A Letter from Maggie Leonard

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John Thiesen

The Mennonite Library and Archives recently received a box of papers of Heinrich H. Epp (1857-1933), who was a minister in the Bethesda Mennonite Church in Henderson, Nebraska, for many decades and elder of the congregation 1910-1924. As I unpacked the box, a folded-up document caught my attention when I noticed the signature “Maggie Leonard, Mennonite Mission, Darlington, Ind. Terr.”

Margaret/Maggie Leonard, first person baptized at Darlington, Oklahoma, mission in 1888; this photo probably taken while she was attending school in Halstead, Kansas (Mennonite Library and Archives, Bethel College, North Newton, Kansas)

Maggie Leonard was the first person baptized in the mission work conducted by the General Conference Mennonite Church among Cheyenne and Arapaho at Darlington and Cantonment in what is today Oklahoma. She was baptized in 1888, but did not come from the two groups among whom the Mennonites were working. Her father Joseph Leonard was white (likely an Indian agency employee) and her mother was Caddo. (Maggie Leonard is listed as Caddo in the 1900 census). She also attended the Indian Industrial School at Halstead, Kansas, run by Christian Krehbiel, and also the Mennonite Seminary (teacher training school) at Halstead (during 1890-1892).

This is the text of the document:

What I learned on my trip to Kansas.

When we went to Kansas I was very glad. And I learned some things that I did not know before.

I learned how to milk a little but not quite good enough yet. And that we must clean the yard every Saturday or at any time when it is dirty around the house. And I learnt how to play some games that I did not know before, and how they dry apples, cherries, peaches etc. And I learned how they put they prepare <sic> pickles for Winter. I learned something about the railroad I did not know it could run so fast, and that so many people could be in it at the same time. And I even saw a great many cattle in the train. I saw how the people thrash grain. I think it is nice to look at the thrashing machine when it is working. And I know how the people spend their Sundays. They always go to church. I wonder how many of you likes to go to church. I think it is nice to go to church or to Sunday Schools. I learned how they can make milk into clabber in a short while by putting rennet in it and then from the clabber they make cheese. I learned how they prepare can fruits. And I know how they water the flowers with a pump and it has a long rubber pipe fastened to it. And the person who waters the flowers and the grass, takes it and waters whatever he wants to water. And I know now how the large cities look and the hotels & stores, and the large streets. And I know many more German people than I would if I stayed here. I saw how they work on their farms & orchards. I think it is nicer to live on farm than to live in a large city. Because there is so much noise in the large cities and it may happen sometime that the city might catch fire and then may be the inhabitants that live in the city might have to burn up. And I also saw some large bridges, some are for the wagons to go over, and some are for the train. When the train goes over the bridge, it makes very much noise. Now I am very glad that I went to Kansas. I would not know so much now if I did not go there.

Maggie Leonard.
Mennonite Mission.
Darlington Ind. Terr.

It is unclear if she is describing her time in the Halstead schools or whether she had made a trip to Kansas before that already.

Maggie Leonard did not retain formal ties to the Mennonites after her baptism. Sometime in the early 1890s she married someone named Garen and had a son. In 1898 she married a widower, John David Downing, and they had 7 more children. Downing was apparently a prominent rancher and Freemason in Grady County, Oklahoma. He is listed as Cherokee in the 1900 census. He died in 1923. (see https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/53563566/john-david-downing).

Margaret Downing did keep some personal contacts with Mennonites over the years. In March 1936, Missionary News and Notes, the publication of the Women’s Missionary Association of the General Conference Mennonite Church, included this note:

Last week Mrs. Goerz received a letter from Mrs. Margaret Downing–nee Maggie Leonard. Some of the older readers will remember that she, then 17 years old was the first Indian who accepted Christ and was baptized in our Mission at Darlington on June 3rd, 1888. Rev. H. R. Voth was the missionary stationed there then. Later Maggie came to Krehbieltown, at Halstead, Kansas and during that time she attended the Mennonite Seminary at Halstead. She has been married twice, is mother of eight children–three girls and five boys–all living. At present she is keeping house for her youngest son who is in the government service as clerk in the Jicarilla Indian Agency at Dulce, New Mexico.

Mrs. Goerz was Martha Krehbiel Goerz, Mrs. Rudolph A. Goerz, a daughter of Christian Krehbiel. She was an editor of the Missionary News and Notes. Martha Goerz may well have been acquainted with Maggie Leonard already from her Halstead school days.

Margaret Downing returned to her home territory towards the end of her life. Here’s the death notice from the Chickasha Daily Express, Aug. 14, 1966, p. 3. (see also https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/25408163/margaret-l-downing)

Funeral services were held Thursday in Arcadia for Mrs. Margaret Downing, 97, who died Aug. 2 in Oklahoma City. Mr. and Mrs. Downing were early ranchers north of Verden. Surviving children are: Mrs. Thelma Moring, Mrs. Pearl Dennero, Mrs. Rena Topatche, Ernest and John Downing, all of Oklahoma City; and Eden Downing, of California.

A major unanswered question is, how did Maggie Leonard’s early handwritten account of a visit to Kansas end up in the possession of Heinrich H. Epp in Henderson, Nebraska? He was not a member of the General Conference mission board; there is no indication he ever visited Darlington, nor that Maggie Leonard ever visited Henderson. The link between the two persons remains a mystery.

Notes from Mennonite/s Writing

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The Mennonite/s Writing conference was September 30 to October 2, 2022 at Goshen College in Goshen, Indiana. It was a meaningful space for me of cross-pollination, listening and learning. Here are a few highlights for folks who weren’t able to attend and might be interested. You can read the full schedule here.

Thursday 

On the afternoon of September 29 Julia Kasdorf and Steven Rubin led us in a four hour pre-conference workshop on documentary photography. They were inspired by the work of writers and photographers funded during the Works Progress Administration. As part of the workshop they had us interview and photograph people in and around downtown. The resulting slide deck with photos and quotes was on display during the conference as a way of introducing out of town conference participants to the community.

The opening plenary was with Julia Kasdorf, one of the most prominent promoters and creators of Mennonite literature in the US. She talked about Shale Play her latest book of poems (with photographs by Steven Rubin) that looks at the impact of fracking in her community in central Pennsylvania.

Friday

First thing on Friday morning I was part of a panel on technology and Mennonite writing organized by Hope Nisly. Melanie Springer Mock talked about the growing community of Mennonite content creators on TikTok. Adam Schrag looked at the Mennonite meme pool and the parallels with Martyrs Mirror and I talked about the parallels between the socially disruptive impact of pamphlets in the radical reformation and the use of social media by the Arab Spring and other mass movements using the internet to create space for dissent.

Mennonite writer Sofia Samatar spoke during the plenary on Friday morning. She read from her new book, The White Mosque, a memoir tracing the journey of an apocalyptic Mennonite community in Central Asia. I was excited to discover that she’s written a fantasy series that I hadn’t heard of before. In the Q&A I asked her about the subject of whiteness in her memoir (her father is Somalian and her mother is white Mennonite) and she described what it is like to always having to convince other Mennonite that she is Mennonite, but she also pointed out in a playful way that she values the random, a theme that would continue through the conference.

Saturday 

On Saturday morning, Ervin Beck surveyed the community of plain poetry among plain Anabaptists through careful study of their poetry publication which has been published regularly for over twenty years. Ervin encouraged those of us at the conference to take an approach of “benign neglect” this community. On the same panel, Christopher Dick summarized the Mennonite Socialist Vision of Jakob G. Ewert, who was confined to a bed for twenty-five years and Joel Horst Nofziger looked at how Mennonite understandings and tellings of our history influences power dynamics in our theology.

It was clear that while Literary Mennonite writers and critical review of Mennonite Literature have formed a key part of these gatherings (happening every few years for thirty-twoyears) there is also a growing space for other forms. One example was getting to hear my sister, Abigail Nafziger and her librarian colleague Matilda Yoder talk about their podcast “Just Plain Wrong” in a panel on humor. They described some of their work humorously reviewing Amish Romance as “reading these books so you don’t have to.” Also on their Saturday morning panel was Andrew Unger of “The Daily Bonnet” and Johnny Wideman of Theatre of the Beat. All the panelists kept us laughing and also thinking about the line between Popular and Literary work. In the Q&A time folklorists Magdalene Redekop reminded us of the tradition of the female Mennonite trickster. 

In the plenary on Saturday afternoon, Sheri Hostetler interviewed Rachel Yoder about her book (and upcoming movie) Nightbitch, about a mother who finds herself becoming a dog. Sheri told a story from Carl Jung’s The Red Book in which he talks about being haunted by Anabaptist ghosts. The ghosts are deeply frustrated because they died with the purest of belief but cannot find rest. Jung tells Ezechiel, the spokesperson for the group that he did not “live his animal” (see passage here). This theme of embodiment and learning to be outside of our heads was also a key theme in the week.

Later on Saturday afternoon there was a panel on Mennonite speculative fiction featuring Yoder, Samatar (see above) and Jessica Penner, author of Shaken in the Water, a magical realism novel that was also new to me. The panel talked about Mennonite and Anabaptist connections with wilderness.

On Saturday night we heard from Hildi Froese Tiessen, organizer of the first Mennonite/s Writing conference (in 1990) and she quoted Magdalene Redekop about how these Mennonite/s Writing gatherings are about play.

My friend John Kampen talked about he valued the space for play and speculation that he found at the conference in light of other spaces that can be more focused on correct ethics. That was a helpful framing for me to reflect on my own experience of Mennonite and social justice spaces, particularly around when a focus on the “right thing” can get in the way of being fully in our bodies.

Daniel Born was on a panel talking about Mennonite Noir as a genre and his novel Unpardonable Sins. This was a highlight for me because Dan co-authored the book with my friend and mentor Dale Suderman who died in January 2020.

I also got to listen to a lot of wonderful poetry from Jeff Gundy, Julia Baker, Jean Janzen, Julia Kasdorf and many others.

Sunday

On the closing panel Sunday afternoon, there was a fruitful dialogue between Robert Zacharias and Laura Hostetler about how many people in the room have a foot in multiple worlds. Laura (a scholar of cartography and empire) reminded us that margins are not just about marginalization. It can be useful to have a foot in multiple worlds. The margins in ecology are a very fruitful space: beaches and areas between forests and grasslands are examples.

I’m grateful to have spent three days playing on the margins with this community of writers, readers and critics. It’s a fruitful space.

A big thanks to Ann Hostetler, Daniel Shank Cruz and the entire planning committee for pulling this event together.

