PART 4: Intertwined Lives

 

PART 4: Intertwined Lives

Young Adult Mennonite Group Attends
Farmington Chautauqua, August 1910

By Elizabeth Hervey Osborn

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A shared heritage united the young people.

Fourteen of the nineteen were grandchildren of Jacob and Eliza Strickland Krebill. Ten were grandchildren of Peter and Maria Dorothea Krehbiel Weber. Twelve were descendants of Christian Krehbiel and Elisabeth Hahn. 

Each of them had surnames in their trees suggesting descent from the Krayenbühls of Bern, Switzerland who were early accepters of the Anabaptist teachings of Menno Simons in the 1500s, and who fled to the Palatinate to escape religious persecution. Turmoil in Germany and a desire for land where their children could settle and farm[1] brought their grandparents to the United States in the second quarter of the 19th century. [2]

All but one of the young people pictured were members of the Zion Mennonite Church of Donnellson, Iowa, a village about 11 miles east of Farmington on the Burlington Route. The congregation had formed in the 1840s, and it was at a gathering near Donnellson that the General Conference Mennonite Church (now Mennonite USA) was first established in 1860, with Zion Mennonite a founding congregation. 

As families grew, the land around Donnellson filled up; so in the late 1870s the congregation established a daughter colony northwest of what is now Wichita, where six of these young people were born. For five of them, their parents returned to their native Iowa after suffering terrible losses; however one, Emma Seyb, grew to adulthood near Pretty Prairie, Kansas. In August 1910, Emma and her widowed mother made the trip by train to Lee County for a visit. 

On Saturday August 6th, twenty-two year old Emma joined her cousins in a tour of the Iowa State Penitentiary at Fort Madison. Together they took a boat ride on the Mississippi River - perhaps observing the early stages of the engineering marvel under construction that would become the Keokuk Dam and Power Generator system. 

Emma's uncle, F.H. Krebill, would win election to the Iowa legislature on the Democratic ticket later that fall, where he would serve on several legislative committees of interest to their Mennonite community, contributing to agricultural science development, the establishment of local high schools, and improved transportation. Father of Otto, Emma K., and Elizabeth (Lizzie), F.H. was well-known in the county, having been justice of the peace, active in the local Red Cross and county road and civic development, and served for many years on the board of directors for Bluffton College in Ohio (now Bluffton University). For these young people, interest in progress, whether engineering, social, or political was undoubtedly at a height.

This group was fully bilingual in the two languages of their neighborhood: English and German, having been educated in a church-sponsored German School during their breaks from public school. When they were small children, the oldest of them would have been taught by Christian Schowalter, who was lovingly remembered as "Der Lehrer" (The Teacher). Christian served many years as the pastor of Zion Mennonite Church, and was a founding officer of the General Conference Mennonite Church. These young people, and many of their parents, as they reached adulthood would have been baptized into their faith by Pastor Schowalter. He cared deeply about young people, and encouraged not only faith but also mental and social development through Sunday Schools, Mission work, music, and farm-and-home projects.

Dan, who at age 30 was the oldest member of the group, was Christian's youngest son. Abbie and Anna were Christian's granddaughters. Christian had passed away three years earlier, so for the last decade or so his son Ed, Abbie's father, taught the German School. 

Abbie, Erna, Ada, Lizzie, Emma K., Jacob, Dora, and Hilda all sang in the Zion Mennonite Choir, where their talents were considered an "integral part of the worship service." And Hilda, Anna, Dora, Emma K., Lizzie, Ada, and Abbie -- together with many of their mothers -- participated in the Ladies' Mission Society. 

For most of these young people, Lee County and Zion Mennonite would be "home" their entire lives. The graves of sixteen of them can be found in Zion Mennonite Cemetery, just north of Donnellson.

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[1] See Olga Krebill Hirschler, The Altleiningen Krebills, 1966; available in pdf format at https://www.familysearch.org/library/books/viewer/270648/?offset=&return=1. In a later Part, the discussion of each person in the picture will include their ID number from this book, in the format “4BG” where the number represents a child of Friedrich and Anna, and the following letters indicate birth order in each succeeding generation. Person 4BG therefore is the (G) seventh child (Otto) of the (B) second child (Frederick) of the (4) fourth child (Jacob) of Friedrich and Anna. 

Olga Krebill Hirschler is herself 4KC; at age 16 in 1910 she would have been the right age to attend Chautauqua, however she is not pictured in the photograph though her older brother R.J. and younger sister Edna do appear. The author of this report is identified in this book as 4BGBDA.

[2] Abbie’s mother, Elise, was of Dutch-Prussian Mennonite heritage, and traced a slightly later different path to the United States, with her ancestors likely originating in the Dutch Lowlands, then moving to the Vistula delta, then the fertile fields of what was then Russia but is now north-central Ukraine. As a 10 year old orphan in 1874, Elise left the village of her birth to come to the United States .