The Mennonites Come to Kansas

Scott Seely
5 min readJun 15, 2021
Dirk Willems rescues his pursuer.
Dirk Willems rescues his pursuer.

The Mennonites came to Kansas in the mid-1870s. Although they were farmers and Kansas offered ample space for farming, they had to travel thousands of miles to get to the American Midwest. This is the story behind that journey. It begins in Europe in the 1500s, but be patient, there’s drama.

The 1500s were a time of religious ferment in Europe, largely efforts to break away from the Catholic Church. Martin Luther was the fermenter many of us are most likely to have heard of, but there were others. One was Menno Simons, a Dutch Roman Catholic priest. He left the Church in the 1530s, and the Mennonites are named for him.

Menno was an anabaptist, a word which means re-baptizer. Anabaptists, including Mennonites, believed that before being baptized a person should consciously desire it, something infants can’t do. They re-baptized adults who had already been baptized as Catholics. The Church regarded this as heresy.

The Mennonites also believed that to be a genuine follower of Jesus, one must live a life of peace and not be involved in wars, and therefore not serve in the military. What’s more, the Mennonites had a tendency to decline politics in favor of a quiet life, so they had little political power.

This last turned out to be important, because demands to break away from Catholicism were not demands for individual religious freedom. In many places, all subjects of a given kingdom, duchy, or other political entity were expected to embrace the religion chosen by their ruler. Martin Luther, for example, tried to get sovereigns to sign both themselves and their subjects on to his religious vision. The Mennonites maintained people should not be required to believe as their rulers did. Since they generally didn’t participate in government, they were at a serious disadvantage in this dispute.

This led to a form of double jeopardy. Mennonites were viewed as heretics by the Catholic Church for their religious beliefs, while the ruling class saw the Mennonites’ political beliefs as a threat to their power and control. It was a situation ripe for persecution, and persecution occurred. Rulers, supported by the Church, demanded punishment for anabaptists. Torture and executions followed.

Mennonites regard the victims of this persecution as martyrs. By 1660, Tielman J. van Braght, a historian, had counted no fewer than 803 anabaptist martyrs. Copies of his book enumerating them, The Martyrs Mirror, still exist. Eventually, over 4,000 anabaptists were executed for their faith.

The communal memory of this persecution lives on for the Mennonites, and martyr’s stories are part of Mennonite culture. This is reflected at the Kauffman Museum in North Newton, Kansas, a repository of Mennonite history. The visitor passes through exhibits on Mennonite life, farming, and crafts, and then comes to an area devoted to Mennonite martyrs.

An exhibit tells the story of one of the most famous martyrs, Dirk Willems. He lived in Asperen, Netherlands in the late 1500s and was sentenced to death for being an anabaptist. Imprisoned in a castle, he escaped by lowering himself from his cell using a rope made of knotted rags. A prison guard pursued him. It was winter, and Willems fled across an ice-covered pond. The guard chasing him broke through the ice and fell into the freezing water. Willems turned back and rescued his pursuer, who promptly re-arrested Willems and took him back to the castle, where he was burned at the stake.

The scope of persecutions such as this led the Mennonites to look for safer places to live. They moved about Europe with little permanent success until Catherine the Great of Russia took an interest in them in the late 1700s. She was looking for experienced, successful farmers to develop marshy lands in Ukraine, then a part of Russia. She promised the Mennonites exemption from military service, autonomy within their communities, and respect for their beliefs and the German language they spoke. In response, a group of Mennonites settled in southern Russia in the early 1800s.

But in 1870, the czar Alexander II rescinded these guarantees and decreed universal military service. Once again, the Mennonites needed to look for a new refuge.

In 1872, a Mennonite named Bernhard Warkentin came to the U.S. to scout potential living places. He liked what he saw in Kansas. The railroads were promoting settlement along their newly constructed tracks, and the land was suitable for growing wheat. The Mennonites had created a successful wheat farming region in Russia, where they built their own farming equipment. They wanted to take those strengths with them, and Kansas offered the chance.

Over the next twelve years some 5,000 Mennonites immigrated to Kansas from Ukraine. Even though not much wheat was being grown in Kansas at the time, they brought with them bags of seeds for Turkey Red wheat, a hearty winter wheat variety. Their success in growing it changed wheat farming in the U.S., and similar wheat is grown in the great plains today.

Immigration is hard, though, and such success came with personal costs. One unidentified Mennonite settler had this to say:

I took my family in my own wagon; it was the 17th day of August when we rode from Peabody onto the land, 14 miles northwest. I had loaded some lumber and utensils and my family on top … So we rode in the deep grass to the little stake that marked the spot I had chosen. When we reached the same I stopped. My wife asked me, “Why do you stop?” I said, “We are to live here.”

Then she began to weep.

Today, the Mennonites continue to grow wheat, and one mark of their success is Bethel College in North Newton, Kansas, a Mennonite institution with around 600 students. A key part of the wheat harvest is separating seeds from the plants, a process called threshing, and so the Bethel College teams are known as “the Threshers.”

The green Kansas prairie stretches to the horizon under a blue sky.
The Kansas prairie.

To learn more about the Mennonites, their history, and their lives on the Kansas prairie, visit the Kauffman Museum in North Newton, Kansas. It is affiliated with Bethel College and is a mile or so from Route 50.

This is a piece from www.route-50.com, where you can find stories about people, places, and things along the 3,073 miles of U.S. Highway 50.

The image at the top of the page is in the public domain and comes from the Rijksmuseum, via Wikimedia Commons.

The quote telling of a settler’s family’s arrival in Kansas is from “History of The Kansas Mennonites With A Study of Their European Background,” Victor C. Seibert, 1938, Fort Hayes (Kansas) State University.

The image of the Kansas prairie was taken at the Tallgrass Prairie National Preserve, on Route 50 not far from North Newton, Kansas. Copyright 2019, Scott A. Seely.

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Scott Seely

Writer, living in San Francisco. Travels U.S. Highway 50 and writes about it at Route-50.com.