I cannot recall when I became conscious of my registered name, nor that of my home community. Certainly, it was before I began attending our local school where on the first day of arrival my name (borrowed from the book Little Women, which my mother had enjoyed a lot, an aunt once told me) was entered in the school register of the Altbergthal, SD, No. 1296 (a number that I also learned of later).

I did not know anything about our community cemetery but would become acquainted after my grandmother, Maria Dyck Klippenstein, passed away on 16 March 1943 at the age of sixty-four, and my mother, Helena, on 7 November 1944, at the age of thirty-six. Both received local burials.

Of those events, I recall most clearly a short meditation at my grandma’s home before her funeral given by Uncle Bernhard, a public school teacher, who exhorted us (in Low German) to consider all the good things Grandma had brought into our lives, and her expectations, as he had understood them, of her children when they became adults.

Even more indelibly etched in my mind was the customs of gathering the immediate family around the opened casket of a deceased just prior to burial. In these cases, that was the Altbergthal cemetery. I recall very clearly that the day of my mother’s funeral was very rainy and the procession, headed by a horse-drawn wagon for the three miles from the church to the cemetery, took longer than usual. Those standing by my mother’s grave at the end included my dad, and his five sons. My youngest brother, Alvin, was three at the time. My mother and grandmother were the first adult deaths, less than two years apart, in our extended Klippenstein family.¹ I would discover many years later that the location of a number of the Klippenstein family members, going right back to the first migrants to move to the West Reserve in approximately 1890, was a special corner of the cemetery area where still stands the headstones of at least seven members of the clan, including those of my mother and grandmother.²

The village of Bergthal, West Reserve, one could say, began with the movement of people from the South Russian community of Bergthal to Manitoba in 1874–1876. These migrants first settled east of the Red River in a government land grant sector that received the title “East Reserve.”³

Bergthal of the East Reserve was one of the first villages founded by the new Mennonite settlers after arriving in the late summer and early fall of 1874. The sons of Johann Klippenstein, Sr. occupied a number of sections in the neighbourhood of Bergthal, East Reserve. Son Heinrich became a leading landowner fairly early. When a decision was reached by a number of Bergthal families to look for more productive land west of the Red River, all of Johann Sr.’s sons and daughters made the move. Heinrich, however, left about a dozen years later than all the others. Having arrived in the west, they all agreed to settle in one of the new villages of the area, Neubergthal. Heinrich would later settle in Altbergthal. Both “Bergthals” of the West Reserve were established around 1879 and we are left to wonder what kind of discussion ensued between the two to sort this out. There is a theory that suggests they did it by calling one of them the “old” Bergthal or Altbergthal for the Bergthal on Buffalo Creek and the other one could then be called “new” making Neubergthal, the one to the southeast of what would later be the town of Altona.⁴

The most northerly of the village residents, possibly Mr. Johann Wieler, apparently offered land free of charge to be used as a cemetery. It would run up against the creek bank to the west and to the north. Presumably it was assumed that caretaking and maintenance would need to be divided somehow among the other residents. One doesn’t know if burial fees of any kind existed at first. It would be ten years or more until the first burial took place there.

No list of all burials in the cemetery has been found so far. An effort to create a list and situate burial plots already in use, was attempted some years ago by Alvin Klippenstein and Martha Dyck Martens, one still a resident in the community at the time and the other a former resident. Names of persons buried were drawn from individuals with good memories, especially Martha’s grandmother, and burial sites if unmarked were entered that way in notes that came with the map, while existing headstones were deciphered as well as possible. The resulting list thus created comprised a total of some sixty persons, young and old, believed to be buried there.⁵

The Altbergthal cemetery came up for special care and interest when the Bergthaler Mennonite church of Altona decided to celebrate its 125th anniversary in August of 2007. That date was predicated on research which indicated that the roots of the congregation lay in meetings held in the village of Hochstadt beginning in 1882, and the move of that group to Altona in 1912 where a new church building to accommodate this Bergthaler group was constructed.

It was further discovered, or highlighted at least, that the burial plots of the Bergthaler bishop (Aeltester) Johann Funk and his wife Louise, with the original headstones remained intact in the Altbergthal cemetery just a few miles west of the Altona church. It became known further at that time that Bishop Funk, once ordained to serve as a “Bergthaler” Aeltester, in 1882, had retired from his ministry in February 1911, and passed away on 17 March 1917. Many members quickly agreed that a public tribute in the form of a plaque, to be placed in the congregational lobby space, would fit in with the celebrations very well.⁶

The cleanup of the cemetery for that occasion had been managed by two residents of Altbergthal at that time, Henry D. Wiebe and Alvin Klippenstein. They would continue to be involved in the maintenance of the cemetery until Alvin’s death in March of 2010. It would take about five years to rally the energies of family and community to continue the mowing and repairing that maintenance required. For some years it was totally overgrown with tall grass, and the headstones, which Alvin and Henry had repaired for the Funk celebration, had begun to crumble again. There was no fund available at the time to hire the required help.

