To a reporter from the East, the Old World folk who welcomed winter’s thaw on the “bleak, wild prairie” in Kansas appeared odd but admirable.

“Our population has received an important and valuable addition . . . by the extensive emigration of Mennonites,” the anonymous scribe wrote in the March 20, 1875, edition of Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper, a national magazine based in New York.

The bustling scene within two large communal shelters built by the Santa Fe Railroad 16 miles north of Newton resembled “a perfect Babel.”

The migrants’ gear — “strange-looking, battered trunks, boxes, beds, cook-stoves, sacks, bags, fur coats” — presented a “grotesque appearance.”

Yet the Russian Empire must have been sorry to lose these “conscientious, hardworking agricultural people.”

A peaceful sect, the Mennonites had been “unable to reconcile their conscience” with the czar’s repeal of an exemption from military service.

The frugal newcomers would stimulate the U.S. economy, the reporter predicted: “A very large amount of money has thus come into the country, as it is estimated that the head of each family brought from $2,000 to $10,000” — $56,000 to $282,000 in 2024 dollars.

“They will be welcomed by any state within whose limits they settle.”

Indeed, several states (Kansas, Nebraska, Minnesota), a U.S. territory (Dakota) and a Canadian province (Manitoba) proved hospitable to the 18,000 Mennonites who arrived from South Russia (today’s Ukraine) and Prussia (Poland) over the course of a decade.

Beginning in 1874 — scarcely a year after the forced removal of Native Americans from south central Kansas — waves of Mennonite immigrants made their way by rail from points east, after a journey by train across Europe and a transatlantic steamship voyage, to the North American Great Plains, whose land and climate resembled that of their former homes on the Eurasian steppes.

“The Russian Mennonites had a love affair with the soil,” said Peggy Goertz­en, director of the Center for Mennonite Brethren Studies in Hillsboro, Kan., while leading a tour of historic sites on April 20. “I think they thought God was a farmer, too. They believed this is what God wanted them to do, and they helped each other succeed.”

Four Anabaptist streams

This summer, descendants of the immigrants are celebrating the 150th anniversary of their ancestors’ arrival, an event that changed the course of North American Mennonite history.

Transplanting vibrant communities from Ukraine in the Russian Empire to the North American Great Plains shaped the destiny of four Anabaptist streams: Hutterites, Mennonite Brethren, General Conference Mennonites (now a part of Mennonite Church USA) and Holdeman Mennonites.

The migration of “Russian Mennonites” — something of a misnomer, since many had lived in the empire fewer than 70 years and never assimilated into Russian society — was one of the major movements of people in Mennonite history.

Between 1874 and the mid-1880s, about a third of the Mennonites in the Russian Empire and Prussia migrated to the North American Midwest. About 10,000 settled in the United States, 8,000 in Canada.

Those who chose Canada were more conservative, including most of the Kleine Gemeinde (today’s Evangelical Mennonite Conference). Eager to attract settlers, the Canadian government granted a military exemption.

Around half of the U.S.-bound settlers chose Kansas. Smaller numbers staked their futures in Dakota Territory, Nebraska and Minnesota.

Also on the move were several hundred Hutterites, communal-living Anabaptists. Gathering in rural colonies, they settled in Dakota, though many of their descendants, who today number around 50,000, would make their homes in Canada.

More than 40 years later, after World War I, all but one Hutterite colony moved north of the border due to the persecution of their pacifist young men, two of whom died in Leavenworth Military Prison in Kansas.

The lack of a military exemption in the United States didn’t deter Hutterite and Mennonite migration. Yet, it was Russia’s retraction of such a waiver — granted in the 1780s by the German-born czarina, Catherine the Great, to attract German settlers to newly acquired land — that had been a prime motive to sell their homes and farms in Ukraine, often for less than full value.

Another push to migrate was the government’s effort to Russianize the empire’s ethnically diverse population, revoking the Mennonites’ privilege to run their own schools.

The resulting exodus of valuable farmers prompted the government to allow alternative service, thus accommodating Mennonite pacifism for another four decades.

That era (1874-1917), remembered as a golden age, crashed to a halt as the end of World War I unleashed civil war and revolution, terrorizing the Mennonite colonies and setting the stage for Soviet-era persecution, famine and the colonies’ final destruction in World War II.

In 19th-century Russia, the Mennonites’ self-governing, isolated colonies had preserved their German culture. Some harbored unrealistic hopes for similar privileges in the United States. The only prospect of a special dispensation arose in April 1874, when the U.S. Senate considered, but did not pass, a “Mennonite bill” proposing priority access to land.

In the debate, Sen. Thomas W. Tip­ton of Nebraska, a state trying hard to attract Mennonites, acknowledged that the newcomers were pacifists but characterized this peculiarity as an asset: “If there is any portion of the world that can send us a few advocates of peace, in God’s name bid them welcome.”

