Alexanderwohl 42

We continue our examination of the 1848 Alexanderwohl Gemeindebericht; for the earlier posts, see here, here, and here. Only one paragraph remains in the community report. This post will provide a translation of the entire paragraph and commentary on the first part; comments on the remainder will await a subsequent post. We begin with the translation:

The year of settlement, 1821, was unfruitful and returned only the seed sown. 1822 was fruitful, but grasshoppers came and caused significant damage for seven years. 1823 and 1824 were years of crop failure. The persistent storm of the first months of 1825 also resulted in a great loss of livestock for this community, since there was no food for them. At that time the livestock was fed straw from the roofs. In 1828, a devastating cattle disease prevailed. The most difficult year, however, was the starvation year 1833. The improved cattle and sheep breeding and the four-field farming system introduced through the efforts of Acting State Counsellor Contenius and under the leadership of the Agricultural Society’s unforgettable Johann Cornies have brought the community to prosperity.

year of settlement, 1821. As previously noted, the largest group from the Przechovka church arrived in the last months of 1820. This group along with others who had emigrated to Molotschna earlier, officially founded the village in 1821. Since the first founders were onsite at the beginning of the year, they were able to turn their attention immediately to earning their bread. 

unfruitful and returned only the seed sown. Interestingly, the report first focuses on field crops even though that was not the primary agricultural pursuit in Molotschna’s first decades. Cornelius Krahn (1955) explains, “Pioneer conditions made large-scale grain raising impossible and the distance to the market made it unprofitable. Thus stock farming, particularly the breeding of sheep, became the chief occupation” (see also Goerz 1993, 14). This is not to say that grain cultivation was nonexistent. Indeed, the founders of Alexanderwohl, like other Molotschna farmers, presumably sowed barley, rye, oats, and wheat, among other grains, from the very beginning. Some of these grains were intended primarily as fodder for livestock, but others were meant for human consumption. Note further that the community report says nothing about the large gardens that Mennonites planted, tended, and harvested from the beginning; the focus here is strictly on the field crops and their failure in 1821. We will return to the point of this negative emphasis later on.

1822 was fruitful. Unlike 1821, which was unfruitful (unfruchtbar), 1822 was fruitful (fruchtbar). The (initial) contrast between the two years could not be more striking. As we will see in the next clause, the 1822 report still has field crops in view.

grasshoppers came and caused significant damage for seven years. According to the community report, a plague of grasshoppers damaged 1822’s potentially fruitful harvest. To make matters worse, the grasshoppers continued to wreak havoc for seven years, thus presumably through 1829. Johann Cornies’s 1824 letter to a Mr. Koshani confirms the Alexanderwohl report:

When I arrived home on 11 August 1824, it was extremely hot and dry here. Grasshoppers had ravaged the area, consuming everything in sight, and no blade of grass, green or dry, could be found anywhere. … The summer of 1824 was dry and grasshoppers consumed everything still growing. Grain and fodder shortages soon followed. (2015, 42–43)

Two years later, in correspondence with State Counsellor Schubert, Cornies elaborates: 

Since 1822, swarms of grasshoppers have caused great devastation in our area. This has resulted in a serious shortage of food and fodder for man and beast. In 1823 and 1824, virtually nothing remained: no crops on the fields, no pastures for livestock, and very little hay. When I returned home from St. Petersburg in 1824, the livestock was so thin and wasted that I could not comprehend how it could still be alive. Swarms of grasshoppers darkened the sun, there arose dust clouds as dark as the darkest rain, and fierce winds kept anyone from walking along the street. Compare this to the first chapter of the Prophet Job. (2015, 92–93)

Heinrich Goerz adds that in 1826,

just when the settlers had recovered from this crop failure, grasshoppers destroyed a large portion of the crop in a number of villages. They came in swarms several versts in length and were so numerous that they darkened the sun. (1993, 13)

A verst is roughly 2/3 of a mile, so a single swarm is being estimated at a length of nearly 2 miles, as apocalyptic as the grasshopper swarms that have plagued the central United States from time to time.

