150TH ANNIVERSARY: ORIGIN STORIES

As part of its series of programs on the 1874 Germans-from-Russia migration, Heritage Hall Museum & Archives focuses on arrival in Dakota Territory

The men, women and children of German and Swiss ancestry who immigrated to America from Russia beginning in the 1870s may have come from varying faith traditions and different villages across eastern Europe.

But they shared one commonality upon their arrival in Dakota Territory: settling on the unknown of a brand-new frontier in the emerging breadbasket of a whole new world.

That was the focus of a special program hosted by Heritage Hall Museum & Archives Sunday afternoon, Aug. 4 in Pioneer Hall — the third of a three-part series exploring the migration of Germans from Russia to America beginning 150 years ago.

The program was held Sunday afternoon, Aug. 4 inside Pioneer Hall and followed a July 14 look at the journey immigrants endured as they left Russia and traveled to Dakota Territory, as well as a June 2 program that explored how and why these settlers had previously moved across Europe and to southern Russia starting in the mid-1700s.

All three of the programs were recorded and are being produced for preservation on both Heritage Hall Museum & Archives’ YouTube channel and as DVDs.

As was the case with the first installments of the museum’s three-part series, Sunday’s program featured comments from a panel of four local historians representing and sharing different aspects of the migration story:

• Dan Flyger on behalf of the Reformed and Lutheran perspectives;
• Norman Hofer through the eyes of the Hutterites and Prairieleaut;
• S. Roy Kaufman telling the story of the Swiss Amish and Low German ancestors;
• And Marnette (Ortman) Hofer providing a general overview of the arrival in Yankton and journey to unbroken prairie to the north and what would become Freeman and surrounding area.

Background

The journey that led many of this community’s pioneers from their comfortable lives in Russia across the Atlantic and into post-Civil War America was prompted by a confluence of events and unique circumstances.

Among the immigrants who established settlements north of Yankton beginning in 1874 were Anabaptists who had fled religious persecution in Europe beginning in the 16th century. They eventually found safety in Russia around 1770 thanks to manifestos issued by Czarina Catherine II that included — according to the Global Anabaptist Mennonite Encyclopedia — “perpetual exemption from military and civil service … free exercise of religious practices, [the] right to build and control schools and churches, [and] local self-government for agricultural churches.”

But almost 100 years later, in the 1860s and 1870s, another Russian ruler, Czar Alexander II, embarked on a major reform campaign that would revoke the exemptions the Anabaptists and other German-speaking settlers had enjoyed and led them to — once again — seek refuge elsewhere.

Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, the Homestead Act of 1862 had been put in place by the United States to help accelerate growth across the western territory of an expanding America and allowed any adult citizen, or intended citizen, to claim 160 acres of surveyed government land.

Those two unrelated events — lost exemptions in Russia and new opportunities in America — resulted in a scouting delegation to survey the options here and ultimately triggered the immigration that would follow and a new way of life in Dakota Territory.

Hutterite Perspective

The different groups settling across this area starting in 1874 faced similar challenges.

Yankton, their first destination in Dakota Territory, was 30 minutes from where they ultimately settled. The Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad Company had yet to expand its line and ease the burden of difficult travel and scarce supplies, and adverse conditions on the open prairie — like snowstorms and prairie fires — posed even greater obstacles.

But there were also challenges specifically unique to the different groups.

For the Hutterites, Norman Hofer said the most difficult decision came immediately: To settle individually on a homestead using the 160 acres offered by the government or to settle communally on a colony.

“In Europe, in Russia, you always lived in a village,” Hofer said. “You had neighbors next door. The children could play together. You could loan a cup of sugar to finish up a recipe. You could visit in the evening. But if you homesteaded, you were an average of a mile from your closest neighbors. Can you imagine a prairie with no trees, no windbreak, no nothing? Grass as far as you can see and a neighbor a mile away. I don’t even want to think about it.

“Well, that’s what happened to the Hutterites.”

Hofer noted that the Hutterites came to America on nine different ships. Of the roughly 1,250 coming to America, 450 chose colony life and the rest settled on the prairie — known as the prairieleut, or “prairie people” — all in eastern Hutchinson County.

But not right away.

Hofer noted that the Hutterites got held up at Burlington, Iowa when railroad officials talked them into setting in Nebraska, instead.

“We’ve got better land than they have up there in Dakota,” Hofer said they were told.

There were 280 Hutterites on the first ship across, he said, and families boarded in an immigrant house at Lincoln, Neb., while the men went out in search of “good Nebraska land.”

Then disaster struck.

“I don’t know what happened,” Hofer said. “New water, new organisms, new food, crowded conditions, (but) there was an outbreak of dysentery, an outbreak of flu. And 36 of the children died the first month. That’s a funeral a day. That means every morning another grave had to be dug. And after 30 days, an old man, Darius Stahl, also died.”

That was it. The Burlington Railroad had promised that if the Hutterites didn’t like it in Nebraska they would move them to Dakota Territory, and that’s what happened.

Colonies were established northwest of Yankton, on the east side of Silver Lake (temporarily) and west of what would become Freeman when the railroad arrived in 1879.

The prairieleut established churches — Hutterdorf, New Hutterthal, Hutterthal and the Krimmer Mennonite Brethren Church, today Salem MB located between Freeman and Bridgewater.

Hofer noted they first joined the Mennonite conference after World War 2.

As for himself, Hofer told the audience it doesn’t matter to him if people refer to him as prairieleut or a Hutter (a local term for prairieleut).

“I like it here,” he said.

Reformed/Lutheran

Dan Flyger spoke on Sunday through the lens of the Reformed and the Lutherans who also migrated to America in the 1870s.