I’ll close with this story: in her keynote Rachel Yoder shared about how her car broke down the night on her way from her home to the conference.  She described how demoralized she was stuck just inside the Indiana border, still an hour and a half short of Goshen. She was sitting there when a minivan with conference organizer Ann Hostetler (and others rolled up). The van door and someone said: hop in, we are going to get ice cream! This story embodied something special about this gathering for me.

You can see photos from the event here.

Pandora Press in 2022

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Pandora Press has had an interesting history leading up to the present, and this year has seen significant changes in its leadership, vision, and publishing model. Founded in the 1990s by C. Arnold Snyder, an historian at Conrad Grebel University College, and continued by Christian Snyder in the 2010s culminating with the publication of Jo Snyder’s The Vegan Mennonite Kitchen, Pandora Press is now – as they say – under new management.

Following many fruitful conversations with Christian Snyder in 2021, as of January 2022 I am now the Director of Pandora Press. To say the very least, I am thrilled to have the opportunity to grow and transform its work over the coming years, and I have much to share with readers of Anabaptist Historians in what follows.

First, I should say something about what Pandora Press has been doing so far this year and last. Our 2021 featured title, Jo Snyder’s cookbook The Vegan Mennonite Kitchen, continues to make a strong contribution to the conversation on Mennonite culinary cultures through its delicious recipes and storied reflections (not to mention a review in Chatelaine).

The Vegan Mennonite Kitchen: Old Recipes for a Changing World, by Jo Snyder. 186 color pages. 2021. ISBN: 978-1-926599-71-7. www.veganmennonite.com

The past few months have seen the publication of two titles that were in-press in late 2021, the first of which was recently covered in an interview with Lucille Marr, published here on Anabaptist Historians. The second title adds to the Bridgefolk series that collects papers from Mennonite Catholic dialogues, with a cover designed by the talented Meghan Harder.

Menno’s Descendants in Quebec: The Mission Activity of Four Anabaptist Groups 1956 – 2021, by Richard Lougheed. 2021. 255 pp. ISBN: 9781926599724

Intercessory Prayer and the Communion of Saints: Mennonite and Catholic Perspectives, Edited by Darrin W. Snyder Belousek and Margaret R. Pfeil. 2022. 260 pp. ISBN: 978-1926599786

Two further titles that contribute to established themes in Pandora Press’s publication history have recently been released, the first of which is a joint effort with the Masthof Press (which distributes the book in the United States), and the second of which is a new edition of a standout title in our spiritual care series.

Making Wars Cease: A Survey of the MCC Peace Section, 1940–1990, by Urbane Peachey. 2022. 320 pages. ISBN: 978-1926599885

Spiritual Caregivers in the Hospital: Windows to Competent Practice. Third Edition, Edited by Leah D. Bueckert and Daniel S. Schipani. 2022. 348 pp. ISBN 979-888627349-6

Beyond these four books, Pandora Press is excited to announce the following new and forthcoming publications. I have recently had the pleasure of editing a booklet on theologies of the border and the European refugee crisis, authored by Hadje Cresencio Sadje, a prolific graduate student who is currently a visiting fellow at the Toronto Mennonite Theological Centre.

Theology at the Border: Community Peacemaker Teams and the Refugee Crisis in Europe, by Hadje Cresencio Sadje. 2022, 109 pp. ISBN: 978-1926599755

We are also very close to publishing a novel that stages a unique literary and philosophical encounter between Mennonite identity and Ancient Greek thought. Ronald Tiessen’s Menno in Athens narrates a pilgrimage that will speak to both the hearts and minds of its readers.

Menno in Athens: A Novel, by Ronald Tiessen. With original artwork by Lisa Rollo Kipp. 2022. 200 pp. ISBN: 978-1-926599-74-8

Beyond these titles, late 2022 will also see the publication of a book of weekly meditations on favourite hymns by Carla Klassen, an expansion of the recent Zeman Lectures by Gary Waite, a substantial study of Anabaptist oath refusal by Edmund Pries, and the first publication of Cornelius J. Dyck’s dissertation on the Dutch Anabaptist figure Hans de Ries, introduced by Mary Sprunger.

Spring 2022 Catalogue

Over the past six months I have been bringing older Pandora Press titles back into print, so if you have been looking for one of our books that has gone out of print it is likely that it is now available again. Our new catalogue includes a near-comprehensive list of our books, both past and present, so please see here for a PDF copy.

A New Logo for Pandora Press

To mark the major changes that have taken place over the past year in both its directorship and vision, and to signal its movement into new and exciting futures, I am excited to present the new Pandora Press logo, designed by Winnipeg illustrator and designer, and author of the highly-praised graphic novel Shelterbelts, Jonathan Dyck (https://www.jonathandyck.com).

The new logo is meant to be as evocative as the name of the press, calling to mind the tumult of Pandora’s box, which in Hesiod’s Theogony contains the foreboding promise of both positive and negative futures. In addition to the new logo, new books published in 2022 and onward will also include a larger and more detailed image that combines several themes connected to the press’s identity.

Connections

Although Pandora Press remains an independent publisher, informal friends of the press include the Toronto Mennonite Theological Centre (directed by Kyle Gingerich Hiebert), the Institute of Anabaptist Mennonite Studies at Conrad Grebel University College (Associate Director, David Neufeld), the Canadian Mennonite University Press (now run by Sue Sorensen), the Institute of Mennonite Studies at the Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary (led by Jamie Pitts and David Cramer), and Gelassenheit Publications (a new publishing company run by Jonathan Seiling).

Collegial relationships of mutual support are the only viable future available for Mennonite publishing and Mennonite higher education, and my aim is for Pandora Press to be a key part of that future by providing a home for scholars in and around the interdisciplinary field of Mennonite Studies to publish their work.

Submissions

Pandora Press invites submissions of both popular and scholarly manuscripts, including revisions of dissertations. Our established specializations are in Anabaptist history and Mennonite theology, but we are expanding in new interdisciplinary directions and we encourage submissions from scholars across the social sciences and humanities, as well as from literary writers in the ever-blooming discourse on Mennonite/s Writing.

For its academic titles, Pandora Press uses double-blind peer review and consultation with its newly formed editorial board in order to ensure a high standard of quality and scholarly rigour. Not all manuscripts will be accepted of course (for reasons of both quality and capacity), but Pandora Press is committed to helping early career scholars place their work with publishers that will help them succeed in their chosen fields, whether by referral to other editors or through constructive suggestions about form and content.

Translations

Pandora Press is currently seeking funding to pay for three major translations in the area of Anabaptist history, only one of which can be made public because contracts have yet to be signed. And it is an exciting project indeed!

In 1972 the Reformation History scholar Gottfried Seebaß submitted his lengthy habilitationsschrift, Müntzers Erbe: Werke, Leben und Theologie des Hans Hut. Although at some point a typescript of the work was informally circulated, it took 35 years for the book to be published in Germany. The book was eventually released by Gütersloher Verlagshaus in 2002 to great acclaim. In his review for the Mennonite Quarterly Review, Tom Scott writes that:

“It is astonishing that a scholarly work, whose importance was recognized when it first appeared as a Habilitationsschrift in 1972, should have taken thirty years to find its way into print. Unfortunately, Seebass does not explain the reasons for the delay, nor why it should now at last have been published. It is even more remarkable, as Seebass notes in a brief afterword, that so few of his findings about the life and work of Hans Hut have been revised, let alone overturned, by subsequent scholarship in the intervening years. Both facts testify to the meticulous research and secure command of the theological highways and byways of the Radical Reformation that Seebass displays…” (MQR 77.3 2003)

In late 2021 Pandora Press commissioned an English translation of the book from Amalie Enns, and we are now seeking financial support to pay for translation, copyediting, typesetting, and distribution. If you are interested in supporting the project please contact the press through this form.

A Note of Gratitude

Mennonite Studies, Mennonite Theology, and Anabaptist History are each in a state of flux. Major shifts are occurring for journals like the Mennonite Quarterly Review (as John D. Roth takes on the oversight of MennoMedia’s work on the 500th Anniversary of the start of Anabaptism), and exciting new work is being done by younger scholars in the field – many of whom are featured on this site. In providing the update above I also want to express my gratitude to those who support the work of graduate students and early career scholars in the field, and especially to those who continue to purchase books published by Pandora Press and the other publishers listed above.

With thanks for your past, present, and future support of scholarly publishing in Anabaptist and Mennonite Studies,

Maxwell Kennel
Director
Pandora Press

Menno’s descendants in Quebec: The Mission Activity of Four Anabaptist Groups, 1956-2021: a conversation with author Richard Lougheed

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Richard, first I’d like to congratulate you! The publication of Menno’s Descendants in Quebec has been a long time in the making!

Could you speak a bit about your background? You grew up in Quebec, in the home of a United Church of Canada minister and have worked as an ordained United Church minister, pastoring a joint Anglican and United Church parish in Northern Quebec. You have also trained at Anabaptist Mennonite Biblical Seminary and have been a member of both Mennonite Church Eastern Canada (Mennonite Church Canada) and are now with the Mennonite Brethren. In all of this you have told me that you are more comfortable worshiping on the French side. And your scholarly work has been primarily on French Protestants in Quebec. Can you talk about how your background brought you to the book?

It sounds a bit like I was a grasshopper, jumping all over the place. That works out well for church history, but not so much for a stable church member. I’ve always been interested in Quebec. I’ve lived here for most of my life, now. I met Robert Witmer, a Mennonite missionary formerly to France, when he came to Rouyn-Noranda, where I was serving as pastor in a joint ministry of the United Church of Canada and the Anglican Diocese of northern Quebec. He started a French Mennonite church in our building. We often spoke and when I asked him what he would do in various situations, I liked what he said. I left and went to Associated Mennonite Biblical Seminaries to see if I could fit into the Mennonites, and I was attracted at AMBS to Anabaptist values and mission. When we returned to Canada, my wife Margaret and I, with our four young children, settled in Montreal and attended a Mennonite Church Eastern Canada congregation, the Mennonite Fellowship of Montreal. I served as chair of Mennonites in Quebec for quite awhile. Eventually, I joined a Mennonite and Mennonite Brethren joint affiliation congregation, a church plant, then eventually came to the Mennonite Brethren.

Why the French side? My conversion to the Christian faith – although I was a preacher’s kid, I didn’t have faith. So evangelism has always been quite important to me, I was attending Laval University when I came to faith, so my first Bible readings and my first prayers and so on were in French so that has always had a special place for me. When I was looking for a subject for my PhD thesis in church history, French protestants in Quebec captured me as a field that was fascinating and not much work done so that’s how I ended up there.

