This webpage is a gateway
to information about the Pelee Island Mennonites. I have constructed it to help draw attention to their experience.
My research interest
in Canadian Mennonite/s writing springs, in part, from my Russian Mennonite heritage and my closeness with my Mennonite family. Photo: The author with her opa. (c) N. G. Wiebe
My father spent his childhood years in small Mennonite farming community on Pelee Island, Ontario, Canada, enjoying what one of his brothers calls their “Tom Sawyer childhood”-- floating on logs that they, unbeknownst to their parents, had set adrift in Lake Erie; paddling a leaky boat in the canals; and retrieving the pheasants shot by Michigan millionaires who visited the island each year to hunt.
My father’s father didn’t have as lighthearted a childhood. Ewald Gerhard Wiebe grew up in the Molotoschna colony, a Mennonite settlement in the Ukraine, during the aftermath of World War I and the Russian Revolution. Recently, I learned that my opa and his best friend, as 12 year olds, had the job of burying in mass graves the Mennonites from their village who had died from starvation and epidemic.
In 1924, my opa and the surviving members of his immediate family (his father and eldest brother died of starvation) were among the thousands of Mennonites who emigrated to Canada from Russia. The family was billeted in different Amish homes in the St. Jacob’s area of Ontario until they, and several other Russian Mennonite families (six in all), accepted the invitation of an American sharecropper to farm tobacco on Pelee Island. The United and Brethren/Alliance Mennonite settlement (1925-1950), peaked at about 114 members in 1928 (Koop, 1999). It has traditionally been overlooked in the histories of the island. To date, little has been published on the Pelee Island Mennonites.
One of the first planes to land on Pelee Island (circa late 1920s). My opa, Ewald G. Wiebe, is the young man with arms akimbo. (c) N. G. Wiebe