No warm reception could ease the hardship of migration. Elder Jacob A. Wiebe of the Krimmer Mennonite Brethren (the MB group from Crimea) later recalled his people’s arrival in “uncharted, uninhabited land filled with tall prairie grass, with no sign of trail or road, barren prairie in every direction as far as the eye could see . . . to the little stake that marked the spot I had chosen.”

“Why do you stop?” his wife asked.

Because, he said, “we are going to live here.”

Then, Wiebe wrote in his journal, she began to weep.

“Some had very nice houses in Crimea,” said Goertzen, the MB historian, standing at the site of Gnadenau, the first Krimmer Mennonite Brethren village, east of Hillsboro. “Here she would have to start over.”

A way of life lost

The land staked for Gnadenau was indeed uninhabited, but only recently so. To clear the way for White settlers, most Native Americans in Kansas had been forcibly removed to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) by 1873.

“We were almost wiped out. It is miraculous that we survived at all,” said Pauline Sharp of Wichita, director of the Kanza Heritage Society, which preserves the heritage of the Kanza, or Kaw, Native people for whom the state is named.

The Mennonites, Sharp said in an interview, “didn’t really know the story” of deception and tragedy that preceded the immigrants’ privileged entry: treaties broken by the U.S. government and epidemics of smallpox, a disease brought by Europeans, that decimated the Native population.

Manitoba film tells immigrant story

There was a delay due to funding, but Toronto filmmaker Dale Hildebrand says his documentary about the 1870s Mennonite migration from Russia to the U.S. and Canada is on schedule.

“We have hit the ground running and are catching up,” he said, adding there are still “some big mountains to climb, but our target is to have a premiere screening in early August.”

Through the documentary, Hildebrand — who was born and raised in southern Manitoba — will tell the story of Mennonites who emigrated to North America 150 years ago.

“I want to focus on all the trials, tribulations, suffering and loss it entailed,” he said of how the Mennonites traveled by train across Europe, ship across the ocean and then by steamboat up the Red River from the U.S. to new homes in Manitoba.

To tell that story, Hildebrand is using diaries and journals written by people at that time. “I want to tell real people’s stories,” he said, adding that includes stories of children dying on the journey. “I can’t imagine the hardship and heartache.”

Hildebrand is also employing computer graphics to create prairie grasslands from that time, as well as building sequences of a paddle wheel steamboat going down the Red River. He is also using it to create sequences of the Atlantic crossings and in an original house-barn.

“It will be a marathon to the finish line, but it’s exciting,” Hildebrand said.

For showings in the U.S., Hildebrand will be talking to American broadcasters, online platforms and distributors. To that end, the documentary includes a substantial storyline about American Mennonites “who are a big part of this journey,” he said.

A total of 18,000 Mennonites left Russia in the 1870s for new homes in North America after the Russian government revoked privileges to have their own schools and be exempted from military service. — John Longhurst for AW

Of the many thousands of Kaw people who inhabited a homeland of some 20 million acres prior to 1825, about 500 destitute survivors remained when the U.S. government forced them to cede their remaining lands a year before the Mennonites arrived.

The contrast between the experience of Mennonites and Kaw in 1874 and in the years to come was extreme.

“The immigrant people were encouraged to speak their language and have their own religion — to do whatever they wanted,” Sharp said. “The Native people were forced to change their entire way of life. The Native children were sent to boarding schools to assimilate into White society and forbidden to practice their spirituality.

“It was a total loss of culture and everything they were familiar with. People should be aware of Native history and realize what was lost so that the immigrants could thrive.”

Sharp and Annette Voth will present “Kaw People and Alexanderwohl People: Side by Side Stories” at 7 p.m. July 14 at Tabor Mennonite Church, rural Newton.

Wheat and threshing stones

In addition to bargain-priced railroad land, immigrants prospered thanks to a particular type of winter wheat — Turkey Red — that flourished on America’s Great Plains as it had in Ukraine. According to legend, a girl named Anna Barkman handpicked the prime seeds: “just the best to go aboard the ship.”

Folktales aside, the wealthy Mennonite immigrant Bernhard Warkentin — who by the mid-1880s operated mills at Halstead and Newton in Kansas — imported several thousand bushels of Turkey Red wheat seed from Crimea. Today, half of Kansas wheat varieties can trace their lineage to Turkey Red.

An enduring symbol of immigrant wheat farming is the threshing stone: a solid, seven-toothed rolling cylinder that knocked the grain from the straw as horses pulled it across the threshing floor. About 100 survive today as decorative landmarks and as the symbol of Bethel College and its athletic teams, the Threshers.

