Warkentin House: The Man Who Brought Turkey Red Wheat to Kansas

The sixteen-room Victorian house in Newton, Kansas, was built between eighteen eighty-six and eighteen eighty-seven for Bernhard Warkentin, a Mennonite immigrant from the Russian steppes who changed the agricultural history of the Great Plains. Warkentin was born in eighteen forty-seven in southern Ukraine and arrived in the United States in the early eighteen seventies. His letters home about Kansas farmland helped persuade large numbers of Mennonites to immigrate to Kansas, and they brought with them a seed: Turkey Red, a hard winter wheat that had proven itself in the harsh winters of the Russian steppes.

Brought to Kansas in eighteen seventy-four, Turkey Red transformed the state into the breadbasket of the world. Warkentin operated flour mills in Newton and Halstead and championed wheat growing across the region. The house contains eighty percent of its original furnishings and is open to visitors as a historic house museum.