1823 and 1824 were years of crop failure. Cornies confirms the report above, and David Moon adds that there were “two successive harvest failures, caused in part by drought, in 1824 and 1825” (2013, 253). Putting all the pieces of evidence together, it seems that there were at least three successive years of crop failure, 1823–1825, and that the causes were several: grasshoppers, drought, or both.

persistent storm of the first months of 1825. The problems continued to mount for the Molotschna residents. Cornies again provides a near-contemporary account of the situation. 

In February 1825, we had such a devastating snowstorm that all communications were cut and thousands of livestock died. … Such storms that varied in strength and duration continued from mid-February until late March. The temperature, at two to five degrees Reamur, was mild enough for the snow to stick so firmly to anything that it could be removed only with the greatest effort. The eyes of people and animals were glued shut almost immediately upon exposure to the storm. (2015, 93)

The community report’s description of the storm as persistent is borne out by Cornies’s statement that there were multiple storms between mid-February until late March. The Réaumur temperature scale sets the freezing point of water at 0 and the boiling point at 80, so temperatures of 2º and 5º Réaumur are 36.5º and 43.25º Fahrenheit. What Cornies describes is reminiscent of wet spring blizzards that long-time residents of Nebraska know all too well.

great loss of livestock…, since there was no food. Cornies continues:

Horses in the yard on my sheep farm were covered with such a layer of snow that one needed to look closely to distinguish the front of a horse from its rear. I too felt the rod and judgment of our loving Father, losing more than 200 horses of my breeding herd, about 1,000 Spanish sheep, and several head of cattle. The damage came to no less than 30,000 rubles. In our community, up to 10,000 Spanish sheep, about 1,800 head of cattle, and 1,200 horses were lost in the snowstorms. Now there is a great shortage of fodder. (2015, 93)

the livestock was fed straw from the roofs. Once again, Cornies offers contemporary confirmation:

The fodder shortage was so severe that many a villager removed the straw from his roof and fed it to his cattle. Because of the clouds of snow and dust, nothing could be bought at any price, even if it had been available at some distance from here. (2015, 93)

1828, a devastating cattle disease. The German term Vieh (in Viehseuche) generally refers to cattle; because later in the report cattle are distinguished from sheep in the phrase “Vieh- und Schafzucht” (cattle and sheep breeding), the reference here seems to be specifically to a cattle disease. Cornies’s letter to Johann Sukau back in Prussia supports this interpretation. Cornies writes as follows in July 1828:

Last year, grasshoppers attacked our settlement causing much damage at my sheep farm and elsewhere. I harvested nothing but rye. The grasshoppers devoured our pasture and my livestock had to be driven to grasslands twenty or thirty verstas away. They returned only in fall. The livestock plague infected another part of our settlement, killing all livestock in several villages. (2015, 152)

Later in the same letter Cornies hints at the possible origin of the plague: “With the arrival of spring, the livestock plague reappeared in Russian villages, in several German villages, and at the community sheep farm” (2015, 153). It seems that livestock diseases spread as freely and rapidly as human diseases such as cholera, which took up to 100,000 lives in Russia alone in 1830–1832.

the starvation year 1833.

We will pick up the account with 1833 in the following post. That year deserves special attention, as is evident in the Gemeindebericht’s labeling of it as the starvation year. We will also take a step back to ask why the report lists these years and narrates such a string of negative events. What, to ask the question differently, is the rhetorical point of the arrangement of this last paragraph of the community report?

Works Cited

Cornies, Johann. 2015. Transformation on the Southern Ukrainian Steppe: Letters and Papers of Johann Cornies. Volume 1: 1812–1835. Translated by Ingrid I. Epp. Edited by Harvey L. Dyck, Ingrid I. Epp, and John R. Staples. Tsarist and Soviet Mennonite Studies. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

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

Krahn, Cornelius. 1955. Agriculture among the Mennonites of Russia. Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.

Moon, David. 2013. The Plough That Broke the Steppes: Agriculture and Environment on Russia’s Grasslands, 1700–1914. Oxford Studies in Modern European History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.