The memory of threshing stones in Mennonite lore looms larger than their actual utility. Within a couple of decades after the migration, the stones were obsolete, replaced by mechanized threshing machines.

‘Receive them kindly’

Mennonites whose ancestors had settled in colonial America as early as 1683 — known as “Old Mennonites” and, in the 1870s, not yet organized nationally as the Mennonite Church (now a part of Mennonite Church USA) — provided invaluable aid to the immigrants.

John F. Funk, editor of Herald of Truth in Elkhart, Ind., played a key role in organizing an aid agency, the Mennonite Board of Guardians.

Funk appealed to all — “whether old or new Mennonites, Reformed Mennonites, Evangelical Mennonites, Swiss Mennonites, Amish Mennonites or by whatsoever other peculiar name they may be known” — to give to a fund offering loans and grants for transit expenses.

“Let us receive [the Russian Mennonites] kindly and seek to do them good,” he wrote.

The board raised $40,000 ($1.1 million in 2024 dollars). The guardians negotiated with railroads and steamship companies and helped with logistics of the journeys by ship and rail.

In Elkhart, a typical stopping place for new arrivals, Funk handled the hospitality. The largest group at one time was 700 people.

Those who received aid were grateful. In 1877, Benjamin Buller of McPherson County, Kan., wrote: “Here I have bought 40 acres of railroad [land] on time [credit]; on this I have broken 16 acres, 13 of which is sown to wheat; I have a cow, a horse and a yoke of oxen. To these I have been helped by the American brethren, a large portion of which was a free gift. I desire to tender my sincere thanks to the beloved brethren for these favors, and may the Lord bless and reward you.”

The ‘helpless Poles’

Immigrant communities eventually prospered, but only after enduring the hardships of pioneer life. Some experienced poverty for years and struggled to pay their debts.

The death of children, a common tragedy, fell especially hard on a group that became known as “the helpless Poles.” Numbering about 500, from the Volhynian region of western Ukraine, they arrived in Philadelphia on Christmas Day. Pressing on to Kansas, they sheltered in storehouses, sheds and boxcars.

There’s no accurate record of that awful winter. The best source says a child died about every other night; this suggests a death toll of about 45. Historians dismiss the claim, inscribed on a monument in the cemetery at Florence, that “over 300 Russian Mennonites died during a smallpox epidemic in 1874-1875.” Yet “there’s no doubt that a great many children and elderly died,” Goertzen said during a visit to the site.

With the help of the Santa Fe Railroad and a relief committee organized by other immigrants, many of the survivors settled in McPherson County in the spring of 1875.

Many joined a new denomination — the Church of God in Christ, Mennonite — known as the Holdeman church after its founder, John Holdeman. With 27,000 members today, the conservative group, whose members dress plain and drive cars, is based in Moundridge, a few miles from the site of the original settlement.

Mennonites ‘old’ and ‘new’

The Holdeman church was not the only Mennonite body energized by the immigrants. The General Conference Mennonite Church, like John Holdeman’s group, had struggled to gain a following. Founded in 1860 in Iowa, with the stated purpose to unite all Mennonites, by 1870 it had attracted about 20 congregations and 1,500 members — defectors who found Old Mennonite conservatism too confining.

The Russian Mennonites quickly adopted the fledgling conference. Though grateful for assistance from the Old Mennonites, they found the dominant American Mennonite culture restrictive and foreign. The immigrants favored higher education, Sunday schools, mission work and musical instruments — innovations the Old Mennonites disdained.

Keen to preserve their language and folkways, the Plautdietsch (Low ­German)-speaking Russian Mennonites who settled near English- and Pennsylvania Dutch-speaking Old Mennonite pioneers from the East could not even communicate with their neighbors. Further, the immigrants were shocked to learn that some Old Mennonites drank alcohol and used tobacco.

As early as 1875, Russian Mennonite congregations began joining the General Conference Mennonite Church and soon became its core membership.

Two immigrant ethnic groups — Swiss Volhynians, known as Schweitz­ers, from western Ukraine; and Low Germans from southern Ukraine and Volhynia — became cornerstones of the General Conference.

The Low Germans founded congregations near the present-day towns of Goessel, Buhler and Inman in Kansas, Henderson in Nebraska and Mountain Lake in Minnesota. The Schweitzers established communities at Moundridge and Pretty Prairie in Kansas and Freeman in South Dakota.

In Freeman, the Heritage Hall Museum and Archives tells the story of German-Russian immigrants — Lutherans and Reformed as well as Mennonites.

“This area was heavily settled by Germans from Russia,” said Marnette Hofer, the museum’s executive director and archivist. “We are the only place in the world where the three Anabaptist groups — Hutterites, Low German Mennonites and Swiss Amish — settled in the same area.”