Early in the process, do you remember me asking why you were focusing on French mission in Quebec rather than writing a more generic history of Mennonites in Quebec? Why did you choose to focus on mission?

I’m a church historian. I started off with a history first of the Mennonites, then of the Mennonite Brethren. I’ve been involved with two church plants, both closed, and I’ve been around all kinds of people doing mission as I taught at an evangelical college. I was aware of a lot of unsuccessful attempts at mission in Quebec, so when I was looking at the history it was mission, and particularly French mission which was very different than the English mission, even in Quebec. The history of Mennonites in Quebec was obvious, but my interest in mission in Quebec came from my own experience, and the need to find some answers for myself. I’m not a missiologist, which I say in the book, but history teaches some things about mission. It doesn’t give the solutions, but I think it teaches some things. Maybe more the problems than the solutions.

And why the four groups – Mennonite Brethren, Swiss Mennonites, Brethren in Christ and Church of God in Christ Mennonites – instead of focusing on just one?

I did an MCC assignment with Summerbridge. Since I was church historian and working at Mennonite Fellowship of Montreal, it was suggested that I work on history, so I worked, first of all, on the history of Mennonites, the beginning of the mission and interviewing people at Mennonite Fellowship of Montreal, the pioneers there. It was a video study, aiming for the fiftieth anniversary of Mennonites in Montreal. The membership lists showed that the majority were French. When I came to teach at L’École de Théologie Évangélique du Québec (L’ETEQ), there was a conference for the 100th anniversary of Mennonite Brethren worldwide. I did something preliminary on Quebec and an article out of that.

Meanwhile La Société d’histoire Mennonite du Québec (SHMQ) hired Zacharie Leclair to do some interviews in anticipation of their 50th anniversary. It was really the two fiftieth anniversaries of Mennonites and Mennonite Brethren that sparked the research. It was the idea of the historical society to do a history of the two, but there were also two others – the Brethren in Christ, whom I knew well, but also one whom I didn’t know, the Church of God in Christ Mennonites. The pastor of that church was agreeable to give information. A group of Mennonites and Mennonite Brethren went to visit, to find out more about it. They were so different than the others. It proved fruitful to compare – each of the four groups stresses aspects of Anabaptist identity without having everything. They have interesting differences that are positive, but each one has drawbacks – on mission and in Anabaptist values in general. They are the only four groups of Mennonites in Quebec – all claim to be Anabaptist.

I’m also curious about your comparison with France. What drew you to include France in the book? How does that comparison bolster your discussion?

That’s a question that one of the reviewers suggested. Why don’t you compare them with the Baptists and the Pentecostals in Quebec instead of with France? That would be interesting in some elements, but fundamentally, partly it was because of Robert Witmer, who was very involved in the community in France. The Mennonites in France also have a link with L’ETEQ. In terms of French, most of our theological and ethical materials in French come from France. So the Anabaptists here are informed by the ones on France. Secondly, I’ve been convinced for a while that in some ways you could say the Church Growth Movement is what I see as the main problem in mission in Quebec. The Baptists and the Pentecostals both go along with the ideas of church growth, whereas Mennonites in France don’t. I became convinced that Quebec is more like Europe than it’s like the rest of North America. The context of post-Christendom is what dominates particularly in western Europe and in Quebec. France has a lot to teach Quebec, in terms of mission.

This led me to organize a colloque on the subject, then secondly this book. I think subtly, but it clearly criticizes church growth replacing it with an Anabaptist mission in an emphasis on discipleship. The Mennonite Brethren just made that step recently. When I started the book, I’d say the Mennonite Brethren were dominated by a Church Growth approach. By the time I finished it, they had turned away from it. What I realized in France was that North American missionaries knew they were going to another culture, they were better trained in French, higher standards were expected than for those coming to Quebec. When It came to Quebec, they were dealing not only with those who weren’t Anabaptist, but were post Christian. In France, they got involved in teaching and they got involved in learning the context and they didn’t expect people to easily accept the Gospel whereas in Quebec it was very different because of the North American background. Church Growth assumes that if you talk about your soul needs saving that people will respond to that. In France, I think they quickly realized that they’re not going to respond to that; they had to go about it differently. I also looked to Stuart Murray in England, as someone who has faced post Christianity longer and hasn’t had the same American Church Growth influences that we have had in Quebec.

Your book has been released in English, but will shortly also be coming out in French. Why dual language? Are the two version identical, or will readers who are able to access both version learn different things?

I wrote it in English, but the historical society here in Quebec wanted it in the two languages. The two versions are reaching different audiences. They’re not identical, but virtually. The text of the English version was finished earlier and had less revision. With the French version I was able to reorganize it at some points, add a few things, particularly pictures including coloured pictures in the French version which are not in the English edition. My favourite’s the French version.

Who do you see as your primary audiences? Who are you hoping will read Menno’s Descendants?

My first thought was that there needed to be something in English for people outside of Quebec. There isn’t much in English. I’m also writing it for mission strategists. I want to try to change the thinking of people who organize mission to Quebec. I want to honour all the people who were involved and their descendants. That’s certainly part of the audience and people who are simply interested in Quebec in general. There are also people who are related to missionaries to Quebec. I’ve talked to some of those people. It can be used by all four groups, maybe less in the Brethren in Christ, because I’m not concentrating so much on them, but it’s important for the history of other three groups. In Quebec, there have been a lot of people who have been involved in all of these churches, but are no longer there. I’d like to give them a place too, maybe even good memories of what they used to be involved in. I do meet people who say I think I have a calling to be a missionary in Quebec. I’d like them to read it before they come to see it’s a little harder than you think. There are things to take into account to be prepared for it. It’s a very different culture.

You’ve chosen a striking title. I’m intrigued with the concept of descendants. It sounds sort of genealogical rather than theological. Can you tell us how you came up with this title? What it means to you?

The title in French is just Menno au Quebec (Menno in Quebec). Menno is only mentioned one time in the text. Anabaptist is what appears often in the text, more than Mennonite, since it incorporates all four groups. But they all look back to Menno – the early Anabaptists – but they each take different aspects of Menno or of the early Anabaptists. In terms of genealogy, it’s our ancestors, in my case and for the people in Quebec, they don’t have any Mennonite ancestors; it’s all theological descent, they don’t’ have parents or grandparents that were Anabaptists, so they look back to Menno. The theological descendants of Menno. Depending which group you’re a part of, you may not see traces of Menno in the other groups, but all look back to him.

You wrote the book while working at L’École de Théologie Évangélique du Québec and with support of MCC and La Société historique mennonite du Québec. How did these institutions support your work?

MCC had a tremendous impact on all of those aspects. I worked on Summerbridge with Mennonites through MCC; SHMQ is financed by MCC; the book through Pandora is financed by MCC. MCC has been very important all the way along. Working at L’ETEQ has given me time – as a librarian I have a lot of time plus great resources on MBs. The Centre d’etude anabaptist de Montreal which sponsors Mennonite books in Quebec was sponsored by MCC in its beginning. Plus I’ve got two historians with PhDs as consultants in the SHMQ. Financially, timewise and consultants along with MCC.

As historians, we believe that history is important, that unless we know where we’ve been, we can’t possibly know where we’re going. How do you anticipate your book supporting and furthering Mennonite mission in Quebec?

I wanted to preserve the history that can get lost – documents and people. It’s important to preserve the memories. None of the churches would have the resources to write their own histories. So it was a way of preserving the various histories. Zacharie Leclair says it will be a compulsory book for new pastors to the Mennonite Brethren, so for pastors, mission strategists, hopefully in the future with more information they’ll be able to avoid some problems. I don’t have solutions, but to identify some of the questions and some of the false steps that have been taken in the past and danger points. Hopefully those will be helpful. Another aspect is most French don’t know anything, or very little, about Anabaptists, so people in the churches are learning about Anabaptism. I also felt it was important to highlight missions that were in the same area as Mennonites and MBs started, one hundred years before. I thought that was important to show that these earlier missions faced some of the same obstacles. They persevered, although most disappeared. That can happen. But the Mennonites and MBs weren’t the first Protestant missionaries in the area. We can learn from the history that the church didn’t start yesterday. I also got into my book some things that others wouldn’t include. I also included a section on immigrant churches.

How can we access the book? The English version? The French version? Will it be available electronically? On kindle?

Regarding the English version, Pandora suggests ordering from Amazon. https://www.pandorapress.com/#/

The French version is being published by La Société d’histoire du protestantisme franco-québécois https://www.patrimoine-religieux.qc.ca/en/publications. It should be available by the middle of March At l’ETEQ (eteq.ca).

Electronic versions are still in conversation.

**Finally, a note of explanation regarding the photos. The first photo is the book’s cover; The second depicts Lucille Marr interviewing Richard Lougheed; third is a group of Quebec youth taken in the sixties; fourth is the first Mennonite baptismal candidates. The latter two photos appear in black and white in the English version of the book and in colour in the French version.

Mexican Mennonites: from Religious Group to Ethnic Group, a Perspective from Cultural Anthropology

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Dr. Patricia Islas Salinas

From their formation as an Anabaptist religious group in the sixteenth century during the Protestant Reformation, Mennonites have defended their beliefs and values through community sentiments and a religious identity that is based on their relationship with the Bible. The importance of faith and the notion of grace allowed them to survive the sociocultural atrocities they have suffered since their founding and that today distinguishes them from other groups.

In the 1870s, after experiencing a complicated diaspora, opportunities for growth as a society and Anabaptist community during one hundred years in Russia, and the imminence of the government imposition to end the privilegium, the more conservative Mennonites migrated to Canada and were afforded fifty years more of traditional community life. However, history repeated itself and the group was divided. Those who were not disposed to coalesce to the governmental provisions concerning their education and language decided to retreat, directing their gaze toward the Latin American continent.

The history of the Mennonites in Mexico began in 1922 when they decided to emigrate, driven by the conviction of preserving their group under the canons of their lifestyle and way of thinking, under an agreement with General Álvaro Obregón, president of Mexico, who granted a privilegium which allowed the purchase of the lands offered in the northwest of the state of Chihuahua, including the inhospitable Bustillos land. This series of events formed the San Antonio de los Arenales Agricultural Colony created for the settlers who were already there when the Mennonites arrived practically at the same time and the two groups began life in what is now known as Cuauhtémoc.

