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  Historical Committee
Dutch and
Swiss Mennonites Take Root in Canada:
Two Peoples,
One Identity
By Royden Loewen
Mennonites
exchanged the southern steppes of Russia for the central plains of the
United States and Canada in the 1870s. There they encountered
Mennonites of Swiss and Palatine origins, already in the fourth and
fifth generations of their North American sojourn. While differing in
language and the geography of their recent history, they shared a love
of the land and a desire to create communities of "simplicity, peace,
self-sufficiency, and separation from worldy society."
Compelling the Mennonite migration was a love of land. Indeed, the
Mennonite immigrants of the 1870s expressed an almost obsessive
interest in farmland. As immigrants, they debated its quality, and as
farmers, they tested its potential. As neighbors, they treasured land
if it was contiguous to the land of friends and relatives; as parents,
they schemed for ways of acquiring more land. Their letters suggest
they believed the immigrant community was successful if land, the
foundation of a cohesive, agrarian community, was procured for each
generation. While Mennonites held no affinity to a particular
land or country, historians agree that they firmly held to a “way of
life that was rooted in the soil.” Life on the farm had long
protected Mennonite religious teachings against conformity to a wider
world they equated with ostentation, avarice, vanity, and violence.
Mennonite immigrants, therefore, saw land as a divine instrument. One
Mennonite theologian, Waldemar Janzen, has described land as “a sacred
plot by virtue not of any inherent sacredness, but of God’s choice of
it as an instrument toward his purposes.” But “instrument” and
“purpose” were not always clearly distinguishable. Another Mennonite
scholar, Calvin Redekop, for example, has argued that Dutch Mennonites
linked the concept of religious community to agricultural land and even
a geographic territory: “The family of God and its land were locked in
holy matrimony…. Where the church was ... central in the search and
negotiations for land, the Mennonite moral code [held]….” Yet
another scholar, Nancy-Lou Patterson, has drawn the same link for Swiss
Mennonites: “the spiritual state of blessedness ... [the] enjoyment of
the divine presence [was] embodied in this [rural] landscape of polity,
order and stability, created and inhabited by Swiss-German Mennonite
settlers….“
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Photo: The first boatload
of Mennonite
immigrants from Russian arrive at The Forks, the junction of the
Assiniboine and Red Rivers, Winnipeg, August 1, 1874.
Source: MC USA
Archives- North Newton
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This veneration of rural life
was central to the culture of the Mennonite immigrants of the 1870s,
and can be demonstrated by a comparison of Dutch-Russian migrants to
their more established Swiss-Pennsylvania co-religionists, who had
first come to North America in large numbers after 1710. In the late
nineteenth century, significant differences marked the two main
branches of Mennonites in North America: the Swiss and the Dutch.
By the 1890s, the Swiss were usually lodged in communities more than a
century old and located in the densely populated eastern portions of
North America—Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, and Ontario. The Dutch were
just completing their first generation of sojourn in the midwestern
sections of the continent’s frontier—Kansas, Nebraska, and Manitoba.
Despite these differences, the two groups of Mennonites shared a common
culture. As Anthony Giddens has argued, the worlds of specific social
groups must be seen in “social practices ordered across space and
time,” and in the very processes in which “agents reproduce the
conditions that make these activities possible.” For the
Mennonite immigrants and their descendants, the social practice of a
life of simplicity, peace, self-sufficiency, and separation from
worldly society, and the conditions that secured these “practices”—the
farm household and agrarian community—were inseparable.
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Photo: Historical marker
found at the Alexanderwohl Mennonite
Church, Goessel, Kansas, recognizing the immigration of “peace-loving”
Mennonites from Russia to Kansas, beginning in 1874. Photo by John E.
Sharp |
Two Peoples:
One Identity
The lives of middle-aged farmers Cornelius Plett and David Bergey
represented two distinctive faces of the Mennonite experience in rural
Canada during the 1890s. Plett was a Dutch-North German Mennonite
immigrant, having made the voyage from Imperial Russia to Canada in
1875. He spoke West Prussian “Low German,” he lived in a wooden frame
house attached to a barn by a common ridgepole, his wife wore a black
kerchief, and his kinship network extended back to New Russia and into
the American Midwest, especially Nebraska and Kansas. Bergey was
a Swiss Mennonite, a third-generation Canadian whose descendants had
come north after the American Revolution. He spoke the South German
dialect “Pennsylvanian Dutch”; his house was a stone construction
detached from a massive, wooden, two-storeyed barn; his wife wore a
white cap; his kinship network reached into the eastern United
States. Important, too, is the fact that the specific
socioeconomic and physical settings in which Plett and Bergey lived
were significantly different. Bergey was from Waterloo County in
southern Ontario, while Plett lived in Manitoba’s Rural Municipality of
Hanover, also known locally as the Mennonite East Reserve.
Photo: The Kolb homestead,
Kitchener, Ont. Jacob and Katherine
Clemens Kolb moved to Upper Canada from Bucks County, Pennsylvania
about 1819. About 1829 they purchased this property along the Grand
River at the "Breslau Ford." And built a log house overlooking the
river. This is now the location of Kolb Park in Kitchener.
