Bethel College: The Mennonites Who Fed America

In eighteen seventy-four, Mennonite families from Russia, Prussia, and other parts of Europe arrived on the Kansas plains reportedly carrying seeds of Turkey Red hard winter wheat, a drought-resistant variety that would eventually turn Kansas into the breadbasket of the nation. Twelve years later, three men stood on a prairie knoll north of Newton imagining a college to serve that growing immigrant community. Bethel College received its charter on May twenty-third, eighteen eighty-seven, signed by thirty-three founders, all but three of them Mennonite.

Bernhard Warkentin, one of the founders, was the same miller long credited in Kansas lore with promoting that wheat. Bethel became the oldest Mennonite college in North America, and it remains affiliated with Mennonite Church USA today, a living institution rooted in one of the most consequential agricultural transplants in American history.