Flyger, who is Danish, married into a family that identified as Black Sea Germans — or Schwarzmeerdeutsche — said there was a group who had come to America prior to the Civil War and settled in Sandusky, Ohio where they got “caught up raising grapes.”

But the majority came over in the 1870s following the Czar’s “Russification of South Russia” and, with a strong desire to live near each other found Dakota Territory’s spacious prairie inviting, despite warnings that it was “Siberia.”

Actually, Flyger said, the Black Sea German’s arrival preceded the 1874 migration by a year, with Milltown — the county seat of what was then Armstrong County (the northern half of what is today Hutchinson County) — originally identified as the place on which to settle. The Black Sea Germans eventually opted for land north of Lesterville and staked their claims there.

“And they wanted to settle side by side,” said Flyger. You’ll find that wherever the Germans from Russia went, whether they’re Mennonite or non-Mennonite, they had a tendency to settle with their own kind. All you had to homestead was what you brought in a little trunk, and you relied on one another. They did not intend to become part of the great American melting pot. That’s one of the reasons they were leaving Russia. They didn’t want to melt in with Russian society.”

Flyger said some of the most important elements of their new life revolved around the letter F: Faith, family, fellowship, farming and food, including Turkey Red wheat.

“The first Turkey Red wheat was sown by Black Sea Germans who were Lutheran and Reformed in Yankton County a year before your ancestors got here,” he said. “But I find it very interesting that the Black Sea German people that settled near Scotland … within a year’s time filled all this territory from Lesterville to Menno and from Menno west and down around Scotland.”

All were hard-working people who laid the foundation for all that was to come.

“I believe the present generation can learn an awful lot from looking at the history of these Germans from Russia,” Flyger said. “They left their mark even in the place names. If you look from Kansas to Canada, in the areas where the Germans from Russia lived, you’ll see names that are of German-Russian origin — place names like Worms, Odessa, Castle, Nydorf, Danzig, Petersburg, Kiev in North Dakota — which is Kiev, Strasburg — and the list goes on and on.”

And Flyger suggested that some may think that the settlers’ “clannish” behavior and strong desire to stick together wasn’t the best course to take, “but I admired them for that because it was the importance of their faith and their family that caused them to bind together with fellowship — a sense of community. And I think here in Hutchinson County, much of that has been preserved. And I for one find it extremely admirable.”

Swiss/Low German

S. Roy Kaufman spoke on Sunday about the Swiss-Volhynian Amish and the Low German-Volhynian Mennonites, who were among a 12-man delegation who came to America in 1873 to explore the land.

Kaufman noted, however, that the group never visited southeastern Dakota Territory, but rather focused on areas to the north near the Red River that runs on the east side of what is today northeastern North Dakota.

“So how did we get here?” Kaufman asked.

The answer can be found in Daniel Unruh, a wealthy man who arrived in America in August of 1873 — before the others in his faith community — and only learned of southeastern Dakota Territory from an immigration agent in Chicago. Kaufman said Unruh found his way to Yankton and eventually to the Turkey Ridge Valley southeast of what would become Freeman, where he brought a group of as many as 100 people to homestead in the spring of 1874.

“So Daniel Unruh probably influenced our coming here,” Kaufman said.

While the Swiss-Volhynian Amish settled further south in Turner County, the Low Germans homesteaded toward Marion with the Prussian-Polish Low German Mennonites between Silver Lake and Dolton.

“If you look at … a homestead map, there’s almost like a dividing line where New (Highway) 44 goes,” Kaufman said. “South of that was Swiss, north of that was Low German. Very interesting.

“(And) they didn’t live in villages but, as Dan said, they did very much settle with their own people in these different communities and different areas.”

One of the struggles of this group, Kaufman noted, was whether to live as Amish or as Mennonite.

“The Swiss community actually had a lot of tension,” he said. “It was usually below the surface. It didn’t break out in a lot of quarrels or church fights, but they had to determine, are we going to be Amish, or are we going to be Mennonite? And the issue was, ‘How much are we going to acculturate to American society?’

“Amish would have acculturated a lot less than those who became Mennonites, because the Mennonites already were a step toward being American in their theology and their thinking and the way they practiced church, whereas the Amish were still like the Amish are,” Kaufman continued. “They still kept their own patterns of living away from the culture around them.

“So we had to decide.”

Kaufman said, three years after the Swiss ancesters arrived, they joined the Mennonite Church conference and established the Zion Mennonite Church and Salem Mennonite Church congregations, which eventually merged before splitting into two churches again — known today as Salem-Zion (North) and Salem Mennonite (South).

Kaufman said there were other challenges, like “how to maintain a cultural identity here in America,” he said. “These guys mentioned already the issues of property ownership and living on the land and how we couldn’t just live in villages. We had to live on separate homesteads; that was a big thing.”

There was also the challenge of American schools teaching lessons in the English language and the German involvement in World War I.

“We had this tension as we tried to figure out who we were in America.”

And then there was the challenge of maintaining the Anabaptist faith in an otherwise Evangelical world — “you know, believing the right things and making sure your ticket to heaven is secure and abandoning our Anabaptist faith which emphasizes discipleship, which emphasizes living together in community, which emphasizes an ethic of love.

“I don’t mind being Evangelical,” he said. “I think it’s great, but it’s a vast world away from being an Anabaptist Mennonite.”

These are the challenges that his ancestors had to navigate, Kaufman concluded.

Ultimately, he observed, “We acculturated in really significant ways to American society, theologically, as well as culturally.”

Sunday’s comments also include an engaging perspective from Marnette Hofer.

In the interest of space, that will be published next week.