into their historical self-understanding. We will pursue that possibility, and an alternate explanation, in the following post.

Work Cited

Friesen, Peter M. 1980. The Mennonite Brotherhood in Russia, 1789–1910. 2nd ed. Translated by J. B. Toews, Abraham Friesen, Peter J. Klassen, and Harry Loewen. Fresno, CA: Board of Christian Literature, General Conference of Mennonite Brethren Churches. 

Alexanderwohl 35

The previous post in this series established that it is entirely plausible to think that Alexander I was on maneuvers in Poland in 1820. He was, after all, both tsar of Russia and king of Congress Poland, which means that both Warsaw and a large area around it was under his rule. This leaves us with one final question: Is there evidence that Tsar Alexander I was in Warsaw on 14 September 1820?

It is more difficult than one might imagine to find detailed evidence of the tsar’s comings and goings, but sometimes, as in this case, persistence and dumb luck pay off. The answer to our question is found in a book of memoirs written by Sophie de Tisenhaus Choiseul-Gouffier, a member of the Lithuanian nobility in the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth of the sixteenth–eighteenth centuries. Sophie met Alexander I in 1812, and they remained close friends until his death in late 1825. One indication of the closeness of their relationship is that Alexander was godfather of Sophie’s only son with her husband, the French Count Louis Antoine de Choiseul Island Oktavija-Gufjė.

Choiseul-Gouffier was a prolific author, with a number of novels to her credit, but the work that is of interest to us is her 1829 Mémoires historiques sur l’empereur Alexandre et la cour de Russie, translated into English many years later as Historical Memoirs of the Emperor Alexander I. and the Court of Russia (1904). A friend and confidant of Alexander during the last two decades of his life, Choiseul-Gouffier serves as a reliable and contemporary source for information about the Russian tsar.

Choiseul-Gouffier reports, for example: “In the year 1816 I made a journey to Carlsbad, with my father and one of my relatives. Upon our return we stopped at Warsaw, where the emperor was expected on the 30th of September” (221). The year is wrong for our purposes, but the location is right. Further, one cannot help but be intrigued by what follows. After Alexander arrived, he and the other Warsaw elite attended a ball, where he danced and engaged in banter with Choiseul-Gouffier. Sometime later, she reports,

The emperor left the ball at eleven o’clock. He kept early hours, rising very early in the morning, either to be present at the drilling of the soldiers or to work with his ministers. The next day he had a grand review of the Polish army, on the plain of Povonski, which was covered with an immense throng of people in carriages, on foot, and on horseback, all come to witness this brilliant military spectacle. (222)

Still the wrong year, but now we have the right action: Alexander, clad in a “Polish uniform with the blue and white plume on his cap” (221), surveying the drilling of the soldiers and a “brilliant military spectacle” that Choiseul-Gouffier refers to, strikingly, as “manœuvres” (223). The military review took place on the plain of Povonski, a site said to be three miles from Warsaw at that time (no source indicates, however, which direction it lay from Warsaw).

This is not, fortunately, the only time that Choiseul-Gouffier encountered Alexander in Warsaw. Later she explains that she wished to leave Paris but without dishonoring her husband. She initially sought to have him appointed to a post in Russia, but that did not transpire due to Alexander making his choice before her letter arrived. Still, she remained determined to leave France, so

in 1820 I made a journey to Lithuania, and M. de C. [Choiseul-Gouffier’s husband] being engaged in defending himself against a very unjust lawsuit, I decided to go to Warsaw where his Majesty was at that time, and ask justice and protection from him. (241–42)

Now we are in the right year and the right place. Choiseul-Gouffier continues her account by noting that once again she and Alexander met at a ball, where they danced and conversed and she made her plea that Alexander intervene in the lawsuit in favor of her husband. Alexander agreed and asked her to supply the details of the case. Choiseul-Gouffier intended to do so at a following ball but arrived late and did not meet Alexander at all. The morning after the second ball, Choiseul-Gouffier reports, Alexander sent a messenger to inquire about her health, since he had not seen her the night before. We pick up Choiseul-Gouffier’s narrative at that point:

As I proposed to stay only a few days at Warsaw, his Majesty, learning that I was on the eve of my departure, deigned to come and receive my respectful adieux, saying that he had hoped that I would prolong my stay at Warsaw until the term fixed for his Majesty’s own departure, twelve days later, when he was to go to the conference of Troppan in Silesia. (244)

Here at last we find a piece of evidence that will enable us to date Alexander’s 1820 stay in Warsaw: the conference in Troppan, more commonly known as Troppau. In 1820 the five great European powers of the day—Russia, Austria, Prussia, United Kingdom, and France—met in the city of Troppau (modern Opava, Czech Republic) to discuss an uprising and revolution in Naples, Italy. The details of that conference can be ignored; what is crucial for our purposes is the date of the conference: it began 20 October 1820.

Troppau lay approximately 200 miles southwest of Warsaw, so if one estimates that Alexander and his party covered 30 miles a day (they no doubt traveled faster than the Mennonites emigrating from Przechovka to Molotschna), then their journey required a week. To be safe, we might imagine that it took anywhere between five and nine days, but we will use seven days for our rough calculations.

Let us assume that Alexander arrived no later than 19 October. A seven-day journey would have thus begun on 13 October. Alexander last saw Choiseul-Gouffier twelve days before his departure, which would have been, by our reckoning, 1 October. The several balls that Choiseul-Gouffier mentions took place before then, during the last week of September. Choiseul-Gouffier also reports that the tsar was already in Warsaw when she made her decision to travel there from Paris, which was no doubt a substantial and time-consuming journey.

What does this mean for our question? It seems indisputable that Alexander I was in Warsaw when the Mennonite group from Przechovka rested south of the city on and around 14 September 1820. At least the basic facts of the etiological tale are confirmed: Alexander and the Przechovka Mennonites were at the same place at the same time, just as the Alexanderwohl community report claims.

The only confirmation that we lack is that of Alexander participating in field maneuvers with Polish troops while the Przechovka church members rested for two days. However, the fact that he did exactly that in an earlier stay at Warsaw lends credence to the claim that he also did so in 1820. Emperors of all times generally like to be seen directing their troops; Alexander was presumably no exception.

