uring the first half of the sixteenth century, Menno Simons founded a denomination of Christians in Friesland, a province of the Netherlands. Many of these Mennonites settled in Northern Germany. This religious belief was opposed to military service and about the close of the American Revolution the Mennonites began emigrating, until more than fifty thousand of their number had found homes west of the Dneiper, near the Black Sea, in Southern Russia, around Odessa. These people were fanatical in their belief, rejected infant baptism and original sin, believing in baptism only on profession of faith, and were opposed to theological training.
In Russia, as in Germany, they led lives of great simplicity, both secularly and religiously and lived in separate communities.
The gently rolling lands, with a rich soil, responded readily to cultivation, and history proves the Germans always to have been good farmers. The Mennonites found peace and prosperity in southern Russia, until the Crimean war. Being opposed to military service, when Russia began levying heavy taxes on their lands and heavier toll from their families, by taking the strong young men to carry on the war, the Mennonites became dissatisfied under the Russian government, and left the country in great numbers, removing to America, and settling along the Jim river in South Dakota.