The original members of the Mennonite community in Cuauhtémoc, Chihuahua, Mexico, were undoubtedly the basis for the ethnic origin of this group, using religious worship first as a means of keeping the community together, and later, to remain isolated from the receiving community. Under the provision of preventing women and children from learning Spanish and living with the Mestizos, they managed to ensure that the majority preserved their traditional lifestyle.

A central pillar of Mennonite community is the family, where education in values ​​based on the Christocentric perspective is practiced. The primary means to achieve these values is enculturation. This phenomenon occurs in the family nucleus and is defined by the learning of traditions, customs and ways of thinking developed over time and inherited from parents to children so that children usually reflect domestic and cultural life in their practices, as indicated by Harris et al (1990) who argues, “enculturation is a partially conscious and partially unconscious learning experience through which the older generation encourages and forces the younger generation to adopt traditional ways of thinking and behaving” (4). Coupled with the sense of union and collaborative work to survive, some of the defining characteristics of group members are the values of being self-taught, self-managed, self-contained and the defense of their traditions and customs. 

The cultural study of groups concerning the anthropology of everyday life is highlighted by Agnes Heller who observes, “daily life is the set of activities that characterize the reproduction of particular men, which, in turn, create the possibility of social reproduction” (25). Following Heller’s maxim, “everyday life is the reflection of history,” it can be deduced that Mennonites have preserved their worldview from the collective memory of their traits such as clothing, gastronomy, labor according to gender roles, religious worship at different times of the day, Faspa and other aspects that are observed in the day-to-day life of family members.

After the settlers arrived, the Mexican Mennonite identity was born. They acquired the nationality of the country that had welcomed them by decree, thus forming a unique community in the world with very specific ethnic and cultural characteristics. Integration and cultural homogenization characterize an ethnic group, as well as persistence and the right to cultural difference in a context that, of course, is not their own and, therefore, requires a greater effort from the social actors, who forge their identity from family nuclei thus converting ethnicity into a social process from the perspective of the other, of the different. “There are those who define an ethnic group, not by one or another cultural and identity qualities, but because they are bearers of a culture and an identity that is maintained and reproduced in opposition to others that are dominant” (Pérez, M. 2007, 40).

In this sense, the Mexican Mennonites are an ethnic group due to the contemporary cultural specificity that comes from the original group, which sowed the worldview that gives them ethnic identity, a product of the interrelationships between generations through social, political and power practices among the members of the community since they have their own socio-political and economic system, as well as their cultural norms, community conflict resolution mechanisms and decisions based on their own authorities who work partially and conveniently with the Mestizo authorities.

Members of ethnic groups see themselves as culturally different from other social groups, and are perceived by others in the same way. There are various characteristics that can serve to distinguish some ethnic groups from others, but the most common are language, history or ancestry (real or imagined), religion and ways of dressing or adorning themselves (Giddens, 2000, p.281).

In the Cuauhtémoc region of Chihuahua, the Mennonites are perceived as one of the representative ethnic groups in the area and they are accepted and recognized as peaceful and hard-working people. However, at present, and despite the efforts of the first generations, enculturation no longer provides society with generations that pursue the same ideals and share the same thoughts and actions. Today, there is the phenomenon of the generational gap conceptualized by Margaret Mead that reflects on the evolution of the knowledge acquired under the daily experience of the new generations and the guidelines that the sociocultural context is marking them.

Individuals in a semi-insular society, such as that of the Mexican Mennonites, are immersed, on the one hand, in the daily life of their family and community and, on the other, in the dominant culture and the coexistence necessary to form part of the geographic context and socioeconomic, this generates that they are influenced by different factors such as learning the dominant language, the interrelation with people of different ethnic groups and thought, the use of new technologies, etc., which are interspersed with those learned in the family nucleus, and undoubtedly, these are stronger and the roots of their formation and cultural identity continue to be preserved.

In the Cuauhtémoc region there are two primary Mennonite colonies, Manitoba and Swift Current, the members of both communities coexist in a cordial and united way despite being divided into two main groups, the conservative (traditional) and the liberal (progressive), even when there is a diversity of churches, the guiding axis of all groups is religious Anabaptism. 

From the analysis of daily life, it is observed that the members of the Mennonite ethnic group have a strong sense of cultural identity and refer to it from a different perspective. On one hand, the conservatives are the ones who monitor the ancestral traditions and customs, decide to continue with the traditional educational system, and reject many aspects of modernity and intercultural relations, while those of the liberal branch have begun to use ethnicity as a strategy of continuity of the sense of belonging and community identity through practices and cultural and value meanings, such as the use of social networks to promote their culture, support for the Mennonite cultural center and museum, because even when they have been affected by modernity and globalization, they see themselves as different as they are seen by the dominant society.

Finally, within this cultural analysis, a noteworthy fact is the one that refers to the sociocultural openness of the liberal community with respect to mixed marriages where Mestizos are attracted and converted to the Anabaptist religion, some churches have become true intercultural spaces where the new generations share the education and values ​​of both ethnic groups creating new possibilities for community growth.

Factors like these have been creating differences within the community of Mexican Mennonites. Traditions are social constructions, and therefore, cultural exchange fosters a variation of existing and new traditions especially in the new generations.  

Additionally, tradition is a social construction that changes temporally, from one generation to another; and spatially, from one place to another. That is, tradition varies within each culture, over time and according to social groups; and between different cultures (Arévalo, J. 2010, Para. 8). 

In the Mennonite community of northwestern Chihuahua, the daily practice of rituals, attendance at Sunday service, solidarity between families, and the Anabaptist religious conviction that the sacred word and the commandments should guide their daily actions act as a mechanism of social cohesion between the members of both factions, however, the mere fact of being Mexican also generates a sense of belonging to the country where they were born.

References

Arevalo, J. (2010). Heritage as collective representation. The intangibility of cultural assets

Harris, M., Bordoy, V., Revuelta, F., & Velasco, HM (1990) Cultural Anthropology. Madrid: Publishing Alliance.

Heller, A. (1987). Sociology of Everyday Life (No. 301 H45Y).

Giddens, A. (2000). Ethnicity and race. Sociology, 277-315.

Collection Spotlight: The John Wallace Minnich diaries

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I was reshelving some boxes in the Eastern Mennonite University Archives when I noticed a small, nondescript box with a label that simply read, “John W. Minnich Diaries”. Inside I found three diminutive diaries, one for 1870, 1871, and 1872 and some photocopies of genealogical information, including the marriage certificate of J. Wallace Minnich and Elizabeth Coffman, who were wed on February 22, 1872. On the eve of their 150th wedding anniversary, I thought it would be nice to highlight this collection and explore the customs, culture, and daily rhythms of life in Rockingham County, Virginia. 

John W. Minnich was born March 30, 1839 and died August 4, 1917. His obituary recounts that during his life he was a “post master and merchant at Dale Enterprise”.1 He was not raised or baptized into the Mennonite church, but many of his close friends and associates were Mennonite and his first wife, Elizabeth Coffman, was the daughter of Bishop Samuel Coffman and Frances Weaver. Through this marriage he was brother-in-law to John S. Coffman and Lewis J. Heatwole.  His second wife was Lucinda Gaines.

Minnich helped to establish the post office at Dale Enterprise, and Minnich’s friend C.H. Brunk was the first postmaster.2 Through his diary entries we can see the work he put into establishing his store and the post office in the beginning of 1872.

His daily notes recount the weather, his personal and business accounts, travels around the county, and activities of daily life. He was a faithful journalist from January until the end of March, when I imagine that both his work and home life became too busy to retain the habit. 

Wednesday, January 10, 1872

“After breakfast I went to Harrisonburg to inquire how to proceed in order to establish a post office at “Dale Enterprise”. Saw P.M [Postmaster] Sullivan + contractor Wm A. Gay, and made the necessary arrangements with Mr. Gay, returned home about noon wrote out a petition and rode out for signers at night I had about 30.”

Thursday, January 11, 1872

“…went out to finish up my petition. I rode till noon and had 42 petitioners…I went to Harrisonburg and presented my petition to the P.M. + he endorsed it + sent it on to Hon J. T. Harris.”

Tuesday, February 6, 1872

“…I went with C. H. Brunk to town to arrange + send off his bond as Post Master, Dale Enterprise.”

Tuesday, February 13, 1872

“Foggy and misty this morning. I do not feel very well this morning the vaccine on my arm seems to be taking effect, and feel dull, with slight pains all through my system.”

Wednesday, February 14, 1872

“….I have not felt very well to day, but feel better than I did yesterday. My arm where I was vaccinated is slightly swollen and smartly inflamed.”

[Though he never states it, I believe this was the smallpox vaccine.]

Thursday, February 15, 1872

“After supper I rode down to Rev. Samuel Coffman’s, about 9 O.C. I went to old folks room and asked their consent the marriage of their daughter Elizabeth + myself to which they agreed. I spent the remainder of the evening with Miss Lizzie.” 

Wednesday, February 21, 1872

“After breakfast I cleaned out my stall, washed and dressed etc. About 10 O’Clock Mr. A. A. Hess arrived with his buggy, we took his horse out and put my “Jinnie” mare in and drove to Harrisonburg. Put my mare up at Paul’s Stable paid 25 cts. Bought at Swisher’s 1 fine shirt $2.75. [–] 1 lb brown sugar 12 cts. Vanentines [sic] 4 cents sent one to Miss Sarah Good, Broadway Va Postage stamps 12 cents Paid Dr. Williams, Gordon + Williams for medical services $4.00. Paid County Clerk for marriage license $1.50. On my return home I called at Toll Gate + received $14.00.”

Thursday, February 22, 1872

“Forenoon I shaved, washed, dressed etc. Afternoon about 2 O.C. I hitched “Jinnie” in the buggy + C.H. Brunk + myself drove down to Rev. Samuel Coffman’s. At 3 O.C. Miss Lizzie Coffman and I were married by Rev. Price. Attendants Jacob Coffman + Miss Bettie Brunk and Abram D. Weaver and Miss Annie Coffman–persons present except the family John Coffmans wife, Grandmother Weaver, C.H. Brunk, Mr. William Moyers and Miss Peggy [Arvers]. Paid Rev. Price $2.00. Dinner at 4 O.C. a few young folks came in after dark and amused themselves in play etc. Early this morning cloudy, cleared off about 8 O.C. and remained very bright and pleasant all except a little wind.” 

