THE MENNONITE BROTHERHOOD IN RUSSIA (1789 - 1910), P. M. Friesen, 1911

rated upon in what follows. 4. a) Outwardly, the Molotschna church scene took on the following §73 form in 1860: the “Large Congregation" had parishes in Lichtenau, Petershagen, Margenau, Schoensee and Pordenau with Elders Duerk Warkentin in Petershagen and Heinrich Toews in Pordenau. This group comprised more than three quarters of the population 3 of the fifty-five (58) villages 4 (and landed estates) of the “Molotschna Mennonite District" (or area) in the District of Berdiansk, Taurida, with the “Colony Administrative Office” in Halbstadt (actually Neu-Halbstadt) and a mayoral office 5 at the head of every colony (village). The Colony Administrative Office consisted of a colony adminis- trator and two assistants elected for a period of three years, a hired secretary and a few secretarial assistants. A mayor and two assistants, also elected, filled every village office. Besides these there existed the formerly very powerful “Agricultural Society” (a chairman, two vice chairmen, and a recording secretary). For eighteen years (1848-1865) the nearly all-powerful David Friesen of Halbstadt was colony administrator, Peter Schmidt of Steinbach, where the office was located, for many years the chairman of the society. All of the officials, with the exception of the secretaries, were elected by majority vote by the farmers, that is, the landowners, and had to be Mennonites. All parishes were structured according to the desires of the members who lived, accordingly as they saw fit, in any colony or even outside the colonies on landed estates. An elder might live in one colony, where there was a church, and yet not be active in it but in the church in another place. (Franz Goerz, Jr., the Rudnerweide elder, for example, lived in Gandenfeld.) Every village had a one-room school ; Halbstadt had a one-classroom intermediary, district, or secondary school to train school teachers or secretaries, which later developed into a multi-room, and eventually into a seven-room school (including the two-classroom model school and the two pedagogical classes); Ohrloff had a one-room school run by a society (later three rooms); Gnadenfeld and Steinbach each had a one-room private school (the one in Gnadenfeld— compare above #52 “Brotherhood 204 THE MENNONITE BRETHREN CHURCH School”— later became a three-room secondary school). The teachers of these “advanced” schools, as they were respectfully called, were: Gustav Rempel in Halbstadt, Hermann Janzen in Ohrloff, Heinrich Franz, Sr., and shortly after 1860, Johann and Friedrich Lange in Gandenfeld and Peter Neufeld in Steinbach. Shortly after 1860, Heinrich Franz had his own private school in Gnadenfled. The members of the following congregations: Ohrloff-Halbstadt (and since 1863 Neukirch) with Elder (Bernhardt Fast of Tiege, d. 1860, and) Johann Harder of Blumenstein; Rudnerweide— Elder Benjamin Ratzlaff in Rudnerweide, and since 1861 Franz Goerz of Gnadenfeld;