GER-VOLGA-L Archives

Archiver > GER-VOLGA > 2005-08 > 1123169200


From: "G Martens" <>
Subject: Sutton, Nebraska
Date: Thu, 04 Aug 2005 10:26:40 -0500
In-Reply-To: <380-2200584414027900@M2W090.mail2web.com>


Notes about Sutton from "Russian-German Settlements in the
United States" by Richard Sallet. This notes are in the order they
appear in the book, and aren't in chronological order:

1. The colony of Sutton, Nebraska also expanded westward. Thus
we find Black Sea German in Merrick County. In 1892 the first
people, partly from Sutton and partly from Scotland, South Dakota,
moved into the region of Butte and Naper in Boyd County,
Nebraska, and populated this county, rather heavily.

2. The Black Sea Germans at Loveland (Colorado), LaSalle and
Windsor came from Sutton, Nebraska as late as 1901 when the
first sugarbeet refineries were being built there. .. Of later date
are settlements at Keota (Colorado) and Holyoke. Holyoke is
likewise a daughter settlement of Sutton.

3. The small settlement in Aurora, Illinois goes back to 1890 and is
an offshoot of Sutton, Nebraska.

4. In 1885 immigrants from the region along the Kutschurgan River
who had settled at Scotland (South Dakota) resettled on
homesteads southwest of Ipswich, South Dakota; the people from
Crimea at Freeman, South Dakota moved in 1886 o the Catholic
settlement at Zeeland-Hague, North Dakota, while those from
Beresan at Sutton, Nebraska, migrated on farther to Albion,
Nebraska, where their community still exists.

5 In 1874 first colonists came from Balzer to Lincoln. In the same
year one of the leaders of the Black Sea German settlement to
Sutton, Nebraska sent a German language newspaper to several
German Colonies, which surely contained advertisements for
settling in Sutton. Eight families from Balzer which had originally
settled in Red Oak, Iowa, and were very homesick in their isolation
there, heard of the Black Sea German countrymen at Sutton and
resettled there in 1875. These then were the first Volga Germans
in Sutton.

In those first years, Sutton served as a base camp for the
Evangelical Volga Germans, and it was Sutton from which they
expanded father. Those with greater means settled on farm land at
Sutton. But most of them were poor and had to go into the larger
cities such as Omaha and Lincoln to find work or more on to
Colorado. Usually, however, they stayed on in Sutton for a while
until they had recovered from the strain of their journey, and it is
remarkable how, to all who even made a temporary stop in Sutton,
this village remained unforgettable. It represented their home town
in the New World.

6. The settlement of Sutton also spread out in a northerly and
westerly direction. Thus in 1888 we find people from Kutter in
Henderson, Nebraska.

7. The first Evangelical Volga Germans reached the states on the
west coast as early as 1881. At that time a large group of colonists
from Kolb came to Ritzville, Washington, after having first been in
Sutton, then Culbertson, Nebraska, and being forced to migrate
farther due to crop failure.

8. Loveland in the South Platte Valley has he oldest settlement [in
Colorado]. In May 1901 some twenty families, most of them
originating in Frank, Russia, came from McCook, Nebraska.
Others arrived in the same year from Denver, Sutton and Hastings.


This thread: