The Mennonite Migration & Turkey Red Wheat — 1874, the Crop That Saved the Plains

Summary

In 1874 thousands of German-speaking Mennonites began leaving their colonies on the Russian steppe and resettling on the open plains of central Kansas. They were fleeing the loss of an old privilege: after Russia's defeat in the Crimean War, Tsar Alexander II had moved to revoke the exemption from military service their people had been promised generations earlier, with universal conscription taking effect in 1874. Pacifists by faith, the Mennonites would not serve. So they sold what they could and crossed an ocean and half a continent to a treeless prairie that, to their relief, looked and felt much like the steppe they had left.

They did not arrive empty-handed. Mennonite families carried seed of the hard red winter wheat they had grown in the Crimean and Molotschna country — a drought-tolerant, cold-hardy grain that came to be known in America as Turkey Red. Bred over decades for bitter winters, dry summers, and uncertain rain, it suited almost exactly the conditions that had ruined so many Kansas homesteaders sowing soft spring wheats and corn. Planted in the fall and harvested in early summer, Turkey Red could draw on the moisture of spring and dodge the killing droughts of late summer.

The land they settled was not, strictly, free homestead claims. Much of it was railroad land — sections the federal government had granted to the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, which the railroad's immigration agent C. B. Schmidt sold to the Mennonites in large compact blocks so they could rebuild their village communities intact. That land had reached the railroad and the settlers only because it had first been taken from Native nations: the Kaw (Kanza), forcibly removed from Kansas to Indian Territory in 1873, and the Osage, whose reserves were ceded and opened in the same period. The wheat that 'saved the Plains' grew on ground cleared of the people who had lived there.

What the Mennonites started, others scaled up. Promoted above all by the miller Bernhard Warkentin — who imported thousands of bushels of Turkey Red seed from Ukraine in the mid-1880s — and milled efficiently once the steel roller mill made hard wheat practical, Turkey Red spread across the Plains. Kansas wheat production climbed from a couple of million bushels in 1870 to roughly 80 million by 1900, and Turkey Red and its descendants made the state the heart of the American wheat belt. It is one of homesteading's quietest, most decisive turning points: not a law or a land run, but a sack of seed.

Timeline

The Claim

The people who came to Kansas in 1874 were Russian-German Mennonites — descendants of Dutch and North German Anabaptists who had migrated to Prussia and then, beginning in the 1780s, to the steppes of southern Russia (in present-day Ukraine) at the invitation of Catherine the Great. There they had built prosperous, self-governing colonies like Molotschna and Chortitza, farming under a charter that guaranteed religious freedom, German-language schools, local self-rule, and — crucially for a pacifist faith — permanent exemption from military service. For nearly a century the arrangement held.

Then it began to unravel. After Russia's humiliation in the Crimean War and amid a broader policy of Russification, Alexander II moved to fold the Mennonites into Russian national life, and in particular to end their freedom from the draft, with universal conscription set to take effect in 1874. To Mennonites, military service was not a hardship to be negotiated but a violation of conscience. In the spring of 1873 they sent a delegation — the Committee of Twelve — to tour the United States and Canada seeking cheap fertile land, help with transportation, guaranteed religious liberty and exemption from war, and the right to live in closed German-speaking village communities.

The pull that answered the push came largely from the railroads. The Santa Fe, holding a multi-million-acre federal land grant across Kansas, hired C. B. Schmidt as an immigration commissioner who courted the Mennonites aggressively, offering land in large contiguous tracts on credit; Kansas itself signaled that the new state would not press them into its militia. By late September 1874 nearly two thousand immigrants had reached Topeka, where the Santa Fe sheltered them in a great brick building until each family could choose its tract — the leading edge of a movement that would bring many thousands more.

Building In

The Mennonites settled in tight clusters across the central Kansas wheat country — Marion, McPherson, Harvey, and Reno counties chief among them — deliberately recreating the village pattern of the old colonies rather than scattering across isolated quarter-sections. Some took up genuine homestead claims on the remaining public domain; many more bought railroad land from the Santa Fe in blocks large enough to keep whole congregations together, paying a few dollars an acre. Communities arrived almost whole: the Alexanderwohl congregation, for instance, emigrated as a body and re-founded its village near Goessel in Marion County.