All the pieces of the etiology either fit or seem highly plausible, so we have little reason to doubt the other main element of the report: Alexander conversed briefly with several church leaders and, upon learning from where they came and to where they were headed, wished them luck. We will, or course, never have definitive confirmation of this final detail, but we also have no valid reason to doubt it.

We are, however, not yet done with the etiological tale. Alexander’s wish and the name of the village still deserve careful examination, which we will do in the following post.

Work Cited

Choiseul-Gouffier, Sophie de Tisenhaus. 1904. Historical Memoirs of the Emperor Alexander I. and the Court of Russia. Translated by Mary Berenice Patterson. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner. Available online here. Originally published Mémoires historiques sur l’empereur Alexandre et la cour de Russie (1829). Available online here.

Alexanderwohl 34

The excursus on the naming of Lushton was enjoyable, but it also served a useful purpose: to help us to establish a process for evaluating the historical accuracy of an etiological tale. Not surprisingly, we learned that one should judge historical accuracy on several levels: the broader, general level and the narrower, more detailed level. In the case of Lushton, we discovered that no single explanation of the naming of Lushton gave a full or fully accurate account. Still, thanks to contemporary records, we were able to weave the details of several tales into a coherent narrative that proved the general reliability of the overarching etiology: Lushton was named in honor of an official of the railroad that gave birth to the village. Will we find something similar with the naming of Alexanderwohl? There is only one way to find out.

To set the stage, we repeat the relevant portion of the community report once again:

When this community, which had existed as a church in Prussia for over 200 years, emigrated to Russia under the leadership of its church Ältester (elder), Peter Wedel, they rested for two days on the south side of the city of Warsaw. Tsar Alexander I—may he rest in peace—and a segment of his troops were outside the city engaging in field manoeuvres. We waited anxiously when the tsar, who had been alerted by several passing generals, stopped his carriage and beckoned with his right hand. Several church leaders ran to him and were asked where we came from and where we were going. When he heard we were going to Molotschna in southern Russia the tsar said: “I wish you luck on your journey. Greet your brethren for I have been there.” This happened on September 14, 1820.

When we arrived in Molotschna these greetings were promptly conveyed by Peter Wedel, our Ältester, to the congregations gathered in the churches. When the office in Ekaterinoslav heard of this extraordinary event, the chief judge Fadeyev immortalized it by naming the colony Alexanderwohl because, as he said, “Tsar Alexander has wished you well.”

Several of the claims can be judged reliable without any further investigation: a sizable group from the (Przechovka) church did emigrate to Russia under the leadership of Elder Peter Wedel in 1820, and presumably they made periodic rest stops along the way; Alexander I, the son of Paul I (reigned 1796–1801) and grandson of Catherine the Great (1762–1796), was tsar from 1801 to 1825; and Andrei Mikhailovich Fadeev was the chairman of the Ekaterinoslav Bureau of the Guardianship Committee in 1820 (he succeeded Samuel Contenius in 1818). Finally, the German word wohl does indeed mean “well,” so the etiology makes sense from a lexical perspective. (It may surprise readers to learn that some etiologies of this type fail on a lexical level.)

Other claims will be the focus of our investigation:

1. Is it conceivable that the tsar of Russia was on maneuvers in Poland in 1820?
2. Is there evidence that Tsar Alexander I was in Warsaw on 14 September 1820?

To answer the first of these questions, we must engage in more than a little history.

1. The Partitions of Poland

As noted from time to time in previous posts, the Kingdom of Poland had its territory systematically reduced through three successive partitions in the waning years of the eighteenth century. In 1772, 1793, and 1795 Russia, Prussia, and Austria divvied up Polish territory to add to their expanding realms.

Image made by Halibutt and uploaded to Wikipedia by the author.

What is evident in the map above—and important to note—is that the city of Warsaw never fell under Russian rule during this time. 

2. The Duchy of Warsaw

In 1807, during the middle of the Napoleonic wars of the early nineteenth century (1803–1815), the Prussians ceded their territory to Napoleon, who immediately established a Polish state that would provide him and his army material aid in their war against the Russians to the east. As is evident in the map below, the area of the Duchy of Warsaw corresponded roughly to the areas that Prussia had partitioned in 1793 and 1795 and Austria in 1795.

Wikipedia Commons: User:Mathiasrex Maciej Szczepańczyk, based on layer of User:kgberger.

Of course, Napoleon failed in his attempt to conquer and subdue Russia, and when his army retreated from Russian territory in December 1812 the Russians filled the vacuum and assumed control over most of the Duchy of Warsaw (the Prussians reclaimed the rest).

3. Congress Poland

The Russian rule over the former Duchy of Warsaw was formalized through an agreement once again made between the powers (victors against Napoleon) of the day: Russia, Austria, Prussia, and the United Kingdom. At the Congress of Vienna, which lasted from November 1814 to June 1815, Tsar Alexander I proposed, and the other participants surprisingly agreed, to form the Kingdom of Poland (more commonly known as Congress Poland in recognition of its origin—an etiology of sorts). The surprising aspect of the assent is that, although the new state was technically independent with its own constitution (Congress Poland was a constitutional monarchy), its rulers were to be the Russian tsars. In short, Polish independence was more hypothetical than real, and Alexander I was simultaneously tsar of Russia and king of Poland.

Wikipedia Commons: Mariusz Paździora. The Przechovka church was located
roughly 25 miles north and slightly northwest of Toruń, just outside of Congress Poland.

We engaged in this long historical account to answer our first question above: Is it conceivable that the tsar of Russia was on maneuvers in Poland in 1820? Clearly, given the fact that Tsar Alexander I was ruler of Congress Poland beginning in 1815 and continued his rule over Poland through the end of his reign in 1825, it is plausible to imagine him on maneuvers south of Warsaw in September 1820.

This leaves only one more question to answer: Is there evidence that Tsar Alexander I was in Warsaw on 14 September 1820? That will be the focus of the following post.

Lushton’s Railroads

A previous post discussed Lushton, Nebraska, where Grandpa and Grandma and family lived for a number of years, as an example of how one might examine an etiological tale in order to judge its historical accuracy (see here). Shortly after publishing that post, I discovered that even the clear evidence of an 1889 railroad map is not as precise as one might wish.

