Mountain Lake, Minnesota: 1875-1900
“Our
father, Jacob C. Willems, went to be with the Lord on Sunday, November
8, 1964, in the Dinuba Convalescent Home, at 1:35 p.m. He was the son of Cornelius and Elizabeth,
nee Boldt, Willems and was born on August 8, 1883, in Mountain Lake,
Minnesota. He reached the age of 81
years and 3 months.
My Grandpa
Willems was born in Mountain Lake, Minnesota.
That is one of the facts I learned as a child, but it was simply that, a
fact. I never thought about it, never
felt any connection to it. Mountain Lake
was just a place where the Willems family happened to stop before moving on to
their real destination—Canada, the place where my grandparents met and married,
the place where my father was born.
Then, one
day as I checked to see what the library at the University of Missouri in
Columbia might have on Mennonite history, I happened upon a book titled, A
History of the Settlement of German Mennonites from Russia at Mountain Lake,
Minnesota. It was a small book
published in 1938 by the author, Ferdinand P. Schultz, a teaching assistant in
history at the University of Minnesota.
Surprised and delighted that such a book existed, and that the MU
library, only five minutes from my house, would actually have a copy, I checked
it out and took it home.
As I read Schultz’ book, Mountain
Lake became real. It was as if a window
had suddenly opened onto a period of time in my family’s life that previously
had been blank, a period of time that encompassed a whole generation. My family lived in Mountain Lake twenty-five
years. Grandpa’s father, Cornelius,
lived there almost all his adult life. Twenty
years old in 1875 when his family arrived in Mountain Lake, Cornelius was
forty-five years old in 1900 when he moved his family to Canada. It was in Mountain Lake that Cornelius
married Elisabeth Boldt, my grandfather Willems’ mother. All but the youngest of their nine children
were born before they moved to Canada.
My Grandpa, Jacob, who turned seventeen the summer of 1900, also spent a
significant part of his life in Minnesota—all his childhood and most of his
adolescence. That Grandpa was born in
Mountain Lake, Minnesota, was now more than just an isolated fact.
Getting There
It is estimated that about 18,000 Mennonites moved
from Russia to North America between 1873 and 1884. About 10,000 of them settled in the United
States; the other 8,000 went to Manitoba, Canada. Of those who came to the States, the
majority—about 5,000—went to Kansas.
Minnesota and the Dakota Territory each got about 1800. Nebraska got most of the remainder.
That is a lot of Mennonites on the move, and they
generated a lot of interest and attention in newspapers and magazines, an
interest that began before the migration started. “Western newspapers, railroads, governments
and other agencies interested in westward expansion were struck with the
novelty and the possibilities of this mass-movement of capable, fairly wealthy,
and well-organized immigrants and immediately proceeded with plans and schemes
to draw them into the orbit of their influence.
The first campaign to attract the Mennonites as settlers was begun by
the Canadian Government early in 1872, partly as a result of several Mennonite petitions
to the British Consul at Berdiansk, Russia, for information about Canada.
…. The next contender to enter the race
was the state government of Minnesota with more or less cooperation from the
land-grant railways within its borders.
Other vigorous rivals were Dakota Territory, the Atchison, Topeka &
Santa Fe Railway in Kansas, and the Chicago, Burlington, & Quincy Railway
in Nebraska”(Schultz, 27-28).
The Mennonites who emigrated from
South Russia to North America were part of a vast, communal effort. Mennonite leaders in Russia not only
contacted government officials in Canada and the U.S., they also sought out and
corresponded with Mennonites already living in North America. In early 1873, a group of twelve men from the
Mennonite colonies in Russia set out as an advance party to check out the
situation in North America. They were
not alone. With them were railroads and land company agents as well as representatives
for various national and state governments, state and national. The twelve Mennonites spent about two and a
half months in a focused search for land where their people might settle—and
not just any land, the best farm land available. That search took them from the long
established Mennonite communities east of the Mississippi River into the new
states and territories along the current frontier line: Minnesota, Dakota,
Nebraska, Kansas and Texas. It also took
them up into Manitoba to see land the Canadian government was eager to settle (Schultz, 32).
