The Long Way Home: Germans from Russia and the Stark County Prairie

The settlers who filled Stark County in the eighteen eighties and eighteen nineties were not ordinary immigrants. They were Germans who had already migrated once, a century earlier, when Catherine the Great of Russia invited German colonists to settle the Volga River steppe and the Black Sea lowlands. Catherine needed farmers who knew how to work open grassland, and the Germans of the Rhine Valley and southern German principalities answered the call. Russia offered them religious freedom, exemption from military service, and land.

For a hundred years they kept their language, their Lutheran and Catholic faith, their folk traditions, and their agricultural knowledge on the Russian steppe. Then in the eighteen seventies, Czar Alexander the Second revoked those special privileges. Suddenly the Germans of Russia faced conscription and Russification. Hundreds of thousands left. Many came to the northern plains of the United States, where the land looked remarkably like what they had left behind, and where the Homestead Act and the railroad land companies were advertising one hundred sixty free acres.

They settled around Dickinson in concentrated clusters. The Catholics went to particular townships, the Lutherans to others. They built brick churches that looked like the churches of the Volga colonies. They planted winter wheat the way they had learned on the Russian steppe, a variety better suited to the harsh continental climate than the spring wheats most American farmers tried first. That agricultural knowledge gave them a meaningful edge in the brutal early years of Dakota farming.

Today, Stark County remains one of the most concentrated pockets of Germans-from-Russia heritage in the United States. Drive the county roads and you still find communities with names like Lefor and Belfield that began as German-Russian Catholic parishes. The Dickinson area phone book, as recently as the nineteen eighties, read like a directory of the Volga colonies: Feist, Schneider, Hoffmann, Hettich, Kuntz. The route from Catherine the Great's invitation to a North Dakota farmstead took a hundred and fifty years and crossed two continents, but the cultural thread held.