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The Post Road

by Conrad Stoesz

Mennonite Village Reinland, The Old Post Road, 1883, sketched by artist Richard N. Lea who emigrated from Birmingham, England in 1880 and settled in the Pembina Crossing area. He often traveled between his home and Emerson where he owned a business. This sketch is the only known depiction of a post from the Post Road. Courtesy of Mennonite Heritage Centre

Imagine travelling along the virgin prairie of southern Manitoba over a hundred years ago, perhaps following a buffalo or Indian trail, on a grassy flat plain without hill or stone almost as endless as the ocean. Off in the far westerly distance, over forty miles away, is the hazy bluish outline of the Pembina Hills. You travel by horse or on foot, perhaps towing a cart, along a trail worn into the landscape that meanders around the wet marshy areas. The only trees you see are the small scrubby trees hugging the banks of rivers and streams.¹ Now imagine this picture in winter during a blizzard. No landmarks guide you, no yard lights, no roads, no trees, just a featureless white landscape to navigate in the cold blowing snow.

These are the conditions that the early Mennonite settlers had to contend with when they first settled on the West Reserve. They landed at Fort Dufferin in July 1875, after a long journey from south Russia. They remained at the fort until it was decided in which village each family would settle and where these villages were going to be located. No one else wanted to settle the open prairie because of the lack of trees. There were no easily accessible trees for heating, for building houses, barns, not even trees for building fences for their animals. Once on the land they built houses out of the prairie sod and grasses. For temporary shelters, these sod houses worked well for the new settlers. They were warm in winter and cool in summer, but tended to melt away when it rained hard.² Some wood was gathered before winter from stands of trees a few miles away. In winter they continued to collect wood³ and there is evidence that a few years later some people bought land in the USA for the purpose of harvesting trees.⁴ Even Oberschultz Müller is reported to have bought some timberland along the Pembina River and resold it at cost to the settlers.⁵

Once shelter was taken care of they broke a bit of land for the spring and prepared for the winter ahead. It did not take long to realize the harshness of the winter and the difficulty of travel. There were some wagon trails and small paths going here and there, perhaps to the well, to the neighbors, or to the other villages. There were no paved, lit highways – only prairie, grass, and mosquitoes. Some of these paths or trails are shown in notebooks of surveyors in 1875. Their notes are the earliest historical records of the Mennonite presence on the West Reserve.

Oberschultz (district director) Isaak Müller whom the non-Mennonites called Kaiser Müller⁶, took initiative in calling a meeting of all the village Schultzen.⁷ In a letter dated May 17, 1878 from the village of Neuhorst Müller laid out the plans to mark the most commonly traveled path.⁸

The Schultzen⁹ were instructed to prepare posts, ten feet long and six inches in diameter, for the new road to Emerson – one for every homestead. Blumenort was to erect them on Monday, the 20th of this month, starting from Emerson. The posts were to be placed fifteen rods apart and in a line with the mileposts. Neuhorst followed, then Kronsthal, then Rosenort. Tuesday Neuendorf, Schoenwiese, and Reinland were to proceed. For every twenty miles of road they could use three wagonloads and ten men with spades and chisels. The workers should be prepared to spend three days and improve the road at the same time.¹⁰

With this directive the people of the Old Colony set aside time from their busy lives to work at marking the road. They dug the postholes by hand on the north side of the road.¹¹ According to one artist of the time, the posts had a tapered onion dome crown on them.¹²

This trail was used by people on the West Reserve, as well as those outside of it. It was used as a settlement road by hundreds of settlers who settled the southwestern portion of Manitoba. In 1879-1880 many settlers from Ontario came along this road to establish new communities further west.¹³ All their belongings, including lumber, pianos and machinery traveled along this road.¹⁴ Once settled, the new settlers’ closest and most important trading and commercial point was the town of Emerson.

The concept of road markers was not a new one. In Russia, as early as the 1700s, tall wooden verst¹⁵ posts marked some roads. These posts were put on either side of the road, painted, and inscribed marking the year they were erected in Russian and German letters.¹⁶ Later some roads in Russia had small ditches running alongside with posts marking the distance to the next stopping station, an idea implemented by Peter the Great.¹⁷ Still other roads had small stone pyramids marking the road at certain intervals.¹⁸ In the Mennonite areas of Russia, the road from the Chortitza Colony over the Dnieper River and on to the Crimea was marked with posts.¹⁹ Travel in winter remained hazardous on the Russian steppes because the posts planted one verst away were not much help in a storm. Travelers knew they were coming to Mennonite areas when they saw posts denoting that they were entering Mennonite land.²⁰ Traveling in the Mennonite areas during storms was easier because of the trees planted alongside the road; the treetops could be followed, guiding them on their journey.²¹

This concept of using posts as markers was not a new idea in North America either.²² In 1825, an oak post was erected along the 49th parallel near what is now Emerson, with U.S.A carved in one side and G.B on the other. By 1870 another post was erected, marking a whiskey smuggling enterprise near what is now Gretna²³. The Mennonite Post Road in Manitoba was unique because no other trail or road was as well marked as the Post Road. It had posts every 250 feet, whereas other roads had them over a kilometer apart.