American Mennonites played an important part in this
mass migration, helping the immigrants as they traveled west, welcoming them
into their homes, providing information and aid. And that aid was substantial. Concerned that even the poorest Mennonite who
wanted to emigrate would be able to do so, they raised over $100,000 in aid
money, setting up a Board of Guardians to administer the funds. The Willems and Boldt families may well have
received some of that aid.
The
Mennonites proved to be shrewd negotiators.
They negotiated land deals and aid for travel expenses with railroads
and government bodies. They also
negotiated reduced fares with the companies that owned the passenger ships that
would take the immigrants across the Atlantic.
According to historian Theron Schlabach, the Mennonites even got the
transportation companies to provide German-speaking stewards on the ships and
ice water in the railroad cars.[1]
En Route
“Upon
leaving Russia the Mennonites usually traveled overland through Germany to
Hamburg or some Belgian port where they embarked. Those who were definitely planning to go to
Manitoba had to cross to England where they took passage in British vessels
going to Quebec. From there they
traveled over the Great Lakes to Duluth, thence to Fargo by rail, and then north
down the Red River by steamboat. The
majority, however, crossed the Atlantic on the North-German Lloyd, or Red Star
liners and landed at New York. Now and
then a group landed at Philadelphia. At
these ports they were usually met by numerous agents of railroads, land
companies, or other commercial concerns who were interested in them as
prospective settlers or customers. They
were also met by friends or relatives who had preceded them, had located in one
of the frontiers states or territories, and now wanted them to go with
them. Frequently the immigrants decided
at these ports where they wanted to make their homes and the groups then broke
up into smaller parties who proceeded to their chosen destination” (Schultz, 55).
Gerhard Willems, aged 55, with ten children
including one named Cornelius (20), is listed among the passengers of
the ship SS Nederland, which arrived in Philadelphia from Antwerp,
Belgium, on July 25, 1875. There was a
crowd of Mennonites on the ship—74 families for total of about 700 individuals.
Ten days
later, on August 4, 1875, Jakob Boldt, his wife Elisabeth and their ten children, including one named Elisabeth
(17), arrived in the Port of New York from Antwerp on the ship the SS State
of Nevada. Ninety families, about
500 Mennonites, 90 families, were on their ship.
Both
families arrived in a crowd of Mennonites, and they likely took advantage of
the negotiated group travel rates:
--The Boldt family, arriving in the
Port of New York, probably sailed on one of the ships of the Inman steamship
line. The negotiated Mennonite price
with that line was $41-$42 per adult, with half-fare for children. That price included rail fare west on the
Erie Railroad.
--The Willems family, arriving in
the Port of Philadelphia, could get an even better deal. Theron Schlabach says that a committee of
Pennsylvania Mennonites had “arranged with a firm named Peter Wright and Son to
bring Mennonites from Antwerp to Philadelphia.
By working with the Wright firm, the Pennsylvania Railroad, and a steamship
line named ‘Red Star’, the committee had negotiated prices from Antwerp to
points in the U.S. West. Their fares
were some $5 or $6 per person below the Inman-Erie fare….Bringing the
immigrants through Philadelphia would make it easy to arrange temporary lodging
in the large Mennonite communities nearby”(259-60).
Why Mountain Lake, Minnesota?
“The coming of the Mennonites was an important event
in the history of Mountain Lake, because they came in sufficient numbers to
control and dominate the subsequent development of the community” (Schultz,
41).
Most of the
Mennonites from Russia who came to the United States during the mass migration
of the 1870s settled in Kansas. Only
1800 went to Minnesota, and all those who went to that state settled in
Mountain Lake. Why did they choose that
town? How did they happen to end up there?
