CATHOLIC GERMANS FROM RUSSIA IN TEXAS

Dona B. Reeves-Marquardt & Lewis R. Marquardt^(*)
©Copyright 1993, Texas Catholic Historical Society.
May not be reproduced mechanically or electronically without permission of Catholic Southwest.

In a finely documented article in the April 1986 issue of the Southwestern Historical Quarterly, Terry Jordan includes a table of "European White Stock in Texas, 1910" based upon data collected from the Thirteenth Census of the United States. In the table Jordan lists "Persons of European Birth plus American-Born with at Least One European-Born Parent."⁽¹⁾ The table indicates that 10 percent of the total Texas population falls into this European White Stock category and a full fifty percent of those, 171,776, attribute their nativity to Germany, which according to Jordan includes Wends, Silesian Poles, and many Jews. Also listed in the table, in order after Germany, are Austria, England, Ireland, Italy, Sweden, Russian, Scotland, France, Switzerland, and finally, Other Europe. The Russian group, 10,615 persons or 3 percent of the total white stock in Texas concerns us here. Many of these Russian-listed persons, upwards of 8 percent to 9 percent, are notof Russian parentage, but are Catholic Germans from Russian, who, as early as 1762, first migrated to Asia from their German homelands and began to immigrate to American primarily after 1872.⁽²⁾

In 1762 Russia was ruled by the German-born monarch Catherine the Great. Hoping to settle and cultivate her vast landholdings to the east, Catherine had just issued a call to foreigners of all nationalities to migrate to Russia. While other Europeans responded to her call, Germans not only answered but shouted. They came in thousands adapting to the unfamiliar conditions in such a manner that they succeeded in Russia without ever surrendering their ethnic identity, remaining wholly autonomous in matters of religion, education, and, to a lesser degree, politics. A second immigration of Europeans to Russia began after 1803; these were invited by Catherine's grandson, Tsar Alexander I to cultivate and develop southern Russian farmlands. Again, Germans accepted, flourished with time, succeeded, and established themselves near the Black Sea city of Odessa where they served as a buffer against the invading Turks.⁽³⁾

When Catherine and Alexander opened their lands for immigration, several thousand Europeans answered their challenge in order to escape the conditions of Europe after the French War of Succession, the Seven Years' War and the Napoleonic wars. Most of the early German immigrants, called colonists and numbering as high as 37,000 persons by 1764, were settled by Catherine's representatives on both sides of the Volga River, north and south of the Russian town of Saratov, where they created 100 new villages practically overnight.

Later immigrants to the area around the Black Sea numbered more than 3,500 families by 1810. Though conditions in Russia were miserable, both groups increased, prospered, and thrived until the political situation deteriorated and land availability decreased to such an extent that they chose to migrate again, this time toward North America and South America, specifically to the United States and Canada but also to

Argentina and parts of Brazil.⁽⁴⁾ In all these places they became outsiders again, foreigners out of the mainstream of life to be sure, who were considered neither fish nor fowl, neither German nor Russian. They were, however, strongly Catholic or strongly Protestant.

This essay will address two issues. First, many of the Russians listed in Jordan's table and, thereby, the United States census are actually Germans through ancestry and therefore not Russian as such. Second, how these people came to Texas and the importance of their religion to their settlement will be discussed.

It is important to classify Germans from Russia as neither Germans nor Russians. While in Russia they remained an autonomous ethnic group maintaining and continuing their own language, religion, farming, and social practices. Russian edict prevented them from mingling with the indigenous population to avoid weakening the position of either the autocratic government or the Russian Orthodox Church.

From the beginning, the inclination of the colonists, who felt they represented an advanced culture surpassing the more primitive Russian peasants, was to hold themselves aloof. Not only did the two groups not mix, even to learn one another's language, but the government intentionally located each German village in such a way as to isolate it from the neighboring Russian villages, and to prohibit commerce and trade between them. Additionally, the German villages remained essentially Catholic or Protestant, depending upon the confession of the founding settlers. It thus became possible for the German colonists to echo the religious patchwork pattern of southwestern Germany and the Rhine, with Reformed, Lutheran and Catholic villages intensely guarding the religious, social, and linguistic integrity of the community and its allies.

In Germany industrial and political events from 1762 to 1874 allowed the intensity of group cohesion to subside to a degree. In Russia, however, with its harsh, long winters, friend and family alliances aided survival, while outsiders--the government, the Russians--might be distrusted. After decades of cultural detachment, art, literature, and politics declined in importance for the colonists, while church and religion occupied their leisure time, as a kind of surrogate culture for the German farmers cut off from their mother country. The educational system further sustained this religious fervor and piety among the

colonists by providing continuity for all confessions. Each group cherished its own system and guarded it against infringement from any other; and all were united against the Russian Orthodox. This pattern by itself, supported for a hundred years in rural isolation in Russia, would distinguish the Germans from Russia from their German cousins elsewhere.