The Post Road began in a straight westerly line from Emerson and continued just south of present-day Halbstadt and past Edenburg. It continued through the village of Neuanlage, and then ran north of Blumengart and Neuhorst. From there it began to meander in a northwesterly direction, passing through the villages of Schoenwiese, Reinland, Hochfeld, Osterwick, Waldheim, and ending south of Morden in Mountain City.²⁴

This article continues in the September, 2000 Mennonite Historian.

Endnotes

John H. Warkentin, “The Mennonite Settlements of Southern Manitoba” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Toronto, 1960), pp. 6-9. Kliewer family fonds, Centre For Mennonite Brethren Studies (CMBS), Winnipeg, small collections “K”. David Schellenberg collection, CMBS, small collections, “S”. Johann Wall Collection, Mennonite Heritage Centre (MHC) Volume 1706, File #3 has a map showing land with timber lots marked on it. A letter dated December 8, 1999, from the Register of Deeds Office, Cavalier, North Dakota confirms that the land this map represents (the NE1/4 of section 12-163-55, 2.5 miles south of the Canadian border) was bought by Johann Wall from Joseph Cyr in 1878. Letter in possession of author. The Altona Echo, June 28, 1944. Francis Gerhard Enns, Gretna: Window on the Northwest (Altona, Manitoba: Village of Gretna History Committee, 1987) p. 11. Recollections of David Schellenberg, 1944. Small collection “S” at CMBS. This path may have been an old Indian or Buffalo trail worn into the terrain and used by the settlers. Schultz is a village mayor who is responsible to the people in the village and to the Oberschultz who supervised all the mayors in the area. Rosenort Village Organization, MHC, Volume 1099, file 27 “An die Schulzen Aemter”, translated by John Dyck. Some sources have other dimensions for the posts and the distance in between them. For example Enns lists the posts as fourteen feet long (page 12) and seven inches in diameter (page 11). Here the distance between them is listed as seventy-five strides. Ted Friesen in his book Altona Centennial History Tour July 27-28, 1995 (Altona, Manitoba: Altona Centennial Committee, 1995), lists the posts as seventy-five feet apart (page 7). Perhaps the new replacement posts would have been slightly different from the originals accounting for the difference in descriptions. Telephone interview with Ingvar Lindin of Gretna on March 4, 1999 at 3:30 pm. by Conrad Stoesz. Richard N. Lea emigrated from Burmingham England in 1880. He settled in the Pembina Crossing area. He owned a business in Emerson. He traveled back and forth from his home to Emerson many times. He made this sketch depicting the village of Reinland and a post from the Post Road in 1883. Now property of Felix Kuehn, Winnipeg, it is the only known picture of a post of the Post Road. The Altona Echo, June 28, 1944. Warkentin, p.155. One verst is 1.06 km or 0.66 miles. Paul Shott, “The Role of Highways and Land Carriage in Tsarist Russia” (Ph.D. Thesis, University of Oklahoma, 1982), p.98 Shott, p.99. J.G. Kohl, Russia. St. Petersburg, Moscow, Kiiarkoff, Riga, Odessa, the German Provinces on the Baltic, the Steppes, the Crimea and the Interior of the Empire, (London, England: Chapman and Hall, 1842), p.410. Kurt Kauenhowen, Mitteilungen des Sippenverbandes der Danziger Mennoniten-Familien (Goettingen, Germany: Kurt Kauenhowen, 1940), p.69. Arnold Dyck, Warte Jahrbuch für die Mennonitische Gemeinschaft in Canada (Steinbach, Manitoba: Arnold Dyck, 1944), p.76. N.J. Kroeker, First Mennonite Villages in Russia 1789-1943 Khortitsa – Rosenthal (Vancouver, British Columbia, 1981), p.109. There is a road named the Boston Post Road in the New England States that was marked in the early to mid 1600s. Managing Travel in Connecticut: 100 Years of Progress, Connecticut Department of Transportation 100 Year History, 1995, p.1. “100 Years Ago: Boundary Commission Marks 49 Parallel”, Volume 1073 file no. 1 at Mennonite Heritage Center archives. The earliest map of the Post Road is in E.K. Francis, In Search of Utopia, (Altona, Manitoba: D.W. Friesen & Sons Ltd., 1955), p. 68. Later maps all confirm this basic outline.

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Last modified October 30, 2000.

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