According to Ferdinand Schultz, it was all the work of William Seeger,
the Minnesota land agent:
“Sometime in July or August
[1873] thirty families in one of the newer Mennonite colonies located in the
Crimean Peninsula decided not to await the return of the deputies and so they
sold their farms, packed up their belongings and started the long journey to
America. They arrived in New York at the
very hour when the deputies were about to embark for their return journey to
Russia. The time available for
consultation was too short for the deputies to advise the immigrants about the
most desirable place for settlement, so they had to make independent
investigations. They found a temporary
abode among the American Mennonites at Elkhart, Indiana, while their leaders
toured the western states in search of a permanent home site.
“Seeger, who watched very closely all the developments in
the Mennonite immigration, learned of the arrival of the thirty-five families
and went to Elkhart with the hope that he might be able to induce them to
settle in Minnesota. He found that
practically all of them were planning to go to Kansas where two of them had
been induced to buy land, but he was able to persuade some of their leaders to
go with him on a tour of inspection through Minnesota. According to Seeger they explored the state
‘thoroughly and to their satisfaction.’
The time of this tour was about October 1, 1873. Seeger now felt quite confident that this
group of Mennonites would settle in Minnesota, but he was disappointed, for
shortly after the committee of investigation returned to Elkhart, some land
agents induced most of them to locate in the neighborhood of Yankton in Dakota
Territory. Seeger did not give up the
contest, for he went to Yankton and convinced some of them that Minnesota could
offer them a better home. Those who believed Seeger came to Minnesota with him
and settled at Mountain Lake in Cottonwood County” (38).
The choice of Mountain Lake by those thirteen
families from the Crimea proved decisive for both the little town and for my
family. The Gerhard Willems family was from the
Crimea, and Mennonites settled where there were other Mennonites. New settlers also actively recruited people
back home, writing letters to family and friends back in Russia about the new land
and its opportunities, urging them to come join them in the work of building a
new Mennonite home. And they were
successful. In 1874, nineteen more
families, 125 people, joined the thirteen families who arrived in 1873. In 1875, the year the Willems and Boldt
families arrived, another 590 Mennonites got off the train in Mountain Lake,
making a total of 795 Mennonites in a county whose total population for 1875
was counted at 2870. By 1880, when the
last of the Mennonites from Russia arrived, the Mennonite population totaled
1800 people, 295 families. The American
settlers must have felt more than a bit over-whelmed by these foreigners who
spoke little, if any English. Many of
the Americans decided to sell out and move on.
Number of
Mennonite arrivals by year:
Year Number of Families Approx. Number of Individuals
1873 13
80
1874 19 125
1875 97 590
1876 84 480
1877 33 210
1878 37 245
1879 11 65
1880 1 5
Total 295 1800
As Schultz notes, with new settlers
coming in such large groups “it was impossible for all of them to find
satisfactory land immediately and often the families had to find temporary
shelter while the men sought for land.
The railroad company met this situation by erecting near the station a
large wooden structure which was known as the ‘Immigrant House’. Newly arrived immigrants were allowed to use
this building free of charge until they could find a permanent abode in the
community” (57).
Arrival
“Sister Elisabeth Willems Zimmerman,
maiden name Boldt, was born December 8th in the year 1858 in
the village of Pastwa, Molotschna, Russia.
In the year 1875 she emigrated with her parents the Jakob Boldts to
America. Protected by God’s sheltering
hand, they arrived on August 18th of the same year in Mountain Lake,
Minnesota”
Zionsbote Obituary (5 Jan 1944)
The Willems
and Boldt families both arrived in Mountain Lake the summer of 1875, and both
families probably stayed in the Immigrant House. This may have been where Cornelius and
Elisabeth met. There was almost no
privacy in those temporary shelters; they were courting age, twenty and
seventeen—males and females that age have an in-built radar for spotting
eligible members of the opposite sex. The Boldt and Willems families may have
stayed in the Immigrant House quite a while.