The first seasons were hard in the familiar prairie way. Newcomers wintered in dugouts, broke the tough sod, dug wells, and planted windbreaks on a nearly treeless landscape. But the Mennonites carried advantages most homesteaders lacked: capital pooled within the community — they were reported to have brought substantial gold — experienced dryland farmers who already understood a continental steppe climate, mutual-aid traditions that spread risk across the village, and, above all, the right crop. They knew how to farm cold, dry, treeless country because they had done it for generations on the other side of the world.

That crop was hard red winter wheat. Families had carried seed of the variety Americans would call Turkey Red — one account describes the Barkman family bringing two gallons of carefully hand-picked kernels from their Crimean granary. It behaved on the Kansas plains as it had on the steppe: sown in autumn, it rooted before winter, used the moisture of early spring, ripened in June and July, and tolerated drought and cold that flattened the soft spring wheats. It was not an overnight switch — the immigrants first sowed spring wheat in 1875, and the wholesale turn to winter wheat built over the following decade — but the foundation was laid. The Mennonites had matched a steppe-bred grain to a prairie that was, in effect, an American steppe.

Proving Up

Turkey Red's triumph was as much about milling as growing. Hard wheats are difficult to grind on traditional stone burr mills, and for years that limited their market. The spread of the steel roller mill in the late 1870s and 1880s changed everything: roller mills could crack the hard, high-protein kernels cleanly and produce excellent bread flour, suddenly making Turkey Red commercially superior to the softer wheats it displaced. The Mennonite miller Bernhard Warkentin — who had reached America in 1872 and built mills near Halstead and later Newton — became the crop's foremost champion, importing around 10,000 bushels of Turkey Red seed from Ukraine in the mid-1880s. Grower, miller, and promoter in one, he did more than anyone to scale the wheat up from a colony curiosity into a regional staple.

The numbers tell the rest. Kansas had grown only a couple of million bushels of wheat in 1870; by 1900 the state was harvesting roughly 80 million bushels, and by 1914 more than 170 million. Turkey Red and the varieties bred from it — Kanred, Blackhull, Tenmarq, and a long line of hard red winter wheats developed from Mennonite stock — became the backbone of the crop that made the central and southern Plains the breadbasket of the nation; by 1919 it made up more than 80 percent of Kansas wheat acreage.

Unlike the cautionary tales that fill so much of this site, the Mennonite story is one of homesteaders who largely succeeded — and who changed the odds for everyone around them. By proving that the right crop, the right planting season, and dryland know-how could turn the 'Great American Desert' into productive wheat country, they handed the whole region a template for survival. Yet their success is shadowed by the same fact that underwrites every chapter here: the prosperous wheat villages stood on land taken from the Kaw and the Osage, sold on to newcomers by a railroad that had been granted it for free.

What Decided It

What’s There Now

The Mennonite settlements of central Kansas endured and prospered, and their stamp on the landscape is still plain. Towns like Goessel, Hillsboro, Newton, and Halstead remain centers of Mennonite life, with Bethel College in North Newton (founded 1887), the Mennonite Heritage and Agricultural Museum in Goessel, and Warkentin's restored Newton house all preserving the story. The Turkey Red Wheat Palace built at Goessel for the 1974 migration centennial marks 1874 as the year that changed the region.

Turkey Red itself eventually gave way to its own descendants. Plant breeders at Kansas agricultural stations used it to develop improved hard red winter wheats — Kanred, Blackhull, Tenmarq, and the long succession that followed — and by around 1939 the original had largely been retired from commercial fields. But its genetics run through the wheat that still covers the Plains; roughly half of today's Kansas varieties trace their lineage to it, and some growers and artisan bakers have lately revived heritage Turkey Red for its flavor.

The deeper legacy is the one this site keeps returning to: a single decision — to carry steppe wheat to an American steppe — quietly tipped the balance for an entire region, proving the High Plains could feed a nation. It belongs beside the dramatic land runs and the heartbreaking dryland busts as a reminder that what often decided a homestead's fate was not the law or the luck of the draw but something as humble as the right grain in the right soil. And like every success here, it rested on land first taken from the Kaw and the Osage.

Lessons

References

• Turkey Red Wheat Kansas Historical Society
• Mennonites in Kansas Kansas Historical Society
• Bernhard Warkentin Kansas Historical Society
• Turkey red wheat Wikipedia
• The Migration of the Russian-Germans to Kansas Kansas Historical Quarterly