Warkentin and the Wheat That Fed the Plains

The Victorian house in Newton was built between eighteen eighty-six and eighteen eighty-seven for Bernhard Warkentin, a Mennonite miller from the Russian steppes who may have done more to shape the Kansas landscape than anyone else of his era.

Warkentin arrived in the United States in the early eighteen seventies, and by eighteen seventy-three was working as an agent helping his fellow Mennonites emigrate from Russia to central Kansas. He negotiated favorable rates with the Santa Fe Railroad and persuaded large numbers of families to settle here.

Those families brought Turkey Red wheat, a hard winter variety from the Black Sea region. Warkentin arranged for seed wheat to be shipped directly from Russia to Newton in the fall of eighteen seventy-four. Turkey Red went on to spread across Kansas and neighboring states and came to dominate the region's wheat. The house on the National Register of Historic Places stands as a monument to the seed that made the Great Plains a breadbasket.