According to Ferdinand Shultz, lodging there was free. They thus had a place to stay until they
found a place of their own—either buying land with some kind of house on it, or
acquiring bare land and putting up some kind of shelter to live in—perhaps a
dug-out sod house, or one of the A-frame thatched roof-over a dugout seen in
the sketches made of Mennonite communities and published in periodicals of that
times.
Settling
“The Mennonite immigrants were on the whole much
better off than the average foreign immigrant who came to America, but that
does not mean that none of them were very poor.
Most of them were reasonably well fixed financially before they left
Russia, but some were so poor even then that they had to be aided by their
people in Russia, by their fellow-immigrants, or by the Mennonite Board of
Guardians which the American Mennonites established for that purpose in
1874. All of those who had means
suffered losses because the forced sale of their property made it impossible
for them to realize its full value in terms of cash received. In this matter as well as in the exchange of
currency the earlier immigrants were fortunate, for they were usually able to
sell their possessions easily at a comparatively small loss, and the exchange
rates on the money market were very favorable, the Russian ruble being worth
about seventy-five cents in 1875. By
1878 it had become difficult to sell property for more than a small fraction of
its actual value …. The value of the
ruble declined rapidly after 1875 until it was worth only forty-five cents or
less by 1878” (Schultz,58).
Immigration
was just warming up in 1875 when the Boldt and Willems families arrived in
Mountain Lake. Their timing was fortunate. Emigration and financial aid structures were
in place; a good handful of Russian Mennonite families were already settled in
the new land; and the exchange rate for the ruble was good. Even if they had to sell their possessions in
Russia at a loss, but the loss would not have been as great as for those who migrated
later. The arrival of 97 families in the
summer of 1875 must have created an anxious scramble for land, but those early
families had a distinct advantage over the 166 families who came in the years
that followed
The Early Years
“It was quite difficult to
adjust to the new land and to the new situation. Despite the severe struggles, [Elisabeth]
stood faithfully at the side of her parents, and was helpful in making a home
in the midst of poverty.” Obituary for Elisabeth Boldt Willems
Zimmerman
The
obituary for Elisabeth Boldt speaks a bit about what it was like for her family
when they first arrived in North America—“difficult… severe struggles …
poverty.” It sounds like the Boldt
family may have been among the poorer Mennonites who migrated to North America.
The Boldt family was living in the
Molotchna where land had been scarce for decades. They very likely were among those who had
become landless. The Willems family,
however, may have been better off financially than the Boldts. They came to Mountain Lake from the
Crimea. They arrived on that peninsula just
as it opened for settlement. There is a
good chance they owned land.
Hardship and struggle were not just the lot of the
poor. Settling a new land is hard work,
but Gerhard Willems was fortunate had five sons in their twenties to help him. Jacob
Boldt, however, lacked that resource.
His oldest son was only 14, the next oldest, only 12. His oldest children were girls—Elisabeth, as
the oldest, would have carried a big responsibility, her work critically
important for her family’s survival.
The Locust Plague of 1873-1877
The Willems and Boldt families had the fortune, for good
or ill, to arrive in Mountain Lake in the middle of a four year locust plague
that descended on Minnesota in the summer of 1873, the summer the first Mennonites
arrived in town:
“Each season the mature grasshoppers laid
their eggs in the ground, and the following spring the young insects began to
eat where they hatched. It is said that
swarms of them, before their wings matured, invaded green fields and devoured
every growing blade of grass, grain and weed as they moved in, leaving the
black soil behind them bleak and bare in the scorching sun. The noise of their feeding was clearly
audible to anyone passing by. Sometimes
they were so numerous that they ate the roots out of the ground to satisfy
their voracious appetites. During the
middle and late summer, after their wings had matured, great swarms of them
darkened the sky and obscured the sun like mighty thunder clouds, and the sound
of the millions of wings was like the steady hum and roar of a storm
approaching from a distance. Their
coming down seemed like the falling of light hail or heavy raindrops. They covered everything in sight and found
their way into everything that could be entered. One day in July 1874, a great swarm arrived
at three o’clock in the afternoon and by five o’clock all the heads of the
ripening wheat were cut off and lying on the ground. At such time they stalled railroad trains by
causing the drive wheels of the locomotives to slip, and sand or gravel had to
be thrown on the rails to provide traction” (65-66).