Source:
George L. and Elsie Bender Photograph Collection |
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Waterloo and Hanover of the 1890s were located in starkly different
regions of Canada. Historians of southern Ontario have documented the
decline of the independent “yeoman” in this region. Faced with the
“urban challenge” and the spread of industrial capitalism in a myriad
of small cities, rural society became threatened. Agricultural college
programs, wilderness romanticization movements, and farmers’ political
parties were only some of the reactions to the rising urban-industrial
society. In Ontario, too, a highly integrated, pluralistic society
placed pressures of assimilation on non-Anglo Canadian groups.
Prairie historians, on the other hand, have noted how the independent
farm family “made good” in an environment characterized by an abundance
of land, low population densities, the wheat frontier, upward mobility
from rising land values, cultural homogeneity within specific
settlements, and relative isolation from the metropolis. So
different were such settings as southern Ontario and the prairie west
that historians have argued that regionalism constituted a fundamental
variable in Canadian history, and immigration historians, in
particular, have suggested that regionalism mitigated against the
development of pan-North American identities for any given immigrant or
ethnic group.
Bergey of Ontario and Plett of Manitoba shared similar, crucial “social
practices.” On the surface, regional differences affected their social
behavior. Plett still lived in a homogeneous immigrant community, in a
municipality almost commensurate with a land bloc set aside for the
exclusive use of the Mennonites in 1873 (its exclusivity lifted only in
the 1890s). The more highly urbanized setting of Waterloo increased the
usage of English in the Bergey household, the level of interaction with
the “outside” world, the Bergey children’s pursuit of higher education,
and the household’s dependence on regional markets. Cutting through the
regional differences, however, was a common dedication to the
conditions that were seen as safeguarding Mennonite culture: the
family-oriented farm household set in a closely knit, rural, sectarian
community. This was the common link between Bergey of Waterloo and
Plett of Hanover. Despite regional differences resulting in different
descriptive cultural traits, Bergey and Plett shared similar social
aims. Ultimately, their lives diverged only in that they sought to
establish the self-sufficient agrarian household and sectarian
community in two distinctly different settings.
The lives of Cornelius Plett in Hanover Municipality and David Bergey
in Waterloo County during the 1890s were different. Plett and Bergey
represented different generations of immigrants, they hailed from two
different Mennonite groups, and they spoke different German dialects.
They also came from different regions. Plett’s Manitoba was marked by
an abundance of land and a wheat frontier, and Bergey’s Ontario was
characterized by urbanization, industrialization, and cultural
pluralism. Thus, while the Manitoba Mennonites had a well-defined sense
of social boundary, and recorded high rates of endogamy and linguistic
retention, the Ontario Mennonites interacted almost daily with
non-Mennonites, spoke more English, and more readily changed church
allegiances. Still, a common adherence to the established Mennonite
values of a separated, simple lifestyle, rooted in land, the farm
household, and agrarian community, characterized the majority of
Mennonites in both the Hanover and the Waterloo settlements. Both
communities undertook strategies to ensure the survival of this kind of
ethnic and religious community. There were some behavioral differences
that stemmed from the more intense shortage of land in Waterloo than in
Hanover: the Waterloo youth waited longer before they married and
formed their own households; Waterloo parents more actively sought new
sources of land outside the original townships of settlement, and more
often, too, they lived in multiple-family households. Despite these
differences, both Waterloo and Hanover Mennonites were prepared to
“reproduce the conditions” required in their respective regions to
maintain a rural, sectarian way of life. Both were committed to the
generational succession of the farm household, even when it entailed
secondary migrations to new settlements, or the creation of stem
families. Both, too, practiced a particular system of inheritance,
sanctioned a certain type of wealth stratification, and cultivated
social networks that would maximize their chances of reproducing the
agrarian household and, hence, of maintaining their community’s social
boundaries.
A comparison of a single ethnic group in two regions of Canada
underlines the importance that historians often place on the variable
of regionalism. Such a comparison indicates just how diverse the
experience of any one cultural group can be within a single country.
Mennonites of the frontier prairie west and those of the urbanized east
could not possibly share identical experiences, or even have possessed
similar descriptive traits.
Still, an inter-regional comparison of Mennonites suggests that common
social practices sometimes took root despite the different restraints
and opportunities of particular Canadian regions. In such a
circumstance, the writing of a pan-Canadian experience of one group can
be more than “an intellectual construct”; it can reflect a common,
lived “reality.” For Mennonites, that reality lay within the
self-sufficient household and the sectarian community. That the
Mennonites of Waterloo and Hanover sometimes followed different
strategies in maintaining their communities is evidence of the
restraints and opportunities of their respective regions; that these
strategies were geared to a similar end is evidence of shared cultural
values. A comparative analysis of third-generation Waterloo residents
and first-generation Hanover residents suggests the degree to which
Mennonites venerated an agrarian world. Common behavioral patterns
across regions and generations illuminate a set of values that were not
often given public expression.
From Hidden
Worlds: Revisiting the Mennonite Migrants of the 1870s by Royden
Loewen, pp. 69-72, 86-87. Used with permission. This book resulted from
Loewen's Menno Simons lectures, given at Bethel College, North Newton,
Kan. in 1999.
Royden
Loewen professor of history chair of Mennonite Studies at the
University of Winnepeg, and president of the Mennonite Historical
Society of Canada.
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Mennonite Historical
Bulletin
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Mission
Statement:
"God calls us to preserve our faith heritage, to interpret our stories,
and to proclaim God's work among us."
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