In Texas, Germans from Russia differ fundamentally from other Germans. The German dialects they speak, isolated as they were from their homelands for more than two hundred years, have acquired some Russian vocabulary while retaining the distinctive features of the home dialect as spoken at the end of the eighteenth century.⁽⁵⁾ Their German handwriting varies radically from that of the better-educated German Texas immigrant. Upon arrival, their dress--fur hats, heavy coats, clumsy but serviceable boots, shawls, and other alien articles made them seem strange to their inquisitive neighbors. Their farming methods, their vernacular architecture, their foods, their folklore, and their art forms--most easily viewed in the Catholic cemeteries through distinctive iron crosses that often adorn Russian-German graves--set them apart from German or other Russian immigrants to Texas. Though difficult to identify among other folk groups by those not familiar with these people, Germans from Russia deserve special consideration.

Research on Germans from Russia has been limited since most of their history is confined to an oral tradition. Extremely few texts acknowledge Texas Germans from Russia: they are from many standpoints a neglected population with numbers far greater than previously imagined. The authors of this article have examined microfilmed manuscript copies of census records searching not only for familiar names of these people but for given places of birth and spoken mother tongues. The census taker's declaration of their nationality has not always been accepted. In addition, county histories and church records were also studied. Perhaps the greatest source of encouragement lay in an early doctoral dissertation by Richard Sallet, the editor of an enormously popular German language newspaper, the Dakota Freie Presse. Called the German-Russian Bible, this newspaper was active for almost eighty years before finally stopping its presses in 1954. Sallet's

dissertation, "Russlanddeutsche Siedlungen in den Vereinigten Staaten von Amerika" was published in an obscure German yearbook, Deutsch-Amerikanische Geschichtsblatter in 1931, and only since 1974 has it been available in an English translation, Russian-German Settlements in the United States.⁽⁶⁾

Immigrant Germans from Russia came to Texas mainly from the northern plains states, some from the eastern seaports, and some through the port of Galveston. Many of them were Catholic. At the present time, Texas Germans from Russia are known to have lived at Plantersville in Grimes County, at Fairchilds and Guy in Fort Bend County, at Windthorst in Archer County, in Clay County, in Wichita County, and various other enclaves in West Texas as reported by Bobby Weaver, F. S. Reisdorph, and Elsie Wilbanks and Austin Montgomery.⁽⁷⁾ Russian-Germans are also found within Cooke, Denton, Smith and Grayson counties, and in the cities of Corpus Christi, Mission, San Antonio, Houston, and Galveston.

North and west from Houston, in the midst of rolling hills and piney woods, the tiny community of Plantersville, is in Grimes County. Though Plantersville has never been a large community, the active and busy little village had a post office in 1856. Before that date, a large plantation house was erected by Colonel Isaac Baker approximately three miles northeast of Plantersville. Called "The Cedars," one of the county's "earliest houses built of sawed lumber," the plantation eventually

encompassed 2,850 acres of land and "supported sixty families."⁽⁸⁾ By 1900 several of the families working cotton and living on this plantation were Germans from Russia. Yet one questions why Germans from Russia settled here. Cotton was the primary crop in the county along with some peanuts, corn and vegetables, dairy cattle together with some poultry, hogs and beef. Nowhere does the landscape resemble the vastness and openness of the Russian-Germans' home areas in southern Russia. Polish immigrants had arrived in the county about a decade before the Germans from Russia, the first at Anderson in 1869.⁽⁹⁾ Before the Poles a few pioneering Reichsdeutsche(Germans from Germany) had settled in the county.⁽¹⁰⁾ By 1900 the population of Grimes County had peaked at 26,106, with black families holding the majority. By 1980 it

was reduced to 13,580.⁽¹¹⁾ Though Germans from Russia settled nearby, some time around 1893, never before had they been known to have worked cotton nor to have been so closely associated in the United States with any black people.