Events celebrating the Swiss Volhynian immigration to South Dakota are planned for Sept. 7-8, hosted by the Salem and Salem-Zion Mennonite congregations.

In Kansas, the Swiss Mennonite Cultural and Historical Association preserves the Schweitzer heritage. The association is organizing a celebration Aug. 23-25 at Eden Mennonite Church in Moundridge, beginning at 7 p.m. Aug. 23 with a keynote address by Wynn Goering and a hymn sing.

A Mennonite Memorial Monument, erected in 1974 at the Hopefield church near Moundridge, is inscribed with historical information and a challenge for descendants of the ­immigrants: “Will we give highest priority to God as revealed in Jesus Christ, or will we pursue self-centered interests and pleasures? Will Men­nonites remain true to the Anabaptist vision of the Christian or become so acculturated as to be unidentifiable?”

In Moundridge on May 31, the Moundridge Arts Council and the Swiss historical association dedicated a sculpture, “Fields of Hope.” The artists, Ann Zerger and Chip Parker, spoke of the sculpture’s symbols — a peace dove, prairie grass and wheat — representing the Mennonite ideals of peace and justice, the fertile soil that enabled the immigrant farmers’ success and the legacy of Indigenous people.

“It also represents a visual land acknowledgment of the Indigenous peoples who thrived here for generations and are still here, in Kansas and Oklahoma,” Zerger said. “They are starting to have their voices heard, so it was important to acknowledge their sacrifices.”

Twice an immigrant

At Goessel, the Mennonite Heritage and Agricultural Museum preserves the Low German story. Central to that story is the Alexanderwohl congregation, which still worships in its 1886 church building, with remodeling and additions.

On Memorial Day weekend, at four Goessel area cemeteries — Alexanderwohl, Tabor, Goessel and Blumenfeld — hundreds of flags with the words, “Immigrant with faith, courage, action: thanks be to God!” marked the gravestones of pioneers.

“It was my desire to seeing something waving in the breeze that was not an American flag but gave a message,” said Pat Bartel Penner, a member of the museum board. “I felt the immigrants should have their voice.”

During a “Talking Tombstones” tour May 26, Penner spoke in the voice of Anna Richert Wedel (1811-1890), whose life spanned three homelands.

“There are a few of us here who made two immigrations,” she said, standing beside Wedel’s gravestone in the Blumenfeld Cemetery north of Goessel.

In 1820-21, her family endured a yearlong journey by wagon from West Prussia (today’s Poland) to Molotschna in the Russian Empire’s southland (today’s Ukraine). More than 50 years later, she joined the transatlantic migration to Kansas, traveling much farther but much faster.

The mother of 11, she buried four children at Molotschna. It was hard to leave loved ones, living and dead.

“We knew there would be friends we would not see again in this life,” said Arlin Buller, who portrayed Alexanderwohl elder Jacob Buller (1827-1901).

The new communities prospered. Less than a quarter century after their arrival, the central Kansas immigrants were building institutions.

In 1888, north of Newton, they laid the cornerstone of Bethel College. In 1899, in Goessel, they established Bethesda Hospital, the first Mennonite hospital west of the Mississippi River. The hospital was a joint project of General Conference Mennonites, Mennonite Brethren and Krimmer Mennonite Brethren.

“I think it’s inspiring that these groups, which were separate but also in many ways the same, were able to cooperate to create this service for people,” said Kris Schmucker, archivist at the Harvey County Historical Museum in Newton.

Faith rooted in story

Finding unity in a shared faith and history motivates the organizers of anniversary celebrations. In southeast Nebraska, where 35 immigrant families settled in 1874, Suzanne Ratzlaff, president of the Henderson Mennonite Heritage Committee, was thrilled when almost 200 people attended a “Living the Anabaptist Story” pres­en­tation on April 21 at Henderson Mennonite Heritage Park.

Costumed actors portrayed Anabaptists who birthed the movement in Switzerland in 1525, including leaders who defied church and state by baptizing adults rather than infants and martyrs who faced death rather than renounce their faith.

Three hundred fifty years later, the Russian Mennonite migration continued the quest for religious freedom that permeates Anabaptist history.

At the Henderson event, the presence of Amish — whose ancestors ­migrated from Europe to Pennsylvania in the 1700s — reminded Ratzlaff of the common faith that unites all spiritual descendants of the first Anabaptists.

“Who we are is rooted in stories, not only personally but in our belief system,” Ratzlaff said. “The Anabaptist experience is our foundation, because without the martyrs we wouldn’t be here. We need to learn the stories of those who came before us, and that will make our faith stronger.”

Paul Schrag, editor of Anabaptist World, is a descendant of Russian Mennonite immigrants, both Swiss Volhynian and Low German.