J.W. Minnich and Elizabeth Coffman’s wedding was mentioned in Barbara Coffman’s biography of her grandfather, John S. Coffman. In it, she imagines a conversation between John and his wife Bettie as they left the event:

“Well, that’s the second wedding in the family,” John said as he and Bettie were riding home from Father Coffman’s home that February evening. It was Lizzie’s wedding they had attended. There had been consternation at first when she insisted on marrying Wallace Minnich, a former quartermaster in the southern army, but everyone hoped for the best.

“Do you ‘spose they can really be happy together, not believing quite alike?” Bettie wondered.

“Oh, I reckon so,” drawled John. “They love each other, but it can’t be quite the same. We can pray that he’ll see things differently after a while. At least he’s not taking her away from the church.”

“He’s right gentlemanly, too,” added Bettie, “and a good talker. I like to listen to him.”

“You’re not trying to make me jealous, are you?” teased John.

“Land sakes, no,” replied Bettie with fervor, “There ain’t nobody half as good as my man.”

“But he’s a good businessman, And I reckon he’ll be able to provide for his family better than I can.”3

Monday, April 22, 1872

“Last night Lizzie and I slept in the store room. C.H. Brunk came down early this morning and brought breakfast for himself and me. We opened store this morning and commenced selling goods. Our first bill we sold to Jacob Coffman, Father and Mother [Coffman] came over and bought a bill of Queensware and other goods for Lizzie. Lizzie moved after dinner. She scoured the kitchen before dinner. Father hauled her furniture over.”

J.W. Minnich continued his work running the store and post office at Dale Enterprise for 45 years until his death in 1917. His wife Elizabeth had died twelve years prior,4 and their youngest son, Charles, died unexpectedly of tuberculosis the year after her.5 Minnich’s daughter, Lillian, ran the Dale Enterprise store and post office during his illness and after his death until her untimely passing in 1919.6 His middle son, Wade H. Minnich, also became a postal clerk. 

If you would like to learn more about this collection or the many other nineteenth-century diaries we have in our archives, come visit EMU’s Special Collections the next time you are in Harrisonburg. 

1. “Obituaries–Minnich.” Gospel Herald, September 20, 1917, 470.
2. John Walter Wayland. 1996. A history of Rockingham County Virginia. Harrisonburg, Va: C.J. Carrier Co., p. 208.
3. Barbara F Coffman. 1964. His name was John; the life story of an early Mennonite leader. Scottdale, Pa: Herald Press, p. 77.
4. “Obituaries–Minnich.” Gospel Herald, March 23, 1905, 95.
5. “Biedler Minnich’s Unexpected Death,” Daily News Record (Harrisonburg, VA), Nov. 3, 1906.
6. “MISS LILLIAN F MINNICH SUCCUMBS TO TUBERCULOSIS,” Daily News Record (Harrisonburg, VA), May 22, 1919.

Amish Mutual Aid during the Great Depression and what it implies for Modern Capitalism

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This post revisits the theme of Anabaptist economics that I addressed in my last most on the moral economy of the Hutterite community. I now turn to Amish mutual aid as a functional equivalent to public welfare and commercial insurance/credit during the Great Depression.

On December 16 in 1939, the Baltimore Afro-American, a prominent newspaper, published a brief note regarding the imminent foundation of an Amish settlement in southern Maryland. It noted the religious, “cult”-like character of this Anabaptist group and went on to comment that

The most interesting thing about them [the Amish], however, is the success they have had all through this depression in solving their economic problems. They have good homes, money in the banks, and have religiously spurned State or Federal relief. They have been able to eke out their comfortable livelihood by tilling the soil. Since this matter of getting farmers off relief and government help is one of the New Deal headaches, the Federal farm authorities might find it profitable to do some of their investigating on Amish farms. Maybe they will find some method more simple and less involved than plowing in and limitation of production. Maybe, too, they will run across a procedure that the average farmer can use.1

Baltimore African-American, Dec. 16, 1939.

At this time, the Great Depression had run its course for a decade, bringing economic havoc and social destitution to all capitalist societies. In the United States, African-Americans were particularly hit hard by the Depression’s onslaught on an already racist and highly unequal economy.2 The Afro-American’s readership thus in all likelihood was interested in the fate of the marginal Amish group. After all, while not being exposed to systemic racism, the Amish still represented an unusual model of economic organization that differed substantially from the overall farming population that had transitioned towards a mechanized, commercial and business-oriented agriculture in the preceding decades. What, if any, were these “procedures” that would have been applicable to “the average farmer”?

Before providing a tentative answer to this question, it is important to note a couple of things. First, there was no such thing as “the average farmer.” Rural communities faced different challenges depending on geographic location and other factors. The Depression, for example, had a different impact on owners, tenant-farmers and sharecroppers. Moreover, the systemic racism clearly favored white farmers, with consequences particularly for African-Americans in the southern states.

Second, the Amish were not as unscathed by the Great Depression as the Baltimore Afro-American made it seem. Contemporary sources, as well as later memoirs, provide ample evidence that the Amish were hit hard by depleted prices for agricultural goods, debt and environmental problems caused by dust storms and droughts. In 1971, the Amish periodical “Family Life” published two issues that sections on “Amish life in the Great Depression.”3 The stories by several Amishmen to some degree resemble the experience of hardship by non-Anabaptists as collected in the oral histories by Studs Terkel.4

Yet, these memoirs also show an underlying narrative that in fact for the Amish, the Depression was not as bad as it could have been. This voice is exemplified by one Jonathan Zook from Lancaster County who wrote that

[A]s far as the depression was concerned, we as a family never felt the hardship that many did. I had two boys just out of school and willing workers which I think was a great help to take us through the depression. And I never came to the place that I could not go to the bank and borrow all the money that we needed. [. . .] We were able to meet our interest and taxes [. . . ] and my good wife could always get enough together to feed the family of 8 at that time.5

Family Life, August 1971.

This overall narrative that “it could have been worse” is confirmed by the most prominent contemporary expert on the Amish, Walter Kollmorgen. His 1942 report on “Old Order Amish of Lancaster County, Pennsylvania” was part of the Rural Life Studies program sponsored by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bureau of Agricultural Economics. This study program was established in 1939 to conduct field research on six rural communities to assess “the quality of rural life” based on a number of factors, including social, economic, cultural and environmental factors.6 Kollmorgen’s analyses has been considered the most important piece of scholarship on the Amish of his time, and possible the starting point of Amish Studies as a scholarly discipline.7 His results showed that the Amish were easily the most stable of all communities in the Rural Life Study. Mirroring Jonathan Zook’s emic assessment, Kollmorgen contended that the Lancaster Amish largely evaded the most negative effects of the Great Depression

Not surprisingly, Kollmorgen’s study results mentioned the likely suspects of why the Amish weathered the economic turmoil relatively well. These included superior farming expertise such as soil conservation and a relatively high degree of self-sufficiency.

Kollmorgen addressed another factor throughout his report: communal mutual aid. This form of intra-Anabaptist support extended to loans on no or low interest, non-monetary aid, care, and general support for the needy. While Kollmorgen does not provide a quantitative assessment of his observation – for example, the sums involved in this communal process of sharing financial resources – his overarching assessment leads me to assume that mutual aid was perhaps was the most important ingredient to Amish resilience during the Great Depression. He considered it an informal “program of brotherly love and mutual aid”8 that rested on solid Anabaptist principles and continued to operate in a capitalist environment. In particular, Kollmorgen noted the financial impact of this “program” that provided a form of communal economic empowerment:

The practice of eschewing investments outside of the community and loaning available money at low interest rates to members of the church has served to give these people a rural credit system enjoyed by few farmers elsewhere. The significance of this practice cannot be overestimated. The salutary features of the program are obvious (1) no money is borrowed unless it is necessary (2) when money is borrowed the interest rate is low (3) there are no foreclosures, (4) bank failures and business failures do not disturb the community greatly, (5) investment sharks cannot plunder these people, and (6) interest earnings remain in the community.9

Walter M. Kollmorgen, Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community.

In this quote, Kollmorgen also indicated the comparative aspect in arguing that “few other farmers” had access to a similar form of mutual financial aid in a communal context. This comparative assessment becomes even clearer when comparing Kollmorgen’s study results to the other five cases in the Rural Life Study program, something that still lacks systematic assessment in the scholarly literature. Access to credit or non-monetary aid was considered a key problem across the board of the other case analysists. The case of Harmony, Georgia, with its large African-American population in particular highlighted the credit problem, something that the Baltimore Afro-American’s readership without doubt was quite familiar with.

USDA, National Agricultural Library.

What, if any, are insights to be drawn from Amish mutual aid during the Great Depression not just for “the average farmer” but in general for the common good in a capitalist economy? While Amish mutual aid is group-specific and unique in the sense that it is engrained in the Anabaptist notion of Koinonia, similar institutions in the form or mutual credit and mutual insurance are found in other contexts. In fact, research on and public debates about mutual aid have vastly increased in the recent decade or so.10 After the 2008 financial crisis, mutual aid has become a prominent theme in debates on how to alleviate social consequences of an economic downturn and to promote the common good.

In her contribution to The Nation periodical from December 2020 titled “Mutual aid can’t do it alone”,11 the political scientist Joanna Wuest criticizes this renewed focus on mutual aid. She pointedly refers to the gradual dismantling of public welfare in the United States under a neoliberal agenda so that “[o]ur country is coming to resemble a long-sought libertarian fantasy, with only atomized acts of compassion for those left out.” She calls for a much stronger role of the welfare state in providing comprehensive assistance to the needy.

From a European perspective, Wuest’s, demands for universal public welfare appear perfectly sound, reasonable and far from radical. After all, most European societies enjoy relatively universal public health insurance, unemployment insurance, retirement insurance, and more. Yet, it seems increasingly unlikely that the United States will soon – or ever – return to the path of public welfare expansion as tentatively established during the New Deal.

The case of Amish mutual aid during the Great Depression thus might hold some important lessons for promoting welfare on a communal level. This is not to say that an Amish institution should be taken as a fit-for-all model, let alone be idealized. In order to participate in Amish mutual aid during the 1930s, one had to subordinate oneself under the very strict regulations of the church, its religious tenets and underlying power structure. Such a rigid system of subordinance would not work for left-leaning communes, ethnic minorities or LGBTQ+ groups. At the same time, the Amish example shows how mutual aid provided an effective functional equivalent to public welfare and commercial credit at a time when the majority of Americans suffered from a lack of both.

1. Baltimore African-American, “Note on Amish Farmers,” Dec. 16, 1939, p. 9. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Retrieved June 12, 2016.