Access to the grounds had been improved and some offers of clean up again were submitted. A small Altbergthal historical group remained interested but seemed to need more time to make the cleanup project its own. An older project of renovating the old Altbergthal school building was gaining some interest and would soon become a prominent enterprise in the community. Local involvement in cemetery care had faded almost completely, but diaspora (families who had moved out of the district) Altbergthalers were not ready to admit defeat.⁷

We warmly invite interested persons to visit the cemetery as it looks today. Information about locating the site can be obtained from the office of the Bergthaler church in Altona. This congregation retains in its membership a number of families who have once resided as adults or children in the Altbergthal community. It would be a simple matter, once out there, to take a trip to Neubergthal where the old Altbergthal school renovation is being completed. The church office is able to point you in the right direction to get there.⁸

1. See Lawrence Klippenstein, Peter H and Maria Dyck Klippenstein: A Brief Sketch of Their Life and Work ( Steinbach: The Cousins, 2008), 25. Grandpa and Grandma had a large family—thirteen if three infant deaths are added—giving me, in due time, nine married uncles and aunts, with a total of 55 first cousins on my dad’s side. By contrast, on my mother’s side we had only one cousin, with another one deceased in infancy. That provided very different settings for family gatherings. See the hundred and twenty-five years Klippenstein genealogy in Bernhard Klippenstein, comp. and ed., Genealogy of Heinrich Klippenstein 1849–1977. Third Edition (n.p.,self published, 1978.) This title was inadvertently omitted in the published bibliography of the Peter and Maria Dyck Klippenstein volume. ↩︎
2. A story of family upgrading of the headstone and burial site of Johann Klippenstein, a son of Heinrich and Sarah, is related in a note from Dorothy Janzen, daughter of Johann, in a brief “In Memoriam” in a family newsletter, Klippings dated No. 9 (the last in the series as it turned out), March, 2001,(8) It seems that a space created for an urn once held that marker for Tina Schwartz Klippenstein (d. 1964), wife of Johann, though it has now been removed, leaving vacant the opening created to hold the urn. No available record exists of where the urn may have been moved to, or by whom. ↩︎
3. A definitive historical geographic composite portrait of this area has recently been published in Ernest N. Braun and Glen R. Klassen, eds., Historical Atlas of the East Reserve. Illustrated (Steinbach: Manitoba Mennonite Historical Society, 2015), pp. 24ff. Some data on the West Reserve (a land grant more than twice the size of the first, west of Red River) is included on pp. 236ff. It gives special attention to the location and condition of well over 100 cemeteries in this area. A data scrapbook on the former West Reserve is being compiled for publication by Lawrence Klippenstein, chair of the MMHS WestMenn Historical Committee. ↩︎
4. The earliest burials may have happened already in the 1880s. Buffalo Creek allowed the families who chose to join the Altbergthal community to settle along the east bank of the water leaving it with some grassland on either side of the creek for each settler to draw from for feed and water required by horses and cattle—in effect to be the community pasture. Sixteen quarters of land were allotted to Altbergthal, creating the pattern of sixteen householders in a row forming along the east side of the creek, with a few subdividing these lots to add several more families at the height of settlement. Heinrich, who moved to Altbergthal ca 1890 apparently bought one of the existing homesteaded sections, or in time possibly several more—alleged to have made him one of the biggest landowners in the village. For the story of Neubergthal beginnings see Rose Hildebrand and Joyce Friesen, Neubergthal. A Mennonite Street Village. A Sense of Place with Deep Roots (Altona: Neubergthal Heritage Foundation, 2013), 1-102. ↩︎
5. A copy of this map is in the author’s file. ↩︎
6. A summary of the Aeltester Funk ministry to the Bergthalers, along with details of his struggles, e.g. with regard to the higher education issue is found in Lawrence Klippenstein, “Aeltester Johann Funk,” Church, Family and Village, 213 – 228, and Henry J. Gerbrandt, Adventure in Faith. The Background in Europe and the Development of the Bergthaler Mennonite Church (Winnipeg: The Bergthaler Mennonite Church of Manitoba, 1970), 63-118. A report on the Bergthaler Church celebration appears in Elmer Heinrichs, “Fellowship, food abound at Altona Bergthaler’s anniversary,” Heritage Posting, No 58, October, 2007, 1-2. Technically Aeltester Funk headed the West Lynne Mennonite Church at the time of his Aeltester ordination. He continued to hold the position after a Bergthaler church was formally established and recognized in Manitoba ca 1892. ↩︎
7. The school renovation undertaking began in earnest in 2010. Although the old building had been protected, stronger community interest in restoring the building to new and modern uses grew over time. It is now under the umbrella of the Neubergthal Heritage Foundation which brought significant resources to complete at least the exterior and first floor restoration and add washroom facilities as well. ↩︎
8. Anything you might want to know about Neubergthal, now a National Historic Site, can be obtained from owltree@sdnet.ca. If you wish to know something more about Buffalo Creek on which the cemetery at Altbergthal is situated, I can offer the following: the creek, the longest in the municipality, enters Canada from the U.S. just west of the former site of Haskett, continues through the village of Reinland, turns toward the northeast, through the old school district of Neuhoffnung( which was once used the Altbergthal school building till ca 1980, after it closed at the original site in 1964) and on then through Altbergthal and Schoenthal (northwest Altona) to Rosenfeld where it is channelled to reach the Red River at St. Jean on Highway 75. The creek route would make an interesting hike, end to end, mostly in the former West Reserve! A new map is available to help you, so walk on! ↩︎