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In 1925, the invitation of an Ohio tobacco farmer to sharecrop his land on tiny Pelee Island in Southwestern Ontario offered a new start to 38 refugees. Six Mennonite families were among the thousands of German-speaking Mennonites fleeing the Soviet Union (present-day Russia and Ukraine) in the troubled years following the Russian Revolution. The Island Mennonite people were either Frisian, from Northern Holland, with names such as Wiebe, or Flemish from Southern Holland, with names such as Dick (originally Dyck). The ancestors of these Anabaptist-Mennonite families had left the Netherlands in the mid-16th century due to religious persecution. After two centuries in Poland/Prussia, they migrated to the southern lands of the Russian Empire and settled in what is today Ukraine. The Mennonite people prospered there for over 100 years, but in early 20th century, revolution, world war, and civil war brought death and destruction to their communities and families. And so in the 1920s, about 25,000 Mennonites left the Soviet Union for Canada, United States, Brazil, and Paraguay.
The first Pelee Mennonite families arrived via Kitchener-Waterloo, Ontario, where they were hosted by the Old Order and Amish Mennonites after arriving in Canada in 1924. Here they were cared for over the fall and winter months. In spring, George Cruikshank, an American businessman from Ohio, came to the Kitchener-Waterloo area. He had heard that people with a farming background had arrived there from Ukraine. In response to his invitation, six families seized the opportunity to sharecrop Cruikshank’s Pelee Island farms.
These first families were soon joined by other Mennonites from Ukraine and Western Canada. By 1928, their immigrant community reached 114 members, forming over 10 percent of the Island’s population at the time. In the 1940s, the desire for their children to have Mennonite friends and spouses, among other reasons, prompted many families to relocate to Leamington and other communities on the Ontario mainland.
The first Island worship service took place in the Anna Wiebe home on Henderson Road in spring of 1925. Later that year the Mission Hall on Henderson Road was used. By 1929, services took place in the Methodist Church building on East and West Road. After 1929, the congregation moved to different homes around the Island, until 1950, when all Mennonites had moved to the Canadian mainland.
This virtual exhibit depicts life on Pelee Island for the smal