A so-called Russian-German belt stretches from Stoneham through Plantersville in Grimes County and on toward Dobbin and Montgomery, both in Montgomery County to the east, a distance of roughly fourteen miles. The belt bulges somewhat north of Plantersville. The manuscript copy of the 1900 United States census indicates that with but a single exception, every Russian-German in Grimes County was listed as a farmer or farm laborer. County tax rolls further establish that only one Russian-German farmer owned land in 1896 but several did in 1897, possibly indicating that they worked for others or rented during their first years in the county. Typically these hard working farmers worked the land for whatever wages or shares were available, but, though they may have been hard-working, one informant related that people seemed to avoid them.⁽¹²⁾

Still, Germans from Russia moved not to Galveston, nor to Houston, nor certainly to Fredericksburg or New Braunfels, but to Plantersville, Windthorst, Henrietta, and a few other similar small areas. To speculate that these German immigrants arrived in Texas to work cotton or cut timber is simply not in keeping with their historical preferences though they did engage in wheat farming in the Panhandle. One queries why these people came here at all. Two informants claimed that many Russian-German settlers migrated as share croppers because the land was

fertile and the wages good.⁽¹³⁾ Though plausible, this response does not address the dissimilarity between Texas and northern soil or the untypical farming conditions--specifically the absence of dry-land wheat farming.

Another informant was quite clear about the founding of the Plantersville Russian-German settlement.⁽¹⁴⁾ According to her testimony, seven families were recruited by the schoolmaster, Kasimer Kiefel, to work on the Baker plantation. The families first arrived in New York, then traveled by train to Navasota and from there to Plantersville. At the plantation, all seven families lived together in one large two-storied house; each family occupied a room until they could build their own homes. They were given a team, mules, chickens and other farm animals and were expected to farm cotton, corn, and other crops. The role of Kasimer Kiefel as a recruiter was confirmed by another informant;⁽¹⁵⁾ he apparently was one of the first to contact the Cedars and made several trips back to Russia to bring more settlers to the area. Both informants also thought that Rev. Joseph Ignatius Klein, beyond aiding Germans from Russia to settle in Plantersville, may have made a recruiting trip to Russia, himself. Indeed, according to Diocesan documents, he was insured to travel abroad.

On 5 March 1894, about ten acres of land situated three miles north of Plantersville and west of the Cedars were purchased for $30. The recently ordained Rev. Klein of Indiana was authorized to make this purchase by Nicholas A. Gallagher, Bishop of Galveston, and was instructed to build a new church and establish a parish, soon to be called St. Mary's Catholic Church of Plantersville.⁽¹⁶⁾ Built for approximately

$1,700 by the seventy some families living there, it was to become the only Catholic church in the small area, and also served several Polish Catholics.⁽¹⁷⁾ As a roving missionary for the growing county, Father Klein served St. Stanislaus in Anderson from April 1895 till August 1897; between 1894 and 1895 he baptized 87 people at St. Mary's of Plantersville. The number baptized annually would average around 60 until the start of World War II when many families moved to Houston.

The original St. Mary's Church of Plantersville burned in 1917 but within four months, by 13 November 1917, it was replaced and rededicated at a cost of $3,788, under the guidance of Reverend George Apel. The present wooden clapboard church contains on the north side stained glass windows with German inscriptions of the donors' names; on the south side inscriptions of names are in English. The traditional altar is situated under a blue painted apse with nine illusionistic angels peering down from above. The ceiling of beaded board is painted a light yellow, subtly reflecting the tinge of the time-tinted windows, and adorned in the Catholic tradition with decorative stenciled borders.

But not all had been calm with the Germans from Russia at St. Mary's. Even before the 1917 rebuilding, Reverend Apel had written to

the bishop, "herewith I am returning the petition as you have requested. Plantersville is at rebellion . . . . Some . . . believe to have the right to dominate the priest and slander him at liberty." Even earlier, in 1911, several "insulting" letters had also been forwarded to Bishop Gallagher.

The letters seemed to originate from the German-speaking populace, and, since the priest at the time was Polish, one might surmise the parishioners were requesting a German-speaking priest. Unfortunately the exact cause is not known, but Bishop Gallagher's reply of 20 August 1911 to a Mr. I. W., follows:

Your letter of August 16 was duly received and I am pained to see how little respect you have for your Pastor as to threaten to take him before the Civil Court. You have not stated anything against him and as you have made no charge against him I cannot consider your request for me to send a priest up there to investigate. You do not seem to know how to treat a priest in a Christian manner and I will not allow a priest to live at Plantersville until you learn to respect him. Yours Truly, N. A. Gallagher, Bishop of Galveston ⁽¹⁸⁾

When Reverend Klein left St. Mary's in March 1907, he had been followed by a missionary priest out of Houston, Reverend Jacob Schnetzer. Next, Reverend George Wilhelm served from 1908 to 1910; M. Dombrowsky from 1910 to 1911; Charles Weisnerowski from 1911 to 1912; and, finally, George Apel, from 1913 to 1924. During Rev. Wilhelm's tenure troubles began. When St. Joseph's church at nearby Stoneham was built and dedicated in 1910, primarily for the Polish-speaking Catholics in the area, Father Dombrowsky was assigned both St. Joseph's and St. Mary's. He spoke both Polish and German but only "enough English sufficiently to be understood, but not if he gave the Polish and German sermons first."