If I understand correctly (I admit that I may have some details wrong), both the consensus view that the Lushton railroad was the Kansas City & Omaha and the Fitzpatrick claim that the railroad was the St. Joseph & Grand Island can be regarded as accurate, although the consensus account, we should note, is the more accurate of the two. Several reports from the late 1880s reveal how both of the etiologies can be considered true.

The 30 July 1886 (p. 533) issue of The Railway Gazette reports the incorporation of a new railroad (for the original, see here):

The Kansas City & Omaha, we learn from this account, was incorporated in Nebraska in early 1886 with the express purpose of building and operating a line from Fairfield to Stromsburg. This is exactly the line that we saw in the 1889 map in the earlier post (here). We cut off the map just north of McCool Junction, to be sure, but the line continued north through York and Benedict and all the way to Stromsburg and beyond. In 1886, therefore, the Kansas City & Omaha Railroad was founded to connect the St. Joseph & Grand Island line in the south (which went through Fairfield) with a Union Pacific and eventually a Burlington line farther north.

There is still more to the story. Later in 1886, in the 19 November issue of The Railway Gazette (p. 804 here), we read a report that helps us to connect the various threads of the story.

The key lines are at the beginning. Within months of the Kansas City & Omaha Railroad coming into existence, the St. Joseph & Grand Island Railroad amended the articles of incorporation of the Kansas City & Omaha Railroad. Clearly, this could happen only if the St. Joseph & Grand Island exercised complete control over the Kansas City & Omaha. In fact, the November report above leaves little doubt about that fact when it states that the Kansas City & Omaha “was organized to build this company [the St. Joseph & Grand Island] branches and extensions in Nebraska.” A railroad history website confirms this: “ Union Pacific organized the Kansas City & Omaha Railroad, and operated it as part of what was called the ‘St. Joseph & Grand Island Division’” (here).

Clearly, the two railroads were closely connected within the Union Pacific family (recall that the Union Pacific had purchased the St. Joseph & Grand Island in 1880). In fact, they even shared some of the same officers, most significantly William Lush. He was, according to his obituary (see previous post), chief engineer of both the St. Joseph & Grand Island and of the Kansas City & Omaha. 

Other sources confirm this. The 6 August 1886 issue of The Railroad Gazette (p. 549 here) reports that Lush was named chief engineer of the St. Joseph & Grand Island Railroad on 1 August of that year. However, two years later the 6 April 1888 issue of The Railway Age (p. 226 here) refers to him as chief engineer of the Kansas City & Omaha Railroad. As we saw in the prior post, a month prior to that, the 2 March 1888 issue of The Railway Age announced that Lush had been serving as chief engineer of the St. Joseph & Grand Island Railroad and had been promoted, effective 29 February, to general manager. Another source reports that he served in that position through May 1888 (see here). 

In light of this evidence, it seems clear that Lush was chief engineer for the parent company the St. Joseph & Grand Island and its subsidiary the Kansas City & Omaha at the same time. The extensive overlap between the two companies explains why some claim that the St. Joseph & Grand Island laid the track through Lushton and others state that the Kansas City & Omaha gave birth to the village. In fact, both claims are true, although the latter is the more precise of the two. As with many etiologies, the historical reality proves to be somewhat more complex than the tale implies.

***

Since it seems a shame to lose track of some of the nuggets discovered during this research, I list a few additional sources and comments.

• 1897 Galbraith’s Railway Service Maps, Nebraska: here (the colored lines make it easy to see how the various railway systems connected)

• a brief history of the St. Joseph & Grand Island Railroad: here

• a description of the Kansas City & Omaha Railroad: “Locomotives of The Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad: 1855–1904, Part 2.” The Railway and Locomotive Historical Society Bulletin, 1937, 4–70. Available online here.

The Kansas City & Omaha Railroad, Stromsburg to Fairbury, Nebr., McCool Jct. to K. C. & O. Jct. [this is the Lushton line], and Fairfield to Alma, Nebr. was acquired by the B. & M. R.  [Burlington & Missouri River] in 1902. The ten engines acquired with this road were small Moguls and were not built to Burlington standards. (53)

• a frustratingly fragmented mention of William Lush and Daniel McCool in the 1887 The Railway Age (vol. 12, p. 246). The 1887 volume is not visible online except in snippet form. We pick up the report in mid-sentence:

… and then make a circle around the city, returning to the depot of the St. Joe road. The incorporators are D. McCool and William Lush of the St. Joseph & Grand Island railway, and William Kerr. A. L. Clark, W. H. Lanning, Oswalt Oliver, Geo. H. Pratt and J. M. Hagan of Hastings.

The readings of some of the Hastings names are uncertain, but these could be the “local capitalists” involved in the incorporation of the Kansas City & Omaha Railroad in early 1886. If so, then both Daniel McCool and William Lush were part of the incorporating group, which would then explain nicely why two towns established along the Kansas City & Omaha line were named after them. The 1887 issue of The Railway Age has been digitized but is currently mislabeled as Railway Review. Perhaps Google Books will someday correct this error and make this issue visible, so we can see the rest of this intriguing story.

Alexanderwohl 33

The greater part of the Alexanderwohl series has been spent in a twofold investigation: to re-create as accurately as possible the early history of the village and to then compare our best understanding of Alexanderwohl’s history with the account given in the 1848 community report (Gemeindebericht). Thus far we have determined that the report is correct in its broad claims but not entirely precise in all its details. More on that in the near future.

For now we want to consider one of the more incredible claims that the community report makes, one repeated in every account of Alexanderwohl’s history that I have encountered. The claim relates to how the village received its name. The relevant section of the Gemeindebericht reads as follows:

When this community, which had existed as a church in Prussia for over 200 years, emigrated to Russia under the leadership of its church Ältester (elder), Peter Wedel, they rested for two days on the south side of the city of Warsaw. Tsar Alexander I—may he rest in peace—and a segment of his troops were outside the city engaging in field manoeuvres. We waited anxiously when the tsar, who had been alerted by several passing generals, stopped his carriage and beckoned with his right hand. Several church leaders ran to him and were asked where we came from and where we were going. When he heard we were going to Molotschna in southern Russia the tsar said: “I wish you luck on your journey. Greet your brethren for I have been there.” This happened on September 14, 1820.

