Mennonite East and West Reserve bus tours announced
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As the Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society continues to celebrate the milestone of the 150th anniversary of Mennonite settlement in the province, the organization with support from the Plett Foundation has announced they will host bus tours on both sides of the river.
Historians Conrad Stoesz and Ernie Braun will host an East Reserve bus tour on Oct. 10, while Stoesz while host the West Reserve tour on Oct. 22.
Stoesz, who is president of the MMHS and archivist at Canadian Mennonite University said the pair of tours give people the opportunity to tour some of the less travelled sites important to Manitoba Mennonite history.
While only single bus tours of each side of the river are planned for this year, Stoesz said they hope to do another pair of tours in 2025.
The East Reserve tour on Oct. 10 will leave from CMU in Winnipeg but participants from outside the city are able to join the tour at their first stop, the Mennonite landing site at the junction of the Red and Rat rivers.
They will go on to visit the Schantz cairn, home to the Schantz immigration sheds, move on to the Red River Cart in Niverville, and tour the Chortitz Heritage Church where they’ll have lunch. A few more locations could also be included.
“At each of those places there are different stories that will be told,” he said.
One of those includes an incident that took place when the Mennonites were at the immigration sheds looking for water. While digging a well, Stoesz said they had a cave-in in which two men almost died. That concerned the community who were worried their future home sites would also have challenges accessing water.
They were assured that was not the case and were pleased to find out that prediction was true.
“There’s I think 30 people buried somewhere in that area, those first people that died in the first few months at the immigration sheds,” he said.
The West Reserve tour on Oct. 22 will begin at Fort Dufferin, the site that Mennonites landed in 1875 and one that had been used only a few years earlier by the Northwest Mounted Police and the Boundary Trail Commission.
Staying at the site for six weeks, it was there they decided to move forward as one church body, though they had arrived as two.
But the stay there was no picnic.
“Young Jacob Fehr writes in his diary later on, it says that almost every day there is a death of a child,” Stoesz said.
The tour will travel west to the Edenburg cemetery, the Neuanlage cairn near Gretna and Neubergthal, a national historic site featuring restored housebarns.
Those who don’t want to start the tour in Winnipeg can catch up to it at Fort Dufferin instead.
The tour will cost $60 per person and tickets can be secured at www.mmhs.org/tour.