Even before the first St. Mary's church was built, language had been a problem in the area. As the rapidly expanding congregation grew, not all the parishioners could get inside the original church. The solution was simple: first the sermon was given in Polish and the Polish people would enter to listen, next the sermon was recited in German and the Germans would listen. Those "who understood neither Polish nor German would sit through it all to be sure of a seat during Mass which was not said

until after the sermons. There was never a word of English. One day the crowd was so great that the floor broke down." St. Mary's was constructed shortly thereafter; four priests and some twenty nuns have since come from the small parish.

St. Mary's Cemetery is located west of the rectory with double eastern gates facing the western entrance of the church. Entering the cemetery, those familiar with the multiplicity of Texas graveyards soon recognize that the pattern and appearance of this cemetery is strikingly different from other cemeteries in the not-so-distant German belt of Texas.⁽¹⁹⁾ Hand-wrought iron crosses, distinct symbols of Catholic Russian-German funerary art, were brought across three continents to a new and alien environment, to the pine forests of remote Texas. Today, though the church which they built before the turn of the century is still active, these hand-wrought crosses still call attention to these hardy immigrants.

Inside St. Mary's Cemetery, one recognizes immediately the names of many Black Sea Russian-German families, though few inscriptions remain on the wooden or iron crosses. On the stone markers, names such as Bachmeyer, Braunagel, Diehl, Giesinger, Gottselig, Herzog, Hoffart, Mattern, Mock, Wagner and Wolf, abound. To be sure, relatively few Russian-German descendants remain in the county today and the forces of "assimilative blurring" have had their effect.⁽²⁰⁾ Like central Texas by 1900, Grimes County was an area characterized by almost explosive population growth and a heavy mixture of ethnic identity. As D. W. Meinig in Imperial Texas relates:

Europeans moved very largely into those localities already dominated by fellow nationals, clustering into neighborhoods and spreading out only gradually and cohesively into the Anglo areas. In 1900 they still clung rather strongly to native dress, customs, and language. German newspapers were published in more than

a dozen different towns of the region, and Germans were still a major part of the population of Galveston, Houston, and San Antonio.⁽²¹⁾

In his Russian-German Settlements in the United States, Richard Sallet writes of four Catholic colonies from Russia that later moved to Texas:

In 1886-1888 a number of settlers came from the so-called old colonies, Klein-Liebental, Mariental, Josefstal and Franzfeld, to St. Joseph, Missouri, and settled on farms on the other side of the Missouri River at Wathena, Kansas. Later, many of them moved on to Texas and in 1930 only a few people were found in and around Wathena. . . . The settlement of Plantersville in 1930 still consisted of about sixty families.⁽²²⁾

Sallet continues,

In 1891, we have reports of an [other] emigration to Texas. At that time emigrants from Klein-Liebental and Mariental came to Corpus Christi. Other colonists from Franzfeld and Blumenfeld settled at the same time in Brenham and re-settled two years later in 1893 at Plantersville in Grimes County, Texas. The settlement grew by additional families from the old homeland, and although many of these settlers moved on to Kansas and Colorado, others eventually found homes in Houston and Galveston.⁽²³⁾

Although Sallet additionally states, "in the last years before the First World War, earlier settlers from the Dakotas were moving into the southern part of Texas,"⁽²⁴⁾ few of these people have, to date, been located. According to figures from Sallet's evaluation of the 1920 United States census, Texas contained at least 624 German-speaking persons born in Russia, approximately 550 of whom belonged to the first generation.⁽²⁵⁾ He lists Lipscomb County in the northeast corner of the Panhandle with 213, Wichita County with 137, Clay County with 117, Fort Bend County with 91, and Smith County with 66. Perhaps because first-generation figures were too small, Sallet neglected to mention Grimes County, though the 1910 census listed 127 born in Russia. In a recent tally of the 1900 census, at least 68 German-Russian families with nearly 500 people were in Grimes County, a figure considerably greater than Sallet's.⁽²⁶⁾ If one considers only Grimes County, the census for 1920

lists 89 individuals born in Russia out of 785 foreign born. This 11.4 percent segment, when compared to the total number of foreign born in the entire state for the same year (7,057 or 2 percent of the total population), is quite strong.

