Notes from the Editor
There is no need to send us letters of complaint about the shortened length of this issue of Preservings. As an experiment, I have decided to publish two issues a year. This issue will focus on how Manitoba Mennonites have interacted with the railway. The following issue, which will explore the theme of Mennonites and the railway in Mexico, Paraguay, and Russia, will be in your mailboxes sometime in April. Two issues a year allows for more flexibility with our content and the possibility of lengthening the journal. And most importantly, for our Mennonite audience, the cost of Preservings will not increase; readers will actually receive more Mennonite history for their $20 contribution.
Over the course of its twenty-five-year history, Preservings has explored a variety of topics related to Mennonite history. While individual authors have tackled railroads in their submissions, we have never had an issue (in this case two) dedicated to the topic. This is not surprising as traditionally Mennonites have formed an ambiguous relationship with trains. While railroads have been essential to the development of Mennonite communities, offering paths to new homelands and connecting the Mennonites to agricultural markets, they have also brought the world into Mennonite villages and created easy escape routes for those curious about city life. Some Mennonite communities have sought to integrate the railway into their villages in very specific ways, hoping to reap the economic benefits and simultaneously limit cultural interference.
When I put out the request for articles, I wondered about the type of responses I would receive. Not surprisingly, the theme of markets dominated the materials submitted. Indeed, the economic implications of the railway for Mennonite communities in western Canada looms large in this conversation. As Hans Werner shows, the railway carried benefits into some communities while leaving others to witness the billowing smoke of progress from afar. Undoubtedly, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the railway had the capacity to determine economic prosperity for towns and the surrounding communities more than roads, schools, and co-operatives.
Although railways reoriented space, the results were not unfavourable for every community that shunned such direct access to the city and the progress or worldliness – depending on your interpretation – that it promised. Steinbach thrived without a railway, as Ralph Friesen has shown, through a combination of a strong local identity that kept people rooted in the community and a willingness to develop intermediary routes to reaching the railway in Giroux. Steinbach’s proximity to Winnipeg, however, helped to create the possibility for this alternative path, which raises questions about the prospect of replicating this particular model of engaged isolationism.
It was not only Mennonite communities that demonstrated their ambivalence to the idea of the railway; some Canadian communities also expressed their hesitation with the influx of immigrants that seemed to accompany the laying of such tracks. The Community Progress Competitions, run by the Canadian National Railway, reflected the