A useful source of information about Waldheim and other Russian villages inhabited by colonists is a collection of village reports commissioned by the Russian ministry responsible for governing foreign settlers within Russia. On 8 January 1848 the president of the Fürsorge-Komitee für die Kolonisten der südlichen Gebiete Russlands (Guardians’ Committee of the Foreign Colonists in the Southern Regions of Russia; see further Krahn 1959), Eugen von Hahn, sent out a circular requiring mayors and school teachers under his jurisdiction to compile Gemeindeberichte (community reports) for their villages, all 203 of them. So it was that Mayor Christian Schlabbach and Schoolmaster Henry Dirks wrote about life in Waldheim in 1848.
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| Waldheim (modern Vladivka) shown in relation to Kleefeld and Alexanderkrone (where Peter D and family lived), which were approximately 22 miles to the southwest. |
Remarkably, many of the Gemeindeberichte were lost for decades. Some had been published in the Odessa newspaper Unterhaltungsblatt für deutsche Ansiedler im südlichen Rußland, but others lay unpublished and unremembered in the Odessa Fürsorge-Komitee ministry’s archives. Even after the lost reports were finally discovered, they often remained inaccessible to researchers until Margarete Woltner published them in her 1941 Die Gemeindeberichte von 1848 der deutschen Siedlungen am Schwarzen Meer (now available online here; for the German original of the Waldheim report, see here).
So, without further ado, we present the 1848 Gemeindebericht for Waldheim, Molotschna colony. (Be aware that the notes in the report are Woltner’s and are not part of the original report.) After reading the report in this post, we will examine it in greater detail in a subsequent post—but only after tomorrow’s special Super Bowl post.
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Waldheim1
This village was founded in 1836. That year eight landowners settled in it, twelve in the year 1838, and twenty landowners in 1840. The mayor’s office was held by Kornelius Wedel for ten years and [now] Christian Schlabbach in his second year.
The village is located on the creek Behemtschukrak2 and is bordered on the east by the land of the crown village Chernigovka, on the south by the village Gnadenfeld, to the west by the newly founded village Hierschau, on the north by the crown land that the Mennonite Heinrich Janzen of the village Schönsee has leased. The village is 80 versts [53 miles] from Berdyansk and 350 versts [232 miles] from Simferopol. The extremely varied—black, gravelly, stony, and yellow clay—ground is quite suitable for cereal grains. Also, in spite of its elevated position, hay is abundant.
The sixty-eight families of this village3 came from the province of Volhynia, namely, from the following locations: (1) from the village Ostrowa in the Lutzkischen district4 on the estates of the nobleman Michael Bitschkowskij, where they had come from the Rokonosch district not far from the town Wissotzk from the manor of the nobleman Watzlaf Vorainy;5 (2) from the village Wolla on the estates of the nobleman Ignat Bitschkowskij, where they had come from the manor of Count Olisarow near they town of Rawalowka in the Lutzkischen district, and (3) from the district Novograd Volhynsk from the estate of Prince Ljubomirskij.6 In general, their [now-]deceased ancestors migrated to the places mentioned in the years 1806–1818 from the Neumark province at Driesen and from the village Schwetz in West Prussia. Their advocate who brought about the high crown’s authorization for settlement and their guide on the trip from Volhynia to the Molotschna Mennoite colony in 1835 was Kornelius Wedel.
With the permission of the high crown through the mediation of the president of the Agricultural Association, Johann Kornies, and the Molotschna Mennoite Area Office, the settlers were assigned land that Kornies had previously leased and declared was entirely empty. The partly impoverished settlers have received no support from the crown; any necessary assistance came to them from the participation of the older, earlier-established farmers. The assets that they brought along may have amounted to 400 rubles silver.
Since the settlers had lived mostly in forests in Volhynia, Johann Kornies gave their village the name Waldheim [forest home].
Mayor Schlabbach
Assessors David Kühn and Johann Fast
Schoolmaster Henry Dirks
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Notes [bracketed material below added by Buller Time]
1. Russian name: Polscha [today: Vladivka].
2. Begim-Tschokrak [or Behim-Chokrak].
3. 1855: forty farmsteads, ninety-one resident families (a total of 488 men, 473 women); see Mennonitische Blätter 4 (1857): 31 (the permanently absent are counted).
1857: forty-three farmsteads (205 men) in 2,840 dessiatines [7,668 acres] and fifty-nine landless families (296 men); see August Klaus, Nasi kolonii: Opyty i materialy poistorii statistike inostrannoj kolonizacii v Rossii, Unsere Kolonien: Versuche und Materialien zur Geschichte und Statistik der ausländischen Kolonisation in Rußland (Petersburg, 1869), supplement 2, p. 37.
4. The locations of the villages listed below could not be established. Apparently the names are garbled.
5. A larger resettlement of Mennonites from Kronsland [crown land?] was already planned in 1803; see Polnoe Sobranie Zakonov Rossijskoj Imperii (Vollständige Gesetzessammlung des Russischen Reiches), vol. 27, no. 20843.
6. = Lubomirski.
Krahn, Cornelius. 1959. Fürsorge-Komitee (Guardians’ Committee). Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia Online. Available online here.
Wahl, Dale. 1996. Introduction to the Village History Project. Available online here.
Woltner, Margarete. 1941. Die Gemeindeberichte von 1848 der deutschen Siedlungen am Schwarzen Meer. Sammlung Georg Leibbrandt 4. Leipzig: Hirzel.
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