Wherever they settled, Germans from Russia tended to be absorbed quickly, either into the dominant Anglo community or into the ethnically more assertive German-Texas community. This absorption is particularly true in far northern Texas, along the course of the Red River, where Anglo pioneers had established a strong cattle and ranching culture long before the arrival of the Germans from Russia.⁽²⁷⁾ Grass-root county and state histories tend to overlook the non-English-speaking, non-Baptist, non-Methodist, or non-Presbyterian settler who favored farming, Filzstiefel (felt boots), fur coats, and featherbeds. Nevertheless, clusters of Catholic Germans from Russia did settle in Clay and Archer counties, and their descendants and culture can yet be found in small islands in a sea of prairie grass and rolling hills. They found their way to settlements between Henrietta and Windthorst, beginning about 1893.

Important to the development of Clay and Archer counties and the arrival of the Germans from Russia was the establishment of a rail line. The Southwestern Railway of Texas, surely one of the tiniest rail lines in the state, operated from Henrietta in Clay County to Archer City in

Archer County from about 1892 to 1915.⁽²⁸⁾ Its rolling stock consisted of one locomotive, a combination passenger, express, and mail car, and several freight cars. The Windthorst Zeitung of 1894 outlines the benefits of settling in the area and offers transportation free of charge from the Henrietta train station until "our railroad now under construction is finished."⁽²⁹⁾ It was uncommon for Germans from Russia to settle without rail transportation nearby. Pushing their migration ever westward from the railheads of Lincoln, Nebraska; Topeka, Kansas; and Eureka, South Dakota, they sought suitable agricultural land near the means to transport their products to market. In many cases, they knew of available railroad lands even before their departure from Russia and they purchased these lands outright instead of homesteading.

Windthorst, established as a German Catholic community, had forty settlers by January 1893 and about seventy-one families by 1895.⁽³⁰⁾ The community was one of several Catholic German settlements established by Reverend Joseph Reisdorff and was named for the well-known Prussian minister of justice and parliamentary opponent of Bismarck, Ludwig Windthorst. A leader of the German Centrist party, Windthorst was particularly admired by German Catholics and had just died in 1891. German politics probably had little to do with starting a city in this part of Texas, however, and early chronicles relate hardships and near depopulation during the drought of 1895.⁽³¹⁾ The 1900 census, however, lists many German settlers in Archer County, several secondary migrants from other sections of the United States and from the German-Texan belt further south several directly from Germany.

By 1900, 110 Germans from Russia, without exception from south Russia rather than from the Volga area, had settled in adjoining Clay

County, and the number had grown to 196 by 1910.⁽³²⁾ These settlers, for the most part, belonged to conservative Protestant confessions: German Baptists and the German United Evangelical Brethren. Some, however, were Catholic, and settled in southern Clay County and eastern Archer County. They belonged to the parishes of St. Mary's in Henrietta (first constructed in 1879 in Cambridge and moved in 1882 to Henrietta), St. Mary's in Windthorst, St. Boniface in Scotland, and St. Michael's situated some five miles south of Henrietta (demolished for lumber in 1925 or 1926).⁽³³⁾ They abandoned the community of Luxemburg, west of Windthorst, because it did not provide easy access to a parish church.⁽³⁴⁾ Thus, as seen earlier, and as reported by Weaver in 1979, almost all German communities, whether Reichsdeutsche(Germans from Germany) or Russlanddeutsche (Germans from Russia) have been bound directly with religion.⁽³⁵⁾ Just as it was in the old homelands of Russia, so too was it here in Texas: the church offered a continuing surrogate culture.⁽³⁶⁾

The establishment of Catholic parishes, then, enabled these south Russian immigrants to find a more hospitable environment. The railroad offered them access to the community. A search of naturalization and census records establishes two families, perhaps more correctly two and a half families, in Archer County between 1891 and 1893: Anton Munchrat (whose wife was a German from Russia), Peter Heidenheimer, and Frank Immel and their families. The arrival in 1894 of Joseph Hoepfner, born in Landau, in south Russia, his wife and ten children, increased the colony; he likely brought his relative, Jerome Hoepfner,

with his family in 1903. The number of Germans born in Russia and living in Archer County increased to 72 in 1910, according to census records.