The locusts suppressed the local
economy, keeping most of the farmers at subsistence level. Even though not every farm was hit every
season and government aid was available those hit hardest, when approached by
Mennonites with cash to buy them out, the American settlers were eager to
sell. Schultz notes that Mennonites did
not seem as afraid of the locusts as the Americans (57).
Blight, Rust, Weather
In 1877 the
locust swarms “disappeared as suddenly and mysteriously as they had come to the
community in 1873.” However, other
plagues soon followed .
Wheat fields were hit by rust and blight that caused as much damage as
the locusts. Crops were somewhat better
after 1880, but “weather conditions were usually far from ideal.” The growing seasons “were usually either too
wet or too dry,” and winters were severe:
“The
summers of 1880 and 1881 were very wet with an extraordinary winter between
them. The first snow fell in October,
1880, and winter did not break until about the middle of April, 1881. According to one pioneer there were
thirty-two snow storms during this time.
The snow was so deep in the country that they could not travel with
animals for many months, and the farmers had to walk to town with little
hand-sleds to get provisions which ran low everywhere because train service was
very irregular and sometimes impossible for several weeks at a time. In February, 1881, a passenger train was
stalled at the village for about two weeks. …. With the farmers the feed and
fuel problem became quite acute, for the snow drifts were at times so high that
they had to enter the barn through the door of the hayloft or through a hole in
the roof, and the haystacks were covered so completely that they could not find
them except by digging down at the places where they thought the hay was. One farmer’s house was so weighted down with
snow that one side of the roof collapsed and the family had to move in with the
neighbors” (66).
Elisabeth & Cornelius
“In the year 1879
[Elisabeth] was received into the church through the baptism of sprinkling by
Preacher Aron Wall. This did not satisfy
her heart, however. Through diligent
searching of the Word of God, she found the Lord Jesus had been baptized in the
River Jordan. After serious anxiety and
prayer, she found forgiveness in the blood of the Lamb and was with her first
husband C. Willems baptized on 5 May 1880 by Elder Heinrich Voth and
received as a member in the Mennonite Brethren Church at Mountain Lake.” EBWZ Obituary
Cornelius and Elisabeth were married March 24, 1881,
ten and half months after both were baptized by immersion and received into the
Mennonite Brethren Church. They had nine
children: four boys and five girls.
Their first child, a son named Cornelius after his father, was born May
1, 1882. My grandfather, Jacob C., was
born eighteen months later, August 8, 1883.
Two girls came next, then another two boys followed by a trio of little
girls. All the children except the last
were born in Mountain Lake. That is all
I know about their life during the years they lived in Mountain Lake. How they fared economically, I don’t know,
although Ferdinand Schultz says that conditions in the Mountain Lake area began
to improve soon after Cornelius and Elisabeth married:
“The
year of 1882 was a welcome break in the monotonous succession of poor crops,
for the crops were much better than usual.
One farmer raised enough flax that summer to pay all the debts he had
incurred in coming to Minnesota, including the money he owed on his 160-acre
farm which he had purchased five years before from an American at $12.5. an
acre. In succeeding years crops were
generally better than they had been before and by about 1890 or 1895 conditions
were becoming better to the extent that the people no longer wished that they
had remained in Russia, or that they had settled elsewhere in America, as some
of them did in the earlier days when the labor of their hands went for naught
year after year” (67).
“The decade
of the nineties marked a turning point in the economic development of the
community. Up to that time the
Mennonites struggled against great odds to maintain their existence and to
secure the necessities of life.
