Johann Harder

Mein Name ist Johann Harder. Oh, I’m sorry, I forgot that you don’t speak the hoch Deutsch anymore. Ekj sie Hoadasch Johann. What? You don’t speak Plautdietsch either? So I’ll do the best I can in Englisch.

I was born in the village of Blumstein in the Molotschna Colony of South Russia on August 8, 1836, old style. My father was the Aeltester in the Orloff Mennonite Church east of Blumstein. Orloff was Altkirch, or what we today call “General Conference.”

My father wept bitter tears when he was elected elder minister. “Someday,” he said, “I will have to give an account for every soul in the Orloff Church.” Where before he always had an easy-going spirit, enjoying an occasional cigar and reading Russian magazines, now he quit all these sinful practices and became very serious.

I was the oldest of eleven surviving children born to my mother and stepmother and was always expected to be the example for all my younger brothers and sisters. One day my pious mother saw me praying on my knees between two haystacks, and she said to my Geschwistern, “Children, I hope you will all do likewise and follow Johann’s example.”

Actually, all of us followed the example of our father, whom we dearly loved. He was always a peacemaker, and there were many conflicts in the church that needed healing: the barley land dispute, the Orloff church building dispute, the uprising of the landless villagers, and the arguments about the Milennium. But the most bitter dispute that father had to reconcile was the Bruedergemeinde division. Except for my father and his cousin, Peter Toews, who was the Kleine Gemeinde Aeltester, all the other elders in the Molotschna wanted to ban the Mennonite Brethren to Siberia and be done with them. The MBs successfully appealed their case to the Russian Imperial Council, and the Russian official, Eduard von Hahn told the MB leader, Johann Claassen, “You have Elder to thank for your deliverance!”

As a young man of 19 years of age, I successfully wrote the pedagogical examination and was hired as a village teacher in Friedensruh. After three years there, I taught in a two-room school in Schoenau, where Johannes Fast was the lead teacher. He was a schoolmaster beloved by all, and he had a beloved daughter, Elisabeth, with whom I fell in love at sight. A year after we were married in 1858, her parents decided to move to the Crimea. Elisabeth And I stayed on in Schoenau for three more years, and then we decided to join her parents in the Crimea.

We lived together in a small village called Annenfeld and farmed 100 dessiatines of land. By that time Elisabeth had given birth to three children, one of whom died in infancy. Life was not easy in the Crimea, but there was a wonderful fellowship of Christians in Annenfeld led by Jacob A. Wiebe. They called themselves the Krimmer Bruedergemeinde, or as you would say, “Krimmer Mennonite Brethren Church.”

There was only one problem keeping me from joining the KMB. They expected Elisabeth and me to be re-baptized by immersion. Elisabeth had no problem with that, but I knew that my father would oppose it, believing that it would be a rejection of the baptism I had received in the Orloff Church. I made a special trip back to Orloff to discuss it with my father, and he finally gave his approval, but with considerable protest.

Shortly after we joined the KMB in Annenfeld, the issue of emigration to America came up when the Russian government decided to cancel the special privileges given the Mennonites, such as exemption from military service. The Molotschna Colony decided to send twelve delegates to America to “spy out the promised land”. The Annenfeld KMB decided to send their own delegate in the person of my father- in-law, Johannes Fast.

The letters he sent back to Annenfeld were glowing reports about Marion County, Kansas; and soon the Brethren decided to sell out and immigrate to America. In his last letter, Fast wrote the Brethren, “Be sure to bring some winter wheat with you, if only several pounds per family.”

Elisabeth and I and our five children arrived at Peabody train station on Tuesday morning, July 21, 1874. We were met by our parents, the Fasts, who took us to their home on the prairie twelve miles northwest of Peabody. By this time my father-in-law had reserved twelve sections of prairie land for the Annenfeld group, awaiting Elder Wiebe’s signature before the purchase contract was finalized. When fast and Christian Krehbiel from Sommerfield, Illinois, first saw the land by the South Cottonwood Creek, Krehbiel commented, “This is a Gnadenau, a gracious meadow.”

Several weeks later when the Gnadenau village was drawn up, the Fasts and Harders were situated in the center of the village across the street from the lot reserved for the village school, which I had promised to teach. The school was built right away because the KMB needed a meetinghouse and the children were almost ready to start school again. My family lived in the schoolhouse that first year. We pushed the benches together for beds at night, and my wages for teaching were that each family would bring a load of lumber and sod bricks for the building of our own house.

We lived in our sod house for only six years because our old world village pattern of farming proved to be unworkable in America. All farm families were supposed to live on their own quarter sections of land. We got our 160 acres on what is now the 13-mile road, diagonally across the road from here. When the new church was built here in 1898, we could always walk to church.

Elder Wiebe and I worked together in the church in wonderful harmony, sharing the preaching and teaching ministries. It wasn’t long before our children were grown and married and ready to leave Gnadenau for fertile fields elsewhere.

Elder Wiebe and I made many evangelistic trips to Texas, Oklahoma, Colorado, Nebraska, South Dakota, and Saskatchewan to gather our people into new fellowships and help them organize into KMB congregations. Three of my sons were ordained into the preaching ministry. My oldest son, John, was ordained in the Zoar KMB Church near Inman. My son, Isbrand, was ordained in the Springfield KMB Church southwest of Lehigh, and was the minister of the KMB Church in Waldheim, Saskatchewan for many years. My son, David, was the minister of the KMB church near Weatherford, Oklahoma, and started the Bethany KMB Church in Hillsboro when they moved here to join the faculty of Tabor College in 1909.

Ten years before then, however, their mother (my dear Elisabeth) passed to her eternal reward. In 1900 I returned to Russia to visit my brothers and sisters and their families for the first time after our departure 26 years earlier. While there I met and married Renette Schulz, a widow with four beautiful daughters. Not long after our return, I sold our farm and we moved into the town of Hillsboro close to where the college was built. My wife’s daughter, named Renetta after her mother, was also one of the early teachers at the college.

So that’s my story. I died in 1930 at the age of 94 and was laid to rest here beside Elizabeth.

Her parents were buried in this same row, and the family recently placed a new grave marker there.

As Elder Wiebe and I often told our people, “Let’s so live our lives that when our time comes to leave this earth, we will be ready to meet the Lord and all the dear ones who have gone to heaven before us. Amen.”