As in other communities, census records proved again the difficulty of an accurate appraisal of numbers in this community. Beyond the usual confusion of spelling German names, a problem encountered in all parts of the country, the enumerators simply did not know what to do with these wondrous folk. The Ludwig Rittel family was likely tabulated among the Germans, for someone added "German" after the country of birth, "Russia." The problem became so acute that the enumerators fashioned a rubber stamp, "German," to mark over the hand-written entry "Russia" for several pages. For one such family, the Anton Dockters(?), a frustrated note confides, "I went back the second time but couldn't learn any more. These people live on a farm and all work out in field also in the home."⁽³⁷⁾

What brought "these people" to Clay and Archer counties was a church with a familiar and comfortable environment; a settlement in which they could communicate with their like-minded neighbors, other Germans from Russia; and a land not unlike the treeless, rolling steppes bordering the northern shores of the Black Sea, with farming conditions similar to those they had known in their homelands. Their transition to Texas brought difficult but necessary changes. In north Texas, settlers could not live in villages and go out to their fields to work, as they did in Russia, but rather had to live on the land they farmed. Farming practices had to be relearned. Still, the isolation and uninterrupted landscape were familiar to them. The country around Windthorst, for example, was so barren that a lantern was placed on a wooden crossbeam to guide settlers returning from Henrietta because there were no roads.⁽³⁸⁾

As it had in Russia more than a century before, this extended religious family served as the society's "basic social unit."⁽³⁹⁾ One descendant recalls that her ancestor sent his wife ahead on the train from the

Dakotas to Clay County. When she arrived in Henrietta, she was met by an agent who convinced her that she and her family would be happier near the Catholic area toward Archer County and Windthorst. She agreed, and the family established itself there.⁽⁴⁰⁾ Lacking the community of church and religion, Russian-German families might move elsewhere as examples from Luxemburg in Archer County and Hurnville in Clay County have demonstrated.

As one old settler has remarked, however, "the young people flied and the old people died." The process of assimilation was inevitable. The flock was scattered and the churches sold in an ever-changing economic and social structure. Something different, however, had been created from the way it would have been. The landscape, agriculture, and religious fervor of those parts of Texas where Germans from Russia had resided have been touched by both the Russian Volga and the Black Sea. To date, research into Catholic Russian-German communities in Texas has uncovered but few of the settlements that once existed. Many problems are inherent to discovering more about this remarkable group of people, their patterns of living, and their quiet effect upon the development and religion of rural Texas. It is important, therefore, to note not only the Reichdeutsche with their distinctive cultural imprint upon the state, but also their lesser known, harder-to-trace, ethnic relatives, the Russlanddeutsche.

Notes

*. Dona B. Reeves-Marquardt and Lewis R. Marquardt are affiliated with Southwest Texas State University, San Marcos. This article is a revision of a paper presented at a TCHS conference in Galveston, Texas, 6 March 1987. It follows closely an earlier work by the authors in Journal of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia 9 (Winter 1986): 11-12.

1. Terry G. Jordan, "A Century and a Half of Ethnic Change in Texas, 1836-1986," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 89 (April 1986): 385-422.

2. As recently as 1970, when Terry G. Jordan created his exceptional map of Texas Ethnic Groups, Germans from Russia were not separately enumerated anywhere in the state, either in Lipscomb County in the Panhandle or in Wichita, Grimes, or Clay. See Jordan, "Annals Map Supplement Number Thirteen: Population Origin Groups in Rural Texas," Annals of the Association of American Geographers 60 (June 1970) : 404-405 and map supplement.

3. For a general history of the Germans from Russia, see, among others, Adam Giesiger, From Catherine to Khrushchev (Battleford, Saskatchewan, Canada, 1974).

4. See Fred C. Koch, The Volga Germans (University Park, Pennsylvania, 1977).

5. See Nina Behred and Jugo Jedig, Deutsche Mundarten in der Sowjetunion: Geschichte der Forschung und Bibliographie (Margurg, Germany, 1991).

6. Richard Sallet, Russian-German Settlements in the United States, trans. LaVern J. Rippley and Armand Bauer, (Fargo, North Dakota, 1974). Sallet traveled extensively throughout the United States visiting with his subscribers before being appointed to the Hochschule fur Politik in Berlin. For an interesting discussion concerning the Dakota Freie Presse, see LaVern J. Rippley, "A History of the Dakota Freie Presse" in Heritage Review 7 (December 1973): 9-17.

7. See Bobby Weaver, "Germans in the Panhandle-Plains Region of Texas," The Permian Historical Annual 19 (December 1979): 29-42; F. S. Reisdorph, "A History of the German People in the Panhandle of Texas and Ellis County, Oklahoma," (Thesis, West Texas State Teachers College, 1942); and Elsie Montgomery Wilbanks and Austin H. Montgomery, Jr., "The Other Germans," Texana 3 (1971): 230-248.