Sometimes the struggle seemed hopeless in the face of discouraging circumstances,
and many tears were shed by the immigrants who remembered the comforts of their
old home in Russia. Many times they were
fortunate and thankful to have the bare necessities of life when crops failed
or were destroyed by natural forces.
There was resentment against those individuals who had induced them to
come to Minnesota, and quite a few would have moved away if poverty had not
compelled them to stay. But most of
these things were forgotten in the nineties with the improvement of economic conditions
to the point where they need no longer be content with the bare necessities of
life and could enjoy some of the comforts of life.”
”During the
nineties the crops were better than they had been, consequently the farmers
were making enough money, in spite of depression prices for some time after
1893, to build new houses and barns, buy new machinery, and in other ways
improve their material circumstances” (67-68).
Leaving Mountain Lake
By the time
the nineteenth century ended the Mennonites had been in Mountain Lake for a
full generation, over twenty-five years.
It was no longer a frontier town.
Substantial wood houses replaced temporary shelters both in town and on
the farms. Trees in windbreaks had grown
tall; the community had begun to thrive.
Then, in the years between 1896 and 1902, in spite of all that progress,
some 200 Mennonite families picked up and left Mountain Lake headed for North
Dakota and Canada, taking with them “long train-loads of livestock, farm
equipment, and household goods” (68).
The Willems
family was part of this second migration.
In 1899, the old father, Gerhard Willems, left Mountain Lake to join his
daughter Elisabeth and her husband, John Quiring in the Rosthern area of
Saskatchewan, Canada. In 1900, Cornelius,
Elisabeth and their family joined them. Two of Gerhard’s other sons, Heinrich
and Abraham Willems, as well as Gerhard’s oldest daughter, Anna (Siemens), also
moved to Canada. One son, Johann
Willems, moved to Nebraska; one daughter, Margareta, moved to North
Dakota. Only one of Gerhard’s children
stayed in Mountain Lake, his son Bernhard, who died there in 1912. Gerhard’s son Peter, who died in 1877, and
his daughter Maria, who died in 1895, were buried there as well.
Members of the Boldt family also participated in the second
migration. The old father Jacob Boldt
died in 1896; and the old mother, Elisabeth, died in 1895. Both of them were buried in Mountain Lake. However, their oldest son, Jacob J. Boldt emigrated
with his wife and children to Saskatchewan in 1901, the year after his sister
Elisabeth, her husband Cornelius Willems and their children moved there. Brothers John, Henry and Cornelius as well as
sister Maria (Falk) at some point moved to California, though exactly when I
don’t know. Their brother Klass and
sister Kathleen (Ratzlaff), however, stayed in Mountain Lake, dying there in
1952 and 1957 respectively.
-----*-----
Sources
A History of the Settlement
of German Mennonites from Russia at Mountain Lake, Minnesota by
Ferdinand P. Schultz, Teaching Assistant in History, University of Minnesota.
Published by the author at University of Minnesota, Minneapolis, Minnesota,
copyright, 1938. (Fletcher Press, John Fletcher College, University Park, Iowa).
(Schultz’ book is not easy to
obtain. Very few libraries have it. Doing an inter-net search I found only one
copy—the price $210. But in the piece
that follows you will find extensive quotations taken directly from it.)
Schlabach, Theron F. Peace, Faith, Nation: Mennonites and Amish
in Nineteenth-Century America. “The
Mennonite Experience in America,” vol. 2.
Herald Press, 1988.
Hiebert, Clarence, ed. Brothers in Deed to Brothers in Need: A
Scrapbook about Mennonite Immigrants from Russia 1870-1885. Published for Clarence Hiebert by Faith &
Life Press, Newton, KS, 1974.
[1] Theron F. Schlabach.
Peace, Faith, Nation: Mennonites and Amish in Nineteenth-Century
America. “The Mennonite Experience
in America,” vol. 2. (Herald Press,
1988), p. 259..