2. Rauchway provides an accessible first overview of this era in: Rauchway, Eric. The Great Depression & the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. Very short introductions 166. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

3. Amish Life in the Great Depression, Family Life periodical, July 1971 (pp. 18-21) and August 1971 (pp. 18-21). Historical Heritage Library collection, formerly Aylmer, Ontario.

4. Terkel, Studs, ed. Hard Times: An Oral History of the Great Depression. New York: New Press; Distributed by W.W. Norton, 2000.

5. Jonathan Zook, in: Family Life, August 1971, p. 21.

6. U.S. National Archives II, RG 83 Entry 34, American Farm Community Study.

7. Anderson, Cory. “Seventy-Five Years of Amish Studies, 1942 to 2017: A Critical Review of Scholarship Trends (With an Extensive Bibliography).” Journal of Amish and Plain Anabaptist Studies 5, no. 1 (2019): 1–65.

8. Walter M. Kollmorgen, Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community: The Old Order Amish of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Rural Life Studies 4 (Washington, D.C., 1942), 22

9. Kollmorgen, Culture of a Contemporary Rural Community, 49–51. See also pp. 52-57.

10. See for example: van Leeuwen, Marco H. D. Mutual Insurance 1550-2015: From Guild Welfare and Friendly Societies to Contemporary Micro-Insurers. Palgrave studies in the history of finance. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016.

11. Wuest, Joana. “Mutual Aid Can’t Do It Alone.” The Nation, December 16, 2020.

Mennonite Miss Chihuahua Part II: Entrepreneur, Public Servant, and Cultural Ambassador

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Katharine Renpenning’s journey to becoming “Mennonite Miss Chihuahua” is explored in Part I of this series: Mennonite Miss Chihuahua: Pageant Politics, Family Tragedy and the Crown.

After being crowned Miss Chihuahua and competing in the national Señorita Mexico pageant in 19871, Katharine Renpenning’s life was never the same. She moved to Chihuahua City to work for the government promoting tourism, which was one of her duties as Miss Chihuahua, and then went to Canada to study English. The director of the English school in Canada was so impressed with her English and entrepreneurial skills that he suggested that she offer English courses and travel experiences from Mexico. And so, in 1994, she started Keers2, a travel agency focused on English language immersions for children and adults ranging from summer camps and semesters abroad to IELTS and TOEFL preparation and professional work-study opportunities. Over the years, the agency began to offer educational travel opportunities outside the English-speaking world and expanded its language immersion program offerings to include French, Portuguese, German, Japanese and Mandarin. In 2018 in an interview with the Rebels, Exiles, and Bridge Builders Oral History Project, Katharine reflected on nearly twenty-four years of being in business:

We’re dedicated to managing study abroad programs, primarily we have courses for children: summer camps, or a high school course. We have contacts with schools, for example, Mennonite schools in Canada, government schools, private schools. We have contact with universities, sometimes I go visit the schools, the University of Winnipeg and Bartolomeos. I manage primarily Canada for people from Mexico. It’s very attractive because the English they speak there is more in-line with the media, more economical in terms of the exchange rate of the Canadian dollar. Now, we also manage, for example, my nephew is studying high school in Austria. We have children who go to study in Germany, school or just German or they go to France and study French combined with culture, with scents, with gastronomy. Chinese [also], right? We manage visas to go to China, as a visitor, as a student, or to Japan. And we [also] have Australia, which is also a country that offers an opportunity to study and work3.

In the oral history interview, Katharine mentioned that she has a showroom on the first floor of her business that is decorated like a traditional Mennonite home where she serves Faspa and hosts educational workshops about the Mennonite community. And that her business, travel and life in Chihuahua was all made possible by her pageant involvement.

[After the pageant] many things in life changed. . . . the family stopped thinking about my brother who had died and everything changed. I had a lot of opportunities, right? To grow. To know and to get to know who the Mennonites are, right? I’m identified as a Mennonite. The Mennonites say I’m not Mennonite and the Mexicans that I’m not Mexican, so, “What am I?” But, from that time onward I had the opportunity to grow a lot and also for the Mennonites be an ambassador of Mennonite culture. It’s been thirty years and it has been very beautiful. There are still many people who recognize me where I go. Now, for example, I’m very interested in people getting to know Mennonite culture. I like that the people who don’t know, who are outside, can get to know what it really is, right? And what God wants from us. That gives me the opportunity sometimes to talk with people about Mennonites and who they are.4

In the midst of running her successful business, Katharine was approached by staffers from Jose Reyes Baeza Terrazas’ governor’s campaign. Baeza Terrazas, who had previously served as a representative from Chihuahua in the National Congress (2003-2004) and as the mayor of Chihuahua City (1998-2001), wanted her to assist him in his campaign and in his government in exchange for the creation of a state resource office that was focused on the needs and development of Mennonite settlements across Chihuahua. Katharine remembers refusing his offer at first, but then accepting after Baeza Terrazas personally assured her that he would keep his word.5

I was invited to work for the government with the Reyes Baeza campaign. So, I said no that I couldn’t because those politicians always tell lies and never do what they say they are going to do and I was not going to make myself available to be doing something like that. So, they promised me that if the governor was going to offer something that he was going to follow through on it. And when he won, he said to me, ‘Well, ok . . . you are the person who can help me keep my word.’ So, the program was created and the program was to have a resource office between Mennonites and the government.6

The program, Chihuahua Vive Con Los Menonitas, ran from 2010-2016 under the leadership of the PRI party and was the first iteration of the government resource office that served as a liaison between the state of the Chihuahua and Mennonite communities across the state.

The program was created and the program is to have a resource office between Mennonites and the government. So, there were programs of every type. Education, for example, we did for education. ‘This is what has to be done in education, in rural development, in health, in transit.’ It was very beautiful, a little difficult. It was my first close contact with the community because all my contact had been more from afar. Many people had known that I had been the Miss Chihuahua that was Mennonite, right? And I felt sometimes that they saw me as a specimen of admiration and rejection, right? And people, yes, know me a little, but during the program period, well, we brought programs, for example, in rural development.

So, also, I was tasked, for example to be in education and to try to bring it. They said to me, the leaders of the colony asked me if they were going to prohibit churches like they did in Canada. And I told them, ‘No, that is not the case. What the government wants is that the schools actually teach students what is necessary for life. That children learn how to read, learn math, learn geography, really learn that it would be a place where children learn, if you do that the government won’t involve itself, but if children leave illiterate, we can’t permit that.’ So, out of principle, the Manitoba Colony started a new program that they called Mejoramiento en Educación [Improvement in Education] where they also gave classes in Spanish, classes in some other areas.

So, all those programs were brought down, culture, education, rural development, overall- was very gratifying because many people well, were very happy, thankful.7

The Mennonite Resource Office went through a few different iterations during its existence and had two different directors after Katharine Renpenning. The office was in flux every six years when there was a change in political leadership at the state level. These shifts were particularly notable when there was a change of ruling political party and when the local reigning political party was different from the political party at the state level. Despite some shifts in funding, preferred projects, or ideological approaches, the goal of the Mennonite Resource Office maintained the same goal of resourcing and developing Mennonite communities with the permission, trust, and support of Mennonite community leaders

The subsequent directors of the Mennonite Resource Office, Angelica Chavez Licon8 and Claudia Perez Howlet9, were interviewed for the Rebels, Exiles, and Bridge Builders Oral History Project and the full audio and clips are available on the Darp Stories YouTube channel10. A Mennonite employee who discussed their role as a program promoter and language service provider was also interviewed for the project on the condition that they remain anonymous. Their interview summary is available by request from the Mennonite Heritage Archives.11

Claudia Perez Howlet, the last director of the resource office before it closed its physical location along the Commercial Corridor in the Manitoba Colony located about 10 kilometers north of Cuauhtémoc in 2019, described the resources, services, and development projects that the office sponsored:

In this office we serve as a resource. We have a translator, for example, who translates for large events all the way down to the smallest things, who is right now accompanying a lady, an older woman from the nursing home to her appointment with Social Security. So that the doctor understands what is being said during these appointments through this interpretation. Translation of diagnoses, of whatever they want. Whatever information you want to reach the Mennonites, we translate. We have translated many transit campaigns, many civil protection campaigns. For the winter, for heaters. We translate everything we are asked to translate. We have gotten a lot of information that we edit, translate, and print in German. We don’t have much of a budget, but sometimes we have printed that information. Also, on the topic of health, are the fairs. Health fairs in many of the most remote Campos, like I told you, we went to El Sabinal. We go to traditional schools, and the more open ones allow us to vaccinate. Well, it is completely voluntary, but every time more children come with their shot records, with parental approval to receive a vaccine. In the incorporated [SEP, Secretary of Public Education] schools, we also have many programs in which we go with the health services. Last year we went to all the schools incorporated through the Álvaro Obregón school.

We went to their schools, along with the health sector. We, the entire government, try to see ourselves as a team. And everything we have at our disposal; we pool in order to serve. For example, we worry about everything here at the municipal level and at the state level concerning the economy. The programs, lending, from the municipalities to farmers and day-laborers that work for the Mennonites, because many times they don’t know this is available from us.  We work together as a team with the Centro de Salud, especially in giving health fairs in the Campos.  We have general practitioners, pediatricians, OBGYNs. They do mammograms, cervical cancer screenings, vaccinations, screenings for chronic diseases such as hypertension and diabetes. We bring in specialists to give talks. The health sector goes to schools to present on “The Healthy Plate” and the importance of physical activity, they check height and weight, the give vaccines, and even videos on how to properly brush teeth and various other topics, and they discuss symptoms of serious illnesses that they could be on guard for. Everything the schools allow us to present, because not all the information is allowed. We have to show the directors what we are planning to present to the children, and they tell us “Yes,” or “No.”  Because Mestiza education is a bit more open about many topics, right. And Mennonite education is more conservative in that aspect, so we share what we are allowed to. For those interested in education, we have an agreement with ICHEA, (Instituto Chihuahuense de Educación para los Adultos, Chihuahuan Institute for Adult Education) and we invite and help them. We have them at the fairs, so that the Mennonites who studied at traditional schools have access to education. Because the traditional schools only go to fifth grade, and only include German, Bible, and basic math. And then they go work on the farm. But many want more education, thus ICHEA. There aren’t schools or many resources, but through ICHEA they can have the books at home to study, and write an exam for our accreditation.

And then, in the area of economics, we coordinate events. We coordinate events with businesses, for example, such as with the Expo Menonita, every other year in September. We help with the organization, distribution, getting funders to make sure in happens, as a way of boosting the economy. For farmers.