8. History of Grimes County, Land of Heritage and Progress, Grimes County Historical Commission, (Navasota, 1982), 199 and 630. As early as 19 May 1861, Reverend George W. Baines, the great-grandfather of President Lyndon Baines Johnson, and N. T. Byars organized the Plantersville Baptist Church. A later Baptist minister and carpenter, Parson Carson, placed the cross atop the first Catholic church in Plantersville around 1872.

9. Polish immigration into America began in Texas in the winter of 1854. By 1855 the first Polish colony and parish in America had built a church, in Panna Maria, Texas. See Edward J. Dworaczyk, The First Polish Colonies of America in Texas: Containing Also the General History of the Polish People in Texas (San Antonio, 1936) and, also, T. Lindsay Baker, The First Polish Americans: Silesian Settlements in Texas (College Station, Texas, 1979).

10. Frequently called Reichsdeutsche by the Russlanddeutsche (Germans from Russia), these German settlers, many of whose descendants still reside in the county and who originally migrated to Texas as early as 1831, arrived in Grimes County before the Civil War, primarily through secondary migration from earlier German communities in Washington, Austin, and Colorado counties. For Germans in Texas, see among others: Rudolph Leopold Biesele, The History of the German Settlements in Texas: 1831-1861 (Austin, 1930); Terry G. Jordan, German Seed in Texas Soil: Immigrant Farmers in Nineteenth-Century Texas (Austin, 1966); and Glen E. Lich, The German Texans (San Antonioes, 1981). The census of 1880 indicates about 175 persons of German birth in Grimes County, less than 1 percent of the total county population.

11. Official United States census population figures for Grimes County are 1880 - 18,600; 1890 - 21,312; 1900 - 26,106;1910 -21,215; 1920 -23,101; 1920 - 22,642; 1940 - 21,960; 1950 -15,135; 1960 - 12,709; 1970 -11,855; 1980 - 13,580. When the decline was most noticeable, it likely reflected the reasons for the rural population decline in the state as a whole during the same period: urban migration, industrialization, elimination of the share-cropper system brought about by mechanization of agriculture, and the decline in the importance of cotton as a cash crop.

12. Interview with Mrs. V. I., 9 March 1986.

13. Telephone interviews with Mrs. C. W. M. and Mrs. M. G. M., 13 April 1986.

14. Interview with Mrs. M. M., 12 May 1986.

15. Interview with Mrs. M. G. M., 13 April 1986. Kasimer Kiefel's son, Frank, served for many years as the church organist at St. Mary's, was a local cotton broker, and operated grocery stores in the area.

16. Rev. Klein was assigned to St. Mary's from 1894 to March 1907. In a Diocesan letter dated November 30, 1913, Klein wrote, "there were 51 families of newly immigrated Russian-German families [in Plantersville, 17 July 1894], 2 Irish families, no church, no parsonage, no school and no money among these poor people." Diocesan records indicate that as early 1873, a Rev. Orzechowsky was assigned to the area using a church built "at public subscription by non-Catholics" on the eastern side of Plantersville. St. Mary's, which dates as a mission church from 1866, is the second Catholic church built in Plantersville. Klein's parents, who settled in Indiana ca. 1860 were immigrants from Alsace-Lorraine, the same area from which many Germans from Russia originally emigrated. Supporting the information feedback theory of emigration, which holds that settlers migrate to unknown areas through correspondence from family or friends already settled there, one informant (Mrs. M. G. M.) related that Klein was directly instrumental in assisting emigrants from abroad to relocate to Plantersville,. At the time there were two Catholic dioceses in Texas, one at Galveston founded in 1847, the second at San Antonio, founded in 1874. Rev. Klein was reassigned to Mentz, Texas, March 9, 1907 and died June 4, 1920 in a parish house in Waco.

17. Like their newly neighbored Germans from Russia, most Polish Texans kept their own language in their church services and small communities. See Baker, First Polish Americans, 138-141. See also, History of Grimes County, Land of Heritage and Progress, 376 and Dworaczyk, First Polish Colonies, 177.

18. Gallagher's letter and other records are located in the Catholic Archives of Texas in Austin; see folder entitled, "Plantersville."

19. For a discussion of these and other Texas graveyards and funerary customs, see Terry G. Jordan, Texas Graveyards: A Cultural Legacy(Austin, 1966).

20. See Terry G. Jordan, "Forest Folk, Prairie Folk: Rural Religious Cultures in North Texas," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 80 (October, 1976): 135-162.