When we arrived in Molotschna these greetings were promptly conveyed by Peter Wedel, our Ältester, to the congregations gathered in the churches. When the office in Ekaterinoslav heard of this extraordinary event, the chief judge Fadeyev immortalized it by naming the colony Alexanderwohl because, as he said, “Tsar Alexander has wished you well.”

Before we look at the details of the report, we need to discuss what type of literature this portion of the report actually is. In form and function it corresponds to a literary type in folklore and biblical studies commonly known as an etiological tale. George Coats explains that this type is “a narrative designed in its basic structure to support some kind of explanation for a situation or name that exists at the time of the storyteller” (1983, 318). Etiological tales, then, often give the story behind why something bears a certain name. Clearly, the Alexanderwohl community report fits the bill according to that definition: it explains how the village got its name.

What is interesting about etiological tales is that, although some of them originate in an actual event (i.e., they report how something came to be, how a name was assigned), many of them are after-the-fact explanations that make sense of the end result but actually have no basis in history or reality. The following two examples (the first one entirely made up!) illustrate the difference between these two types. Each example offers an etiology for how the village of Lushton received its name.

Etiology 1: In the mid- to late 1880s the farmers of southwest York County were a hard-drinking lot constantly on the search for good liquor. Eventually an enterprising individual took steps to supply this high demand and built a frame house and business establishment near where he knew a railroad track was to be laid. A constant stream of neighbors flocked to him, so much so that the area became known as a hangout for drunks, or lushes. In time, the name stuck, and the small village that grew up around the shop became known as Lushton.

Etiology 2: In the spring of 1887, the Kansas City & Omaha Railroad laid track between Sutton and McCool Junction. Roughly midway between the two towns, a new village was platted, complete with its own train depot. In recognition of the railroad’s role in giving birth to this village, the founders named it after a railroad official named William Lush (see, e.g., here).

Each of the etiological tales sounds plausible, although the first is a total fabrication. Lushton did not get its name because it was a hangout for drunks. The point of recounting etiology 1 is to show that an etiological tale that sounds plausible or at least possible may be a total fabrication.

In fact, at times even a historical-sounding account such as etiology 2 may also be fictional, an after-the-fact attempt to fill in the gaps. This is such a key point that we need to address it fully before we proceed to the Alexanderwohl etiology. Rest assured: we will return to that matter shortly. However, first we must pursue the possibility that the official story of the naming of Lushton is just as much a fabrication as the fanciful tale of etiology 1. We pursue this primarily not to decide how Lushton received its name (although that question interests me as well) but to work through the process of judging the historicity of an etiology before we apply the same methodology to the story recounted in the Alexanderwohl community report. 

Most sources agree on the basic facts regarding Lushton’s founding: the village was platted in the late 1880s when the Kansas City & Omaha Railroad laid track between Sutton and McCool Junction. The etiological claim is that the village was named after a railroad official by the name of William Lush. Can we substantiate this claim?

An online search confirms that William Lush was indeed a prominent railroad official. For example, the 2 March 1888 The Railway Age reports that William Lush had been chief engineer of the St. Joseph & Grand Island and was being promoted to acting general manager (for the original, see here). (We should not ignore the fact that, according to the announcement below, the previous general manager’s name was McCool.)

William Lush’s obituary seven years later (11 January 1895 The Railroad Gazette, p. 29) confirms and supplements the picture of him as an important railroad official (original here).

In addition to this contemporary evidence confirming that William Lush was a chief engineer who managed the laying and modification of tracks in central Nebraska at the time when Lushton was founded, we have an early claim that the village was named after him. Specifically, in 1925 Lilian Linder Fitzpatrick published “Nebraska Place-Names,” in which she stated:

The town of Lushton was surveyed and platted in the spring of 1887. It was named for a  railroad official by the name of Lush in the same year when the Saint Joseph and Grand Island railroad was built through the town. (Fitzpatrick 1925, 147)

This would seem to be compelling evidence in favor of the official etiology—except for one nagging detail: according to the generally accepted etiology, the Kansas City & Omaha Railroad laid track through Lushton, not the St. Joseph & Grand Island Railroad. There is no disputing the fact that William Lush held a key position in the St. Joseph & Grand Island Railroad, but that seems rather beside the point if some other railroad gave birth to Lushton.

To complicate matters further, we have an even earlier attestation that calls Fitzpatrick’s explanation into question. T. E. Sedgwick’s 1921 York County Nebraska and Its People states: “The Kansas City & Omaha was put through here [Lushton] in the spring of 1887” (475). Sedgwick, writing four years prior to Fitzpatrick, clearly contradicts her on the identity of the Lushton railroad company.

We seem to be at an impasse. If the consensus that the Kansas City & Omaha Railroad ran through Lushton is correct, then Fitzpatrick’s explanation loses credibility, since towns are generally not named for an official of a railroad that did not give rise to the town. On the other hand, if Fitzpatrick is correct that the St. Joseph & Grand Island Railroad laid track between Sutton and McCool Junction, then her account of Lushton being named after William Lush seems highly likely.

Cases such as this cannot be decided without recourse to contemporary evidence. Fortunately, such evidence exists in this instance in the form of an 1889 railway map issued by the Nebraska Board of Transportation (see here).

When we zoom in on the relevant section of the map (below), we notice both lighter lines and heavier lines. According to the key in the lower left of the map, the heavy lines trace Union Pacific, St. Joseph, and Grand Island lines (Union Pacific had purchased St. Joseph & Grand Island Railroad in 1880). Now locate Lushton in the upper fourth, just right of center. It has a heavy line connecting it to Sutton to the southwest and McCool Junction to the east. Note further that just north of Fairfield on that same line one can read “S JOS & G'D I'D,” clearly an abbreviation for St. Joseph & Grand Island.

Evidence from 1889, a mere two years after Lushton’s founding, indicates that Lushton straddled the St. Joseph & Grand Island Railroad track that extended from Fairfield (which was on the main line to St. Joseph) and McCool Junction (so named because it was at the junction of two lines of this railroad, whose general manager at the time was named Daniel McCool).

Fitzpatrick is correct, and the other accounts of the railroad that went through Lushton have it wrong. Further, because Fitzpatrick is correct about the railroad, and because we know that William Lush was a central figure in the St. Joseph & Grand Island Railroad’s laying of track in central Nebraska at this very time, her explanation that the town Lushton was named after him is not only plausible but highly likely.