As to the cultural aspect of our work, well, we foster individual and collective participation, and we organize meetings with youth to organize activities, because many times there aren’t activities here on the Corredor. So, we have tried to implement them with various youth. What we can do within the scope of our organization, and if we can’t, well, we can look for those who can. Those with more resources. This is a project we have been pushing, and the way we broke into that last year was with a very cool event we organized in December, which was the Parade of Lights. It was with a group of youth. It was initiated by them, and it was a success. We were very happy with it. So, this year we would like to continue, maybe with baseball tournaments, or whatever they suggest. They are just hanging out in the streets, so, we need to have more healthy activities. They are far from the city. If they want to go to the movie theater or something, not everyone can, they have no way of going. They also don’t have many things, so we are worried about that. And in the cultural aspect, we also look for events, and help with organizing and support, different competitions. We encourage participation in La Festival de las Tres Culturas (The Festival of the Three Cultures) so that the Mennonite culture is also represented. And well, basically, social development includes every area, but we principally focus on what is most necessary.

All of our activities are broadcasted Abram Siemens on the radio. He has helped us a lot. In broadcasting and all that. Everything we have. He is always asking, “What can I help with? And in this? What is happening this week?” So, he does interviews and is constantly spreading the word. Thank God, we have a good relationship with colony leadership. We are in constant communication. Thanks to communication media. Now, WhatsApp is a marvelous tool. I have a WhatsApp group with about 200 colony leaders. That’s how everybody knows to go to an event. Everything we have available, or that we do, or who we are, we are here to meet their needs. And it is through them. And they have opened many doors for us, and distribute many things for us.

We have to respect the customs of everyone. They respect ours, and we respect theirs that are completely- It seems to me that we live in the same place. Different cultures, but I think that we learned to live together very well with that.12

The physical location of the Mennonite Resource Office closed at the beginning of 2019 after nearly ten years of operation; however, the Chihuahuan government maintains that they will continue the Mennonite Service Program from the state capital under the Department of Social Development13

Katharine Renpenning, the “Mennonite Miss Chihuahua,” without whom the Mennonite Resource Office would not have been founded, resides quietly in Chihuahua City and continues to run Keers, which recently celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary. She marveled at the path that her life had taken her and emphasized the responsibility she felt to continue to bring people from different communities together.

I think we are bridge builders. Not just cultural, [but] we are generational bridge builders. We are economic bridge builders. We are bridge builders in an ecological aspect in respect for love for God, love for nature . . . bridge building is very important.14

1. Darp Stories, “Señorita México 1987 con Katherine Renpenning (Nuestra Belleza Mexicana Excerpt)” YouTube video, 6 minutes, November 16, 2021, https://youtu.be/hgoCu3rvHo0

2. Keers, “Keers 25 Años” https://www.keersmx.com/index.html

3. Katharine Renpenning, interview by Abigail Carl-Klassen, March 23, 2018, Interview 34, transcript, Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Campos Menonitas of Chihuahua Oral History Project, Mennonite Heritage Archives, Winnipeg, MB.  

4. Ibid.

5. Jose Reyes Baeza Terrazas. Wikipedia en Español, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jos%C3%A9_Reyes_Baeza_Terrazas

6. Katharine Renpenning, interview by Abigail Carl-Klassen, March 23, 2018, Interview 34, transcript, Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Campos Menonitas of Chihuahua Oral History Project, Mennonite Heritage Archives, Winnipeg, MB.

7. Ibid.

8. Angelica Chavez Licon, interview by Abigail Carl-Klassen, March 23, 2018, Interview 35, transcript, Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Campos Menonitas of Chihuahua Oral History Project, Mennonite Heritage Archives, Winnipeg, MB.

9. Claudia Yazel Perez Howlet, interview by Abigail Carl-Klassen, February 20, 2018, Interview 19, transcript, Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Campos Menonitas of Chihuahua Oral History Project, Mennonite Heritage Archives, Winnipeg, MB.

10. Darp Stories, “Trailer: Rebels, Exiles, and Bridge Builders” YouTube video, 4 minutes, May 1, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCGy9sd_xNDQTwffveCOhvhg/featured

11. Name Withheld by Request, interview by Abigail Carl-Klassen, March 8, 2018, Interview 27, transcript, Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Campos Menonitas of Chihuahua Oral History Project, Mennonite Heritage Archives, Winnipeg, MB.

12. Claudia Yazel Perez Howlet, interview by Abigail Carl-Klassen, February 20, 2018, Interview 19, transcript, Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Campos Menonitas of Chihuahua Oral History Project, Mennonite Heritage Archives, Winnipeg, MB.

13. Maribel Alba, “Cierra oficina de atención a Menonitas,” El Heraldo de Chihuahua, 31 Jan 2019, https://www.pressreader.com/mexico/el-heraldo-de-chihuahua/20190131/282995401101925

14. Katharine Renpenning, interview by Abigail Carl-Klassen, March 23, 2018, Interview 34, transcript, Rebels, Exiles and Bridge Builders: Cross-Cultural Encounters in the Campos Menonitas of Chihuahua Oral History Project, Mennonite Heritage Archives, Winnipeg, MB.

Southern Anabaptist Colleges and Civil War Memory: Eastern Mennonite

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Regina Wenger

This is my second post exploring the relationship between southern Anabaptist colleges and Civil War memory. In my first post, I summarized the experiences of Anabaptists during the Civil War before discussing how Bridgewater College—founded in 1880—recalled the Civil War. I suggest reviewing that piece before reading the one that follows. Below I examine Civil War memory at Eastern Mennonite and offer some conclusions that compare it to how memory operated at Bridgewater.

As an adolescent, Peter S. Hartman witnessed the tribulations the Civil War unleashed on the Shenandoah Valley. Years later, the Mennonite recalled Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Valley Campaign and the Battles of Good’s Farm (Harrisonburg), Cross Keys, Port Republic, and New Market. Though, he stated, none of those conflicts compared to General Philip Sheridan’s “never-to-be-forgotten raid” in 1864:

We just began to realize what war was when Sheridan made his raid. They came [to Harrisonburg] Sunday noon . . . . There was no preaching anywhere that Sunday, so I went over to visit one of our neighbors right at Weaver’s Church. We could see from there Sheridan’s army coming up the [Valley] Pike and spreading all over the country, and I concluded I would better go home. When I got home the whole farm was overrun with soldiers shooting the stock…. Everything was taken, horses, hogs, sheep, except some chickens and four milk cows.1

Sixty-four years after Sheridan’s Union troops charred the Shenandoah Valley, Hartman told the tale of his experiences to students at Eastern Mennonite School.2 Founded in 1917, the Mennonite educational institution did not endure the war, but through the stories of Hartman and others, there developed a collective memory of the Civil War.

Early in the twentieth century, a group of Virginia Mennonite leaders wished to create a school for Mennonites in the eastern part of the United States. There already existed schools such Goshen College, which served Mennonites in the Midwest; however, no such institution existed for the 75 percent of Mennonites in the East.3 Bishops Lewis James (L.J.) Heatwole and George R. Brunk, as well as other leaders, advocated for higher education opportunities for Mennonites that simultaneously built up the church.4 Evan Knappenberger characterizes most of these men as “religious moderates willing to push the church in new directions while still remain­ing committed to the ideals of nonresistance and plain dress.”5 The school they envisioned shared those goals. In 1912, George R. Brunk developed a plan for a school located in Warwick, Virginia, and asked fellow church leaders for help. However, in mid-1913, Brunk proposed moving the institution to the Hayfield mansion near Alexandria, Virginia. The Alexandria Mennonite Institute and later the Hayfield Bible School floundered amongst personality, ecclesial, and financial conflicts.6 Through the efforts of Bishop L.J. Heatwole and Peter S. Hartman, Virginia Mennonites acquired land in Assembly Park, north of Harrisonburg, Virginia. From that site Eastern Mennonite emerged.

Eastern Mennonite—officially chartered in 1917—ran as a Bible school independent of broader Mennonite Church control until 1923. These Virginia Mennonites, including Bishop Heatwole, selected John B. (J.B.) Smith of Ohio as president (principal) of the school and developed a Bible school curriculum that operated on four tracks: academy, Bible, preparatory, and correspondence.7 However, within a few years, Smith ran afoul of the Board and departed back to Ohio. They then appointed noted evangelist and Virginian Amos Daniel (A.D.) Wenger to the presidency. He served from 1922 until his death in 1935, and it is during his administration that Civil War remembrances at Eastern Mennonite first come into view.

The activities of student literary societies and the periodical the Eastern Mennonite School Journal show an institution that idealized the South, and while condemning slavery, embraced derogatory stereotypes about African Americans. In April 1927, John D. Burkholder wrote a piece called “Family Life: As Seen by Jim Owen, Indentured Servant.” It detailed how an English indentured servant fell in love with southern culture and told of interactions with “mammies” and “darkies.” The piece concluded by saying, “As [he and his master] drove up the shady, inviting drive to the old mansion, Jim felt that he had indeed reached the Utopia of his dreams.”8 Though Eastern Mennonite included students from elsewhere in the United States, the early years of the Journal contains rhapsodic accounts of the “Sunny Southland,” the endearing peculiarity of African Americans, and the high quality of postbellum southern literature.9 In 1928 and 1929, respectively, the Philomathian and Smithsonian literary societies held programs on “The Negro” and “Southern Literature” that both featured “Negro spirituals” as musical selections.10 Through featuring an idealistic portrait of the South, southern culture, and African Americans, the Journal showed sympathy for the South and minimized the affect of slavery on African Americans. In addition, student Grace Showalter observed, that “Southern conventionality,” formed an important aspect of Virginia Mennonites’ spirituality.11 However, more important than the Journal’s contents was the role played by Peter S. Hartman on Civil War memory at Eastern Mennonite.

