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.