To bring this quickly back to Alexanderwohl, we have a story of how the village got its name: to state the matter briefly, the 1820 party traveling from Przechovka to Molotschna camped south of Warsaw, Poland, and there encountered Tsar Alexander I on field maneuvers with his troops. His well wishes at the end of that encounter led to the naming of the village. Is this what really happened? We begin with that question in the following post.

Postscript

Additional exploration of the railroads related to Lushton’s origins complicates the account offered above, which I now know needs to be clarified. I will publish a followup post offering further detail and link it from here.

Works Cited

Coats, George W. 1983. Genesis, with an Introduction to Narrative Literature. Forms of the Old Testament Literature 1. Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.

Fitzpatrick, Lilian Linder. 1925. Nebraska Place-Names. University of Nebraska Studies in Language, Literature, and Criticism 6. Available online here.

Sedgwick, T. E. 1921. York County Nebraska and Its People. 2 vols. Chicago: Clarke. Available online here.

Mennonites in Nebraska

We will return to Alexanderwohl shortly, with a substantive post on the historicity, or lack thereof, of the story about how the village received its name. In the meantime, we take a brief detour to discuss a newly discovered resource that should interest all Buller Time readers.

A recent search for information on one or another Mennonite-related topic whose details now escape my memory uncovered a 1953 master’s thesis submitted to the Municipal University of Omaha, what is now known as the University of Nebraska at Omaha. The thesis title is simple and straightforward: “A Brief History of the Mennonites in Nebraska.” The thesis abstract offers more detail:

The Mennonites who settled in Nebraska originated in the Anabaptist movement of the Reformation period and took their name from the noted Dutch leader Menno Simons. Being persecuted for their faith, they moved from country to country until many found a haven in the United States. Of these a considerable number came to the prairies, some by way of the East, while others came directly from Germany and Russia. Essentially the Mennonites were [not] a racial group but a religious association of men of like or similar faith. Today only five of some nineteen branches of the Mennonite church are represented in Nebraska. The story of their beginnings, the account of their coming, the growth of their settlements, the nature of their religious and social life, and the contributions which they have made to the development of this state make a thrilling chapter in the history of Nebraska.

What is most noteworthy about this resource is that UNO has made the thesis available online in their library’s digital commons. Thus anyone connected to the web can download and read this sixty-five-year-old work of scholarship—and I highly recommend that Buller Time readers do so (see here).

The thesis begins in chapter 1 (1–11) by offering historical background to the Mennonite movement, with particular attention on the three Mennonite groups who settled in Nebraska: those who moved to Nebraska from the eastern states, those who came from Russia, and those who traveled from Prussia. Chapter 2 (12–22) then details these groups’ entrance into Nebraska: the Mennonites from the eastern states to Seward County; those from Russia to Jefferson, York, and Hamilton Counties; and those from Prussia  to Gage County. Chapters 3–7 then offer brief histories of individual congregations in the five Mennonite branches represented in Nebraska: General Conference Mennonite churches (23–53), “Old” Mennonite churches (54–78), Mennonite Brethren churchs (79–89), Evangelical Mennonite Brethren churches (90–96), and United Missionary churches (formerly Mennonite Brethren in Christ; 97–110). Chapter 8 (111–13) briefly discusses the United Mennonite Church, which was an Omaha congregation established for Grace Bible Institute students. Chapter 9 (114–34) provides histories of various Nebraska Mennonite institutions, including the Henderson Community Hospital, Grace Children’s Home, the Back to the Bible broadcast, and Grace Bible Institute. A final chapter (135–45) offers insightful conclusions about Mennonite life in Nebraska.

The subject matter of the work is not all that interests us; the author of the thesis also merits attention. The title page identifies the author as Paul Kuhlmann, which happens to be the name, according to Wikipedia (here) and the thesis itself (1953, 130), of one of the founders of Grace Bible Institute (J. R. Barkman, well known to many of us, was another founder). The Grace University website notes that Paul Kuhlmann was acting president in 1943, and someone with that name also wrote the history of Grace, titled The Story of Grace: A Brief History of the Founding and Growth of Grace College of the Bible, 1943–1978 (see here). If this is all the same person and not a father and son who share a name, then the author of the UNO thesis was personally acquainted with a number of the groups and people whose history he told. I highly commend his master’s thesis as an informative, accessible read for anyone interested in the history of Mennonites in Nebraska.

Postscript: while conducting research for this post, I discovered that Grace University, after seventy-five years, will cease operations this very month (see here). All is not lost, however, since alumni of Grace are launching Charis University in the fall of this year to take its place (here). The new school bears an appropriate name, since the Greek word χάρις (charis) means “grace.”

Works Cited

Kuhlmann, Paul. 1953. A Brief History of the Mennonites in Nebraska (1953). Student Work. 357. Available online here.

———. 1980. The Story of Grace: A Brief History of the Founding and Growth of Grace College of the Bible, 1943–1978. Omaha: Grace College of the Bible.

Lushton and the KMB

Even when there is no writing taking place at the Buller Time blog, the reading continues nonstop in the background. Recently I have been learning about a Mennonite group previously unknown to me: the Krimmer Mennonite Brethren Church. 

For the short version of the history of this group, see the Bender entry in GAMEO. C. F. Plett’s much longer history (which is what I have been reading) is available online here. Suffice it to say that this group, although bearing the name Mennonite Brethren, was not associated with the MB group that was organized in Molotschna in 1860. The Krimmer MB Church arose in the Crimea (German Krim) in the late 1860s as the result of spiritual revival, then spread to the United States when most of its members emigrated as part of the larger Mennonite migration of the 1870s.