Beginning at least in 1920, Hartman delivered an annual lecture featuring his Civil War memories to Eastern Mennonite students and faculty.12 As noted in the opening story, Hartman was a young man when the war started in 1861. He later served as a lay leader in Virginia Mennonite Conference, was instrumental in purchasing the former plantation land on which the school was built, and acted as an informal development officer for Eastern Mennonite.13 Each of the written versions of his oral account followed the same narrative structure: (1) reiteration of the Mennonite Church’s nonresistance and stance against slavery, (2) the foreshadowing of the Civil War in John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry and Lincoln’s election to the presidency, (3) the imprisonment of Anabaptists in Richmond for nonresistance, (4) the passage of conscription laws accounting for members of Anabaptist churches, (5) war’s material hardships, (6) the local battles of Stonewall Jackson’s 1862 Shenandoah Valley campaign, as well as the Burning, (7) Hartman’s interactions with General Sheridan and journey North with his Union caravan, (8) work experience in the North, and finally (9) viewing Lincoln’s body in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, before returning home to a decimated Virginia.14 He summarized the primary theme in his lecture’s concluding line: “All this time the Church stood for non-resistance.”15 In addition to his annual lecture, Hartman also shared with students his recollections of Reconstruction.16 Other narrations of the Civil War by Virginia Mennonites Emmanuel Suter and Bishop L.J. Heatwole echoed Hartman’s emphasis on hardship and nonresistance.17 Students at Eastern Mennonite thus heard about the Civil War as a conflict Mennonites were in, but not a part of.

Historical memory of the Civil War at Eastern Mennonite consisted of a singular stream of nonresistance, muddied by a romanticized view of the pastoral South and its culture. Explicit valorization of the Confederacy does not appear in any Eastern Mennonite sources. Rather, despite their occasional harshness and destruction, the Union is discussed more frequently and favorably in Eastern Mennonite memories of the war. Though a “savage looking man,” Hartman described how General Sheridan ensured his safe passage North.18 The Mennonite Church’s distain for slavery, even while simultaneously resisting and engaging with Confederate Virginia, also comes through in Hartman’s telling. As previously noted, Anabaptist participation in the Confederate economy made it difficult for them to receive financial compensation for the destruction of the war, despite sympathies for the Union. Additionally, American Mennonite identity as a nonresistant people partially lies in the centrality of suffering for the faith, as told in the stories of sixteenth-century European Anabaptist martyrs recorded in Thieleman J. van Braght’s Martyrs Mirror. Though born two years after the Civil War, Eastern Mennonite President A.D. Wenger found the text instrumental to his conversion.19 As Julia Spicher Kasdorf contends, “the publication history of Martyrs Mirror doesn’t precisely coincide with the nation’s wars, and yet American Mennonites tend to rally around the big book whenever the rest of the nation rallies around the flag.”20 Primed with tales from the Martyrs Mirror, Eastern Mennonite students likely heard a similar message of suffering and nonresistance in Peter Hartman’s Civil War recollections that he regularly delivered after the hardships of World War I. While Eastern Mennonite’s southern context shaped the imagination of many of its students and administrators, the dominant narrative surrounding Civil War recollections remained nonresistance amidst suffering.

Conclusions

Mennonites, Brethren, and their respective educational institutions possessed common religious memories of the Civil War grounded in the nonresistant theology of Anabaptism, but diverged by degree of emphasis. Ritual sites of memory appeared at both Bridgewater and Eastern Mennonite. Literary societies perpetuated nostalgic narratives about the South and African Americans. John Wayland and Bridgewater recalled the war through annually commemorating Lee’s birthday, while Eastern Mennonite’s Hartman lecture narrated another tale of heroic suffering for a cause. The nonresistant perspective also allowed John Wayland to describe Elder John Kline as a faithful Christian martyr. Likewise, Peter Hartman described himself and the Mennonite Church as the innocent suffering amidst the tribulations of the Civil War. Both Bridgewater and Eastern Mennonite also shared a history as institutions started by white southerners. As James Lehman and Steve Nolt observe, Anabaptists, like many of their neighbors in the reconstructing South, chose to value the repair of national and local relationships over advocating for the rights of African Americans. Thus their historical memory coincides with the reconcilationist narrative that historian David Blight chronicled in Race and Reunion.21

While both institutions held nonresistance as a wartime memory, only Bridgewater College explicitly endorsed the religion of the Lost Cause. The Lost Cause existed with nonresistance for the Brethren school as intermingling religious memories.22 On the other hand, Eastern Mennonite’s religious remembrances favored the Union, though they appear to not have competed with its nonresistant memories but, rather, reinforced them. Mennonites narrated themselves as distinct from their southern neighbors in their opposition to slavery and the Confederacy, as well as their pacifism. However, the presence of southern influence at both institutions raises the question as to what extent its culture served as a defining characteristic of the schools. Perhaps nonresistance defined demographics and marketing rather the schools’ cultures.23 After Eastern Mennonite graduated its first African American student in 1954, a local Mennonite schoolteacher explained reluctance around desegregation stating, “A bit of the Southern attitude rubs off on us, perhaps as a result of our public school experience. One tends to feel sympathetic to one’s state and its part in the Civil War.”24 Thus a fuller understanding of Civil War memory at southern Anabaptist colleges requires attention to the presence, in varying degrees, of the religious recollections of the Lost Cause and nonresistance.

1. Peter S. Hartman, “Civil War Reminiscences,” The Eastern Mennonite School Journal, February 1928, 17.

2. Originally started as Eastern Mennonite School, it later became Eastern Mennonite College, and is today known as Eastern Mennonite University. In this paper, the school will be referred to as Eastern Mennonite.

3. Donald B. Kraybill, Eastern Mennonite University: A Century of Countercultural Education (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 24. The relationship between the foundings of Goshen College and Eastern Mennonite remain a matter of historiographical debate. The longstanding narrative reproduced in Eastern Mennonite’s institutional histories describe the school as a conservative reaction to Goshen which resulted in hostility between the schools for decades. Kraybill, Eastern Mennonite University: A Century of Countercultural Education; Hubert R. Pellman, Eastern Mennonite College, 1917-1967: A History (Harrisonburg, VA: Eastern Mennonite College, 1967); Nathan Emerson Yoder, “Mennonite Fundamentalism: Shaping an Identity for an American Context” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Notre Dame, 1999). Recently, Evan Knappenberger pushed back against that interpretation with a compelling argument that Eastern Mennonite shared an educational vision with Goshen and was started not as “an ideological alternative to Goshen but a geographical extension of it.” Evan K. Knappenberger, “To Shake The Whole World From Error’s Chain: An Alternative History Of The Founding Of Eastern Mennonite” (M.A. Thesis, Eastern Mennonite Seminary, 2016), 68, emphasis original.

4. Knappenberger, 88-98.

5. Evan K. Knappenberger, “New Take on an Old War: Valley Mennonites and the Lingering Consequences of the Civil War,” Shenandoah Mennonite Historian, Summer 2016, 16.

6. For a more detailed treatment of the earlier iterations of Eastern Mennonite see: Kraybill, Chapters 1 & 2, Knappenberger, “To Shake The Whole World,” 88-98.

7. Kraybill, 55-57.

8. John D. Burkholder, “Family Life: As Seen by Jim Owen, Indentured Servant,” The Eastern Mennonite School Journal, April 1927, 3-6. It’s unclear whether Burkholder created this piece as a work of fiction or recorded the oral account of Mr. Owen.

9. Mary M. Wenger, “Vacation on Vineland Farm,” The Eastern Mennonite School Journal, January 1923, 2-4; A.D Wenger, Jr., “Southern Literature,” April 1923, The Eastern Mennonite School Journal, 2-3; “Personal News Notes,” The Eastern Mennonite School Journal, April 1926, 19.

10. “Philomathean,” The Eastern Mennonite School Journal, June 1928, 17; “With Our Literaries: Smithsonian,” The Eastern Mennonite School Journal, July 1929, 21.

11. Kraybill, 112. Showalter went on to serve as director of Eastern Mennonite’s Historical Library from 1955-1990.

12. “Editorials,” The Eastern Mennonite School Journal, February 1928, 1; Harry A. Brunk, “The Gist of the Short Term Lectures,” The Eastern Mennonite School Journal, March 1930, 5-6. Hartman likely delivered the lecture regularly until his death in 1934.

13. Brunk, Harry A., Life of Peter S. Hartman: Including His Lecture Reminiscences of the Civil War and Articles by the Hartman Family (Harrisonburg, VA: The Hartman Family, 1937), 31-40; Hartman, “Civil War Reminiscences,” 7.

14. Hartman, “Civil War Reminiscences,” 7-21, Brunk, Life of Peter S. Hartman, 1937; Peter S. Hartman and Harry A. Brunk, Reminiscences of the Civil War (Lancaster, PA: Eastern Mennonite Associated Libraries and Archives, 1964). Though Hartman does not name Bishop Kline, the imprisonment of Anabaptists and development of conscription laws favoring those traditions that he mentions were incidents in which the clergyman was personally involved. Additionally, Hartman needed to go north with General Sheridan because Hartman joined the Mennonite Church during the war and thus was not protected by the draft exemption that only covered members of Anabaptist churches who joined before the legislation passed in 1862.

15. Hartman, “Civil War Reminiscences,” 21.

16. “Personal Mention,” The Eastern Mennonite School Journal, January 1923, 12.

17. See: Virginia Mennonite Conference Archives at Eastern Mennonite University Historical Library, L.J. Heatwole Papers (I-MS-1, mostly Boxes 3, 5.1; LJH Miscellany) and Emmanuel Suter Diaries Collection; Virginia Grove, “Grandfather,” The Eastern Mennonite School Journal, January 1939, 27-28.

18. Hartman, “Civil War Reminiscences,” 18.

19. John C. Wenger and Mary W. Kratz, A.D. Wenger (Harrisonburg, VA: Park View Press, 1961), 4–5, 7. Van Braght, Thieleman J., The Bloody Theatre, or Martyrs’ Mirror, of the Defenceless Christians: who suffered and were put to death for the testimony of Jesus, their Savior, from the time of Christ until the year A. D. 1660. Lampeter Square, Lancaster Co., PA: David Miller, 1837.

20. Julia Spicher Kasdorf, “Mightier than the Sword: Martyrs Mirror in the New World,” The Conrad Grebel Review 31, no. 1 (Winter 2013), https://uwaterloo.ca/grebel/publications/conrad-grebel-review/issues/winter-2013/mightier-sword-martyrs-mirror-new-world

21. Lehman and Nolt, 222-23. Though they make this claim only about Mennonites, the similarities shared between Mennonites and Brethren make the claim likely to pertain to both groups. David A. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2001).

22. Based on feedback I received from Dr. R. Eric Platt, I have revised my conclusions about historical memory at Bridgewater. I think he’s correct in observing they likely informed one another. I hope to continue to explore the extent of that connection as I continue working on this project.

23. I am grateful to Dr. Elesha Coffman for raising this question after I presented my paper at the American Society of Church History. I intend to pursue this question further.

24. Kraybill, 173.