THE BERRY MEADOW ARCHIVE - Mountain Light School

PREFACE
Berry Meadow Archive Origins
by Richard Scheuerman
In the summer of 1766, eighty intrepid families from the rolling Vogelsberg district north of
Frankfurt, a. M. anxiously gathered in the city of Büdingen to begin a momentous and perilous journey
eastward. They were fleeing poverty and oppressive conditions that had long prevailed in Hesse in hopes
of finding new lives of opportunity in Russia in response to Tsarina Catherine the Great‟s famed 1763
“Manifesto of the Empress” inviting foreigners to colonize the vast untamed Volga region. These eighty
families joined together for the year-long trek via St. Petersburg and Moscow and eventually reached their
destination in August 1767 when they founded the village of Yagodnaya Polyana (Berry Meadow) in a
wooded valley surrounded by rolling grasslands about forty miles north of Saratov on the hilly, western
side (Bergseite) of the Volga. After several brutal years adjusting to conditions on the Russian frontier,
these German families and others who established a hundred other Volga German villages in the region
began to slowly prosper. In the 1850s the expanding colonists were given additional lands east of the
Volga where the residents of Yagodnaya Polyana and neighboring Pobotschnoye established New
Yagodnaya (1855), Schöntal (1856), Schöndorf (1857), and Schönfeld (1858) in the province of Samara
along a tributary of the Volga, the Yeruslan River. In spite of their evocative names (Pleasant Valley,
Pleasant Village, Pleasant Field), agricultural life in the drier Wiesenseite (Plains Side) of the Volga was
challenging and remote from the mother colonies which explains why the first immigrants from these
families to journey to America came from these daughter colonies.
Unpopular policies undertaken by Tsar Alexander II‟s in the 1870s to Russify the colonists,
religious persecution, and economic challenges led many Volga Germans to once again seek new
opportunities. For these reasons they began immigrating to United States as early as 1876. Over the next
four decades those with ties to Yagodnaya Polyana settled in Kansas, Oregon, Washington, Oklahoma,
Maryland, New York, and Wisconsin as well as in Alberta, Canada, and Argentina. The communities
formed by “Yagaders” in these places continued to perpetuate cultural distinctions well into the twentieth
century. Moreover, in the course of two centuries members of virtually all the original colonist families
had extensively intermarried with each other. In the 1960s of my youth in Washington‟s rural Palouse, for
example, our cousins and closest neighbors bore names like Lautenschlager, Repp, Lust, Schmick/Smick,
Gerlitz, Kleweno, and Morasch—each descended from a single family that had gathered for the trek from
Hesse to Russia that summer day in 1766. Persons interested in their heritage were challenged by these
familial complexities, and the fact that access to Russian census records and other archival materials was
denied throughout the Soviet period. Contact with Volga German families who had remained in Russia
and subsequently deported to Central Asia and Siberia during World War II was also severely restricted.
I became aware as a youth raised near the rural community of Endicott, Washington that a vast
constellation of relatives safeguarded knowledge of our family‟s heritage. This awareness was preserved
in stories handed down from generation to generation by individuals like my Grandfather Karl
Scheuerman and our Great Aunt Lizzie Repp, in the writings of Great Aunt Mae Poffenroth Geier,
through tape-recorded interviews of Endicott elders by historian Gordon Lindeen in the 1950s, and in the
many old photograph scrapbooks featuring faded images of stolid, unsmiling relatives lined up around a
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