21. D. W. Meinig, Imperial Texas: An Interpretive Essay in Cultural Geography (Austin, 1969), 65.

22. Sallet, Russian-German Settlements, 40-41. There are any number of areas to which these immigrants might have moved, for Texas is a large state, and they might or might not have settled at Plantersville. But the familial connection between the people settled in Plantersville and the aforementioned colonies is great. See Karl Stumpp, Die Auswanderrung aus Deutschland nach Russland in den Jahren 1763 bis 1862 (Tubingen, 1974).

23. Sallet, Russian-German Settlements, 40. The History of Grimes County, 436, relates that one Jacob Mock and his wife Magdalena Faeth settled in Montgomery County in the 1890s, but "would travel to Colorado to harvest the beet and potato crops." This same Jacob Mock, according to his petition for naturalization, was born in "Odessa, Russia" and arrived at New York on 11 November 1899, but had lived in Texas since 15 November 1899. A smudged correction in the original document may cause the latter date to be suspect. Brenham is but 41 miles west and south of Plantersville. See also Sallet, Russian-German Settlements, 41, in which he describes another migration out of Plantersville by Black Sea colonists to settle in Park City, Kansas, with Volga Germans already settled there.

24. Sallet, Russian-German Settlements, 30.

25. Sallet also cites the census as listing 885 first generation and 2,301 first and second generation; see Russian-German Settlements, 111. Of this total only 600 are believed to have been Catholic Black Sea immigrants. A cursory examination of the 1910 census indicated a total of 5736 born in Russia, statewide.

26. Discrepancies in population figures have many causes. For a discussion of Sallet's North Dakota figures, see William C. Sherman, "Census Difficulties and Richard Sallet's Analysis of the Russian-German Population in North Dakota," Heritage Review 13-14 (April, 1976): 32-36. Even by the 1936 Centennial edition of The Texas Almanac & State Industrial Guide (Dallas, 1936), a 512 page "Reference book on the Resources, Industries, Commerce, History, Government, Population, and all other subjects relating to the political, civic and economic development of Texas," one finds on page 133, "The Greek, Italian, and Russian populations of Texas are usually town and city dwellers and are devoted to commercial rather than agricultural pursuits. This is true, too, of the Jewish population, which is not shown separately in the census tables, being included largely with the German and Russian figures." See Bernard Marinback, Galveston: Ellis Island of the West (Albany, 1983), for a history of the role Galveston played in Jewish immigration into America. Though a great number of Jewish immigrants entered Texas through the Port of Galveston, many of the "Russians" listed in the census are Germans from Russia, still unknown to most of the writers of the period. This same Almanac, early editions of which were clearly designed to attract immigrants to Texas, had ceased publication between 1873 and 1904. Nevertheless, Earl Wesley Fornell, The Galveston Era (Austin, 1961), 129, states that by 1860, "100,000 copies were printed in German and distributed in Europe. Many immigrants who came to Galveston carried it "'like a Bible!'"

27. Dr. C. C. Young, a German from Russia, helped Alex Albright create "probably the world's largest Karakul sheep ranch" in this area. Through the help of President Theodore Roosevelt and the csar of Russia, breeding stock were imported from Russia and Karakul woolen coats, costing upwards of $2,000 each were sold to the royalty of Europe. See Jack Loftin, Trails through Archer: A Centennial History--1880-1980 (Burnet, Texas, 1979), 458.

28. Katherine Christian Douthitt, ed., Romance and Dim Trails: A History of Clay County(Dallas, 1938), 138.

29. Loftin, Trails through Archer, 286.

30. Walter Prescott Webb and H. Bailey Carroll, eds., The Handbook of Texas (Austin 1951) 2: 923.

31. Ruth Jones O'Keefe, Archer County Pioneers (Hereford, Texas, 1969), 74.

32. United States census, microfilmed manuscript schedules of population, 1900, Clay County, Texas. Also U. S. District Court, naturalization records, Clay County, Texas.

33. W. A. Bullinger, "Texas Germans from Russia," ms., n.p., n.d.

34. Loftin, Trails through Archer, 456. See also William Charles Taylor, A History of Clay County (Austin, 1974).

35. Weaver, Germans in the Panhandle-Plains Region, 31.

36. Hermann Dalton, "Reformed Colonies in South Russia," trans., Theodore Charles Wenzlaff, Work Paper of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia 3 (February 1970) : 20.

37. United States census, microfilmed manuscript schedules of population, 1910, Archer County, Texas, Sheets 12B-21B.

38. O'Keefe, Archer County Pioneers, 74.

39. Dianna Everett and Cathey Kelly, "First, You Work: Germans from Russia to Texas," Panhandle-Plains Historical Review 56 (1983): 65-83.

40. Telephone interview with Mrs. T. D., 4 April 1980.