The steam engine of the Kansas Pacific screeched to a halt near Globeville, just north of Denver. It was 1880 and the first German Russian sons debarked to take jobs as section hands for the railroad after a crop failure in their adopted Kansas. Daughters followed, and then whole families, church groups, and communities. Many more came from Russia: evangelicals from the Volga region, Catholics and Mennonites from the Black Sea. By 1900, German Russians became the dominant minority in Northern Colorado.
The migration began with Catherine the Great’s promise in 1763. This is your land for eternal time, she declared to the German States, if you settle the Russian frontier on the Volga River. It came with a 30-year exemption from taxes, guaranteed religious freedom, and no military service.
Tens of thousands moved from their ancestral homes. They cultivated the Russian Steppes and built prosperous farms, while holding fast to their German traditions.
After Catherine came Czar Alexander II’s “russification” programs. German ways were outlawed, taxes enforced and military conscription prevailed. “Go to America,” urged the Reverend Wilheim Stirkel in village gatherings. Even after 100 years in Russia, many chose to leave.
Railroads and a familiar landscape beckoned them to the Midwest prairies. In northern Colorado, the railroads had land for sale cheap. Grasslands became new fields to sow with the seeds of the red wheat they brought from the Steppes. They prodded fruits and vegetables from the parched soil. Sunflower seeds became a staple snack.
Then came the sugar beets needed by the Great Western Sugar Company. Planting, nurturing and harvesting was “stoop labor.” Every farm required the whole family. School would wait. The German Russians could do the work.
Unser leit – our people – they called themselves. Church was their mainstay, family their obsession. They lived, laughed, worked and, in scarce leisure time, danced the “Dutch hop” to the sounds of the hammered dulcimer. Oral tradition dominated. Folk and religious songs interrupted the stories told in gatherings. Neighbors brought wedding invitations to your door with a verse crafted for the occasion. Funerals drew hundreds.
They were industrious and frugal. The first generation lived in quickly built shanty towns beside the sugar beet factories. The next generations bought the land they tilled and built communities throughout Larimer, Weld and the counties of northeastern Colorado. Boulder County benefited from wheat growers who made Longmont the “Minneapolis of the Rockies.”
It was never easy. After hard beginnings, families suffered discrimination as Germans during two world wars, with KKK crosses burnt before their eyes. They stayed connected to loved ones back home in both Russia and Germany. They missed them, as a popular folk song laments:
Beside the gushing brooks the willows hang,
In the valleys patches of snow remain.
Dear child, that I must go
And leave our homeland behind —
Pains my poor heart so!
Still, they held nothing back. Second and third generations diversified. They became business entrepreneurs like the Anschutz family in energy and the Erhlichs in automotive. They became teachers, sculptors and civil servants. Landmarks, such as Brantner Gulch (an eight-mile long watershed tributary to the South Platte River south of E-470 along US 85) are named for them. They founded hospitals, charities and countless churches.
From the beginning, Germans from Russia have gathered history, genealogy and folklore to preserve their rich history. Northern Colorado boasts the birthplace of the International Historical Society of Germans from Russia located on the CSU campus. A local chapter of German Russian descendants is the largest in the United States, publishes a newsletter and hosts dinners quarterly.
Their roots in the land still live. They live in the title of the song from the late John Denver, born Deutschendorf, a German Russian, which is called “Take Me Home, Country Roads.” They live in many of the farms of Northern Colorado, still owned and operated by descendants of Germans from Russia. They live 250 years after first settling the Volga in what Catherine the Great called their “land for eternal time.” She just never knew it would be in Colorado.