The history of the group is intriguing in and of itself but not crucial to this post. Of greatest interest to Buller Time is the fact that our hometown Lushton has a Krimmer MB connection. It is not often that one encounters the name Lushton in history books, but the village merits several mentions in Plett’s history of the Krimmer MB Church. The most extensive reference is worth quoting in full:

The Nebraska community just north of Lushton, York County, was settled by Mennonites as early as 1874. At the time Jacob Fast, who had come from Russia with his parents at the age of eighteen, settled there with his parents. Here in York County a Krimmer Mennonite Brethren Church was started. Jacob Fast was elected elder in 1890 to serve York County and Jefferson County at Jansen. The church members met in the various homes. Jacob Fast moved to Jansen, making his home there in 1897. In 1918 he moved to Inman, Kansas, where he died in 1931. He had served as elder for about twenty-eight years, twenty-one which were at Jansen.
     Michael Plett, one of the early settlers at Lushton, came there in 1877 from Russia at the age of sixty-four. After about three and a half years in America he passed away. His son, Cornelius Plett, (the author’s grandfather) moved to Kansas with his family in February of 1893, desiring more acreage. He had purchased a farm two and a half miles west of Lehigh, Kansas, from Advents. He died in 1920. The Pletts became members of the Springfield Krimmer Mennonite Brethren Church, southwest of Lehigh. (Plett 1985, 198–99)

To be honest, Plett’s account is confusing on a number of fronts. First, the reference to the Nebraska community north of Lushton must be Henderson, whose first residents arrived in 1874. Presumably that is where Jacob Fast’s (GM 7452) family settled. Jacob married Maria Penner (GM 7453) on 5 March 1878, which is probably when he moved to Lushton, where their first child was born in July of 1879. To be completely accurate, we should say that Jacob and Maria moved to the Lushton area, since the village itself did not spring into existence until the railroad came through connecting Sutton and McCool Junction in 1887. This requires us also to qualify the statement that Michael Plett was one of the early settlers of Lushton in 1877; in fact, he was one of the earliest settlers of the area that became known as Lushton a decade later.

In any event, sometime between 1878 and 1890 a Krimmer MB church was established. The Lushton group never had a dedicated church building, it seems, since the congregation met in people’s homes. It did not have a long history either, since in 1897 Elder Fast moved 50 miles southeast to Jansen, the only other Nebraska town with a Krimmer MB church. What happened to the Lushton KMB church is left unexplained; it simply disappears from the record.

One small clue may point us in the right direction: GRANDMA reports that one source for Jacob Fast’s date of birth is the Henderson, Nebraska, Evangelical Mennonite Brethren church membership book (page 24). The Henderson EMB church was founded by Isaac Peters (Grandma Malinda’s great-grandfather) on 5 November 1882 as the Ebenezer Church (see here); the building was located a mile south of Henderson. 

Why, then, is a Krimmer MB church member—in fact, elder—recorded in the membership book of the Ebenezer Church? Did Fast first join Ebenezer, then shortly thereafter change his allegiance to the Krimmer MB group? Or did perhaps the members of the Krimmer MB congregation gravitate toward Ebenezer after their spiritual leader left in 1897? The precise connection between the two churches remains unclear, but that there was some sort of relation seems hard to deny. Perhaps someone with greater knowledge about the Mennonite churches of the Henderson–Lushton area can fill in some of the gaps within this interesting, surprising story. 

Works Cited

Bender, Harold S. 1957. Krimmer Mennonite Brethren. Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Plett, C. F. 1985. The Story of the Krimmer Mennonite Brethren. Winnipeg: Kindred. Available online here.

Moving to Molotschna 8

As explained earlier (here), the parallel series Alexanderwohl and Moving to Molotschna each has its own purpose: to reconstruct and record, to the extent that we are able, the early history of the village of Alexanderwohl, and to flesh out the story of the the Przechovka church members’ journey from the Vistula River Valley to the steppes of the Ukraine (New Russia), where they founded, among others, the village of Alexanderwohl. 

To that end, this series has focused on the details of the journey itself, the preparations that had to be made before this Mennonite group could move to Molotschna, the inducements that the Russian government offered to encourage these productive farmers to leave their homes and settle in a new land, and, most recently, the conditions in Prussia that motivated the future citizens of Alexanderwohl to leave behind what had been home to their families for over a century. 

The most recent post in the Moving to Molotschna series took up the first condition, or reason: the effects of the Napoleonic wars on the Mennonite community (see here). The thirteen years of conflict (1803–1815) between Napoleon’s French imperial armies and seven successive coalitions against him damaged the Mennonites of West Prussia/Poland financially and raised a challenge to their faith as it related to their historical commitment to nonparticipation in warfare.

This post covers the remaining four reasons that the Przechovka Mennonites gave for desiring to leave Prussia in 1820 (see Duerksen 1955, 79):

2. They had no prospects to improve their lot in Prussia.
3. They had no opportunity to become landowners in Prussia.
4. Russia offered them about 160 acres to a family while in Prussia they were allotted only about 40 acres to a family.
5. Their Russian relatives praised Russian condi­tions and urged them to come to Russia, also.

Reason 5 is straightforward and requires no explanation beyond noting that the earlier immigrants to Molotschna and perhaps even Chortitza remained in contact with the Mennonites still in Prussia. This is not surprising. Because the meaning of reason 5 is self-evident, we will focus our attention for the rest of this post on reasons 2–4, which are actually so closely related that they cannot be discussed in isolation from each other.

Reason 2 begins, logically speaking, with the reality of the situation after the Napoleonic wars: the Mennonites had suffered great financial harm both due to the increased taxation to which they were subjected and as a result of the destruction caused by the movement of massive armies across their farms and fields. The post-Napoleonic status quo was unacceptable, and they had limited opportunity in Prussia to improve their quality of life.

Why did the Przechovka Mennonites have no prospect for improving their lot in Prussia? Reasons 3 and 4 explain why: most Mennonites did not own land and had no possibility of acquiring it, and the average amount of land they could rent was only 40 acres, a fourth of what was available in Molotschna. Each part of the explanation warrants comment.

We have actually encountered reason 3, the limit on Mennonite land acquisition, in previous posts (see, e.g., here). As we have periodically observed, as a rule a Mennonite farmer did not actually own the land he farmed; rather, he held a forty- or fifty-year lease with its actual owner, often a member of the noble class, to live on the property and draw his family’s livelihood from it. Thus it had been and would continue to be the case that, in Prussia, the Przechovka church members could not become landowners.

To make matters worse, in 1801 the Prussian king Frederick William III issued a decree that severely limited Mennonites’ ability to acquire access to land. The relevant portion of the decree stated:

§4 Accordingly no Mennonite who is not ready to give up the military exemption will be granted a permit to acquire any type of property, rural or urban, that is not already the property of a Mennonite at the time of publication of this edict, so that the former exceptions are completely eliminated in the future and consequently the current number of nonserving Mennonite possessions may not be increased or expanded in any fashion. (Jantzen 2010, 263)

As explained previously, §4 states that no Mennonite who rejected military conscription would be given a permit to acquire property from a non-Mennonite. The unstated reason was simple: any non-Mennonite who owned or leased land also owed the Prussian state military service. The government was not about to reduce the number of men potentially serving in the militia by allowing Mennonites who were exempt to acquire non-Mennonite land. The solution of §4, then, was to restrict acquisition of non-Mennonite land to those who agreed to serve when called, whether Mennonite or not.

The king temporarily lifted this restriction in 1806 after the Mennonites delivered on their pledge of 30,000 thalers to be used however he saw fit (see the previous post and Klassen 2009, 178), but the restriction soon was put back in force and remained that way through the rest of the wars and even after Napoleon’s defeat by the Seventh Coalition. The Przechovka Mennonites of 1820 could not improve their lot, in part, because they were prohibited from acquiring the new land that would enable them to grow and restore their wealth. 

Reason 4 is a natural outgrowth of the restriction behind reason 3. Because the growing Mennonite population was legally bound to subsist on the same amount of land that their religious community had owned twenty years earlier, the amount of available land per person decreased with each birth and each passing year. According to the evidence of the visa applications, the average amount of land available to a Prussian Mennonite family was 40 acres. Settlers in Molotschna, on the other hand, had the prospect and possibility of owning about 160 acres (65 dessiatines, or 175.5 acres, to be precise). 

The conditions promised in Molotschna were doubly superior: not only would the settlers have four times as much land at their disposal in New Russia, but they would own that land, not merely serve as tenants on someone else’s property.

Considering all these reasons, but especially the possibility for a more prosperous life in New Russia than they could ever enjoy in Prussian Poland, a life that promised them exemption from military service for all time, it is not surprising that so many Przechovka Mennonites decided to uproot their lives from the Schwetz area and make the 900-mile, seven-week journey to Molotschna, there to found the village of Alexanderwohl on the virgin steppes of New Russia. 

Works Cited

Duerksen, J. A. 1955. Przechowka and Alexanderwohl: Beginnings of Alexanderwohl, Tabor,  Hoffnungsau and Other Churches. Mennonite Life 10:76–82. Available online here.

Jantzen, Mark. 2010. Mennonite German Soldiers: Nation, Religion, and Family in the Prussian East, 1772–1880. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.

Klassen, Peter J. 2009. Mennonites in Early Modern Poland and Prussia. Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Moving to Molotschna 7

The previous post in this series listed five reasons that Mennonites gave for their desire to emigrate to Russia in the years around 1820. According to J. A. Duerksen (1955, 79), those reasons were the following:

1. They were pauperized by the Napolenoic [sic] wars.
2. They had no prospects to improve their lot in Prussia.
3. They had no opportunity to become landowners in Prussia.
4. Russia offered them about 160 acres to a family while in Prussia they were allotted only about 40 acres to a family.
5. Their Russian relatives praised Russian condi­tions and urged them to come to Russia, also.

We should no doubt view this list as Duerksen’s distillation of a variety of reasons offered; although it is doubtful that any one Mennonite gave all of these reasons, the list offers a fairly full, and logically arranged depiction of the general situation that led the Przechovka Mennonites to seek to emigrate. We will explore each reason in turn in order to deepen our understanding of that situation.

1. The effects of the Napoleonic wars

Without diving too deeply into nineteenth-century European history, it is crucial for us to understand a few basic facts about the geopolitics of the day. The French Empire, led by Napoleon after his rise to power during and following the French Revolution, engaged in a series of wars with its neighbors between the years 1803 and 1815. Although the United Kingdom was the most frequent adversary of the French, the wars (plural) were waged by seven coalitions against the French that included nations other than the British. Most important for our purposes were the coalitions that involved the Prussians.

Of particular importance for our interests are the Fourth Coalition and its war during 1806–1807, the Sixth Coalition (1812–1814), and the Seventh Coalition (1815). Not only was Prussia involved in each one of these wars, which in itself affected all of Prussia’s subjects, including the Mennonites, but in several cases armies of several hundred thousand men both crossed through and waged war on the formerly Polish territory (now part of Prussia), which left many of the residents plundered and devastated.

C. F. Plett’s history of the Krimmer Mennonite Brethren, for example, reports anecdotally about one Prussian Mennonite of this time period: 

Anna Wiens had migrated to Russia in 1825 at the age of fifteen, and had gone through many hardships and privations. She and her parents came from Marienburg, Prussia, where they had been well-to-do dairy farmers until they were plundered of all their possessions during the Napoleonic Wars. (Plett 1985, 13)

Although we have no way of verifying the details of this particular account, the story was no doubt true not only for the Wiens family but for many other farmers, Mennonite or not, living in the former Polish kingdom.

In addition to the direct effects of the wars being waged in their presence and the losses suffered at the hands of the troops passing back and forth over their fields, the Mennonites of Prussia also faced increased pressure to forsake their historical commitment to nonresistance and to become combatants in the contest with the French imperial forces.

Peter J. Klassen writes:

The pressure to conform to national military practices was intensified when Prussia became involved in the Napoleonic Wars. Mennonite leaders tried to respond in a positive way by pledging to give the king 30,000 thalers; on 23 November 1806, they gave the king 17,000, then proceeded to collect the rest. … As the wars continued, the situation in Prussia became increasingly difficult. When the government placed an assessment on farms in the Werder [the Vistula marshlands east of Danzig], the Mennonite churches decided to pay an additional voluntary sum of 10,000 thalers to support the king. (Klassen 2009, 178)

However, even this level of financial support was not enough.

