Family Photos: Nursing School

Several months ago, in a post about a 1927 letter Maria wrote to her sister Sara (here), we learned that Sara was working at the Mennonite Deaconess Hospital in Beatrice, Nebraska. More recently, in the last post of the Bullers in The Mennonite series (see here), we read how two decades later, in mid-1946 (probably May), Maria graduated from the two-year Community Nurses Training Course offered at that same hospital. The photographs that feature in this post relate to Maria’s training at that hospital.

This first photo has only the date on which the picture was taken noted on the back: 21 May 1944. We do not know where the photograph was taken (although see below for a reasonable guess). All we know for certain is what we can see: Maria is standing in front of a brick building, with two lawn-type chairs sitting on a patio behind her.

The photo shows Maria wearing her nursing uniform and holding something in her left hand. Is it a wrapped box, perhaps a gift with ribbon and greenery attached? Could it be a purse? an envelope? Once again, dumb luck comes to the rescue.

Wondering how old Maria would have been at that time, I found the relevant page in the Buller Family Record and discoverd that 21 May 1944 was Maria’s thirty-sixth birthday. This information both explains what appears to be a gift box and provides a plausible explanation of why the photo was taken in the first place: to document and capture a memory of her birthday celebration.

We will come back to the significance of this later, after we consider the second photo in this set. To be clear, it is not certain that both photos were taken the same day or even at the same location. Maria is wearing the same uniform in both photos, but presumably she wore that or a similar uniform most days of her training.

The caption on the back of this photograph reads: Marie Buller, Sis Sarah Rempel. (For the life of me I do not know why she spells her name Maria sometimes and Marie other times. I use Maria consistently, since that is the form used in the Buller Family Record, which Maria helped to create.)

At least two things are important about this photograph: her reference to Sarah Rempel as sis(ter) and the location where the photograph was taken. We will deal with each of these in turn.

Maria’s reference to Sarah Rempel as sister was not a simple matter of using familial language to show fondness for another person. Rather, the term sister indicates that Sarah Rempel held a recognized position on the staff of the Mennonite Deaconess Hospital. Rich Preheim offers further background (the entire article, linked below, is well worth reading):

In 1890, American Mennonite women had few opportunities to serve the church in a formal capacity. Pastoral ministry was reserved for men, and Mennonite mission work was still in its infancy. David Goerz wanted to expand the opportunities. A minister and one of the founders of Bethel College in Kansas, Goerz introduced the concept of deaconesses to the 1890 triennial session of the General Conference Mennonite Church. Deaconesses were not a new idea. Christian congregations, including European Mennonite ones, had long had them to minister to other women. Borrowing from a growing movement in Europe and the United States, Goerz’s deaconess proposal was for single women trained as nurses and affiliated with a “mother house.” It had similarities to a Catholic convent. 

The Beatrice, Nebraska, hospital where Sara had earlier worked and where Maria was being trained was one of these deaconess hospitals. It is not surprising, then, that the caption to the 1946 graduation picture referenced above identifies the class sponsor as Sister Alice E. Epp. Members of the hospital staff, including Alice Epp and Sarah Rempel, held that status and bore that title. This leads me to wonder if Sara, when she worked at the same hospital in 1927, was a deaconess on the staff. 

Although we may never know the answer to that question, we can identify the location of the second photo with near certainty. Maria is standing in front the steps that lead up to a brick structure. The porch, for lack of a better term, has several brick columns; sitting atop the brick pedestal at the top of the steps is some sort of rounded stone. We see these same features in a circa 1910 postcard of the Mennonite Deaconess Home and Hospital in Beatrice, Nebraska. The only real difference between the two is the vines that had grown to cover the brick walls and columns over the three and a half decades from the first depiction to the second.

The first photograph above clearly was not taken in the exact same spot as the first, but I suspect that both were taken at the hospital: the first one in the back of the building and the second one at the front.

Only one question remains: Why were the photographs taken in the first place? Thinking about when the photos were taken may point us in the right direction. It seems that, by her thirty-sixth birthday, Maria had started her two-year Community Nurses Training program. At that time, her parents were far away in California. Henry and Bea had been released from German detention two months earlier and were busy sharing about the MCC’s relief work in various churches throughout the U.S.

Ironically, as we read in an earlier post (here), on 21 May 1944—Maria’s thirty-sixth birthday—Henry and Bea themselves were in Peter P and Margaretha’s (and Maria’s) church in Upland, California. 

Mr. and Mrs. Henry Buller, who carried on relief work in France and then were interned in Germany, are now visiting various Mennonite communities in the United States. They were recently at Bethel College, where they shared much that was of great interest. It is their hope to be able to continue in relief work. … The Bullers have gone to Upland, California. The First Mennonite Church there is Brother Buller’s home church. We quote the following from a recent bulletin of this church:

“We appreciate the return of Mr. and Mrs. Henry Buller. We welcome them in our midst. Next Sunday, May 21st they will have charge of the morning and evening service. Mrs. Buller will receive the sacrament of baptism. Mr. and Mrs. Buller were legally married a year and half ago but at that time lacked the privilege of a religious ceremony. Hence next Sunday morning there will be a consecration of their marriage vows.

While other members of the family were meeting Bea and spending time together, Maria was training to be a nurse in Beatrice the day she turned thirty-six. It is not too difficult to imagine that the photographs were taken so that her parents in California might see them and share in her birthday celebration, even belatedly and at a distance. All this is supposition and imagination, of course, but it does make for a good story.

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If you wish to read more about the Mennonite deaconness movement, I recommend the Preheim work cited below and these other resources:

Deaconesses of the Bethel Deaconess Home and Hospital. 1948. “The Deaconess and Her Ministry.” Mennonite Life 3.1:30–37. Available online here (scroll down to page 30).

Schmucker, Kristine. 2013. “Pioneer of Health Care: Sister Anna Gertrude Penner.” Harvey County Museum blog. Available online here.

Work Cited

Preheim, Rich. 2019. “History: Mennonite Sisterhood of Service.” Anabaptist World, originally published in Mennonite World Review. Available online here.