New difficulties arose when Napoleon’s forces invaded Prussia, and Prussian authorities ordered immediate formation of the militia and summoned all able-bodied men to join it. There was to be no exemption. Mennonite leaders said they would serve as firefighters, medical orderlies, and in other ways help the war effort, but they could not take up arms. In response, the government said it would accept 25,000 thalers and 500 horses from the Mennonites. … The more well-to-do Mennonites now extended loans to families unable to meet their share of the payment, and the financial demands were met. When only 300 horses were provided, an additional levey of 14,000 thalers was imposed and paid. …

In addition, Mennonites were required to perform support services such as caring for the cavalry and helping transport supplies and foodstuffs. … As the war dragged on, the changing military configurations repeatedly led military commanders to insist that the Mennonites be prepared at least to join the Landsturm, the civilian militia designed as a last desperate line of defense. Again, Mennonite leaders appealed to the king, and again the king agreed that the Mennonites should be exempt from bearing arms but decreed that they should make contributions to the military that would be the equivalent of actual personal military service. Local military authorities were empowered to determine what that would be. (Klassen 2009, 178–79).

The pressures on the Mennonites only intensified as the wars dragged on. It is little wonder, then, that the very next sentence in Klassen’s narrative mentions an unsurprising outcome: “In consequence of this decision [that the Mennonites must make contributions], applications for emigration visas increased dramatically” (Klassen 2009, 179).

The picture painted by Klassen (whose book I highly commend) is consistent with Duerken’s reason: the Mennonites suffered under a significant financial burden during the years of the Napoleonic wars, 1803–1815, which left many of them pauperized. Thus it is no surprise to learn that those seeking to emigrate to Russia gave this reason on their visa applications.

However, this is not the entire story; Klassen’s evaluation of the effects of the Napoleonic wars does not end with the financial strain that the wars brought. He adds:

The years of the war in the early nineteenth century, including the desperate situation of the Prussian state and the ravages of occupation by foreign troops, left Mennonites in the Vistula Delta with a legacy from which they never fully recovered. Although they had contributed funds, horses, food, and clothing, their neighbors increasingly insisted that no amount of material help could take the place of having sons serve to protect the homeland.  (Klassen 2009, 180, emphasis added)

Klassen’s discussion centers on the experiences of the Werder (Vistula Delta) Mennonites who lived east of Danzig, and thus 50 miles north of the Przechovka church, but the experiences of the Schwetz-area church that is the subject of our interest no doubt mirrored those of their coreligionists to the north. 

Although they do not reference it on their visa applications, the Przechovka church members who emigrated to New Russia after the Napoleonic wars did so not only out of financial distress but also, it seems, to escape the increasing demands that the men of their community take up arms in defense of the Prussian state. The Napoleonic wars thus provided a double motivation for wanting to leave Prussia for the more welcome context of New Russia, a motivation that was both financial and faith-based, as life often turns out to be.

The next post in this series will pick up with the second reason given, that the Mennonites had no realistic chance of improving their financial lot in Prussia.

Works Cited

Duerksen, J. A. 1955. Przechowka and Alexanderwohl: Beginnings of Alexanderwohl, Tabor,  Hoffnungsau and Other Churches. Mennonite Life 10:76–82. Available online here.

Klassen, Peter J. 2009. Mennonites in Early Modern Poland and Prussia. Young Center Books in Anabaptist and Pietist Studies. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Plett, C. F. 1985. The Story of the Krimmer Mennonite Brethren Church. Winnipeg: Kindred.

Moving to Molotschna 6

Although our primary focus the past several months has been on Alexanderwohl, first identifying its founding settlers, then learning more about the circumstances in which they established the village (and we are not yet done with the series), we must not lose sight of the broader context in which this took place. Before the Alexanderwohl settlers could build their new homes, they had to travel to their new home. Providing the background to and context of the journey is the goal of this ongoing series.

Thus far we have learned that the Przechovka Mennonites who wished to emigrate to Molotschna had to secure the necessary documents granting permission to leave Prussia and to enter Russia (here), then pay the Prussian authorities an exit tax of 10 percent of their assets (here). Only then could they begin their 900-mile, seven-week journey to the site of their future home (here). 

With such obstacles to overcome, one might ask why these church members were so determined to leave. A 1955 Mennonite Life article by J. A. Duerksen sheds light on this question. Before we detail the answer he provides, a word about the availability of Mennonite Life online. Thanks to the good graces of Bethel College, all issues of Mennonite Life ever published (1946–) are freely available to anyone who wishes to read and/or download. The entire run of issues can be accessed here. There is an abundance of good reading material available from that page, so I will add the Mennonite Life link to the Online Resources section on the right side of the Buller Time front page. 

The April 1955 issue has an article that, if memory serves me correctly, we have cited previously: J. A. Duerken’s “Przechowka and Alexanderwohl: Beginnings of Alexanderwohl, Tabor, Hoffnungsau and Other Churches.” As the title implies, the article covers the history of first the Przechovka church in Poland/Prussia and then Alexanderwohl in Molotschna colony.

According to Duerksen, “signed statements on emigration passes preserved in the Danzig Archives” gave the following reasons for the 1820 emigration to Molotschna:

1. They were pauperized by the Napolenoic [sic] wars.
2. They had no prospects to improve their lot in Prussia.
3. They had no opportunity to become landowners in Prussia.
4. Russia offered them about 160 acres to a family while in Prussia they were allotted only about 40 acres to a family.
5. Their Russian relatives praised Russian condi­tions and urged them to come to Russia, also.

Duerksen does not cite specific sources for his summary, but we can probably deduce the nature of the emigration passes. It is noteworthy that Duerksen locates the passes in Danzig archives. As we saw earlier, the passport that authorized its bearer to travel within Prussia was issued by the regional Prussian authority; for the Przechovka church, that regional authority was located in Marienwerder. On the other hand, the Russian embassy that issued visas permitting Przechovka immigrants to enter Russia was located in Danzig. Thus, it seems most likely that the passes that Duerksen references are applications for Russian visas by Mennonites who had permission to leave Prussia but now needed permission to enter Russia.

The content of the list also makes sense of this explanation. That is, the Russian government being asked for permission to enter its territory would want to know why the person wished to immigrate; the Prussian government that gave permission for the Przechovka Mennonites to leave would be less interested in the reason and more keen on ensuring that each family paid its 10 percent exit tax before vacating the country.

With that background in place, we are ready to explore further the actual reasons given, so that we understand them accurately and fully. That will be the subject and the task of the following post.

Work Cited

Duerksen, J. A. 1955. Przechowka and Alexanderwohl: Beginnings of Alexanderwohl, Tabor, Hoffnungsau and Other Churches. Mennonite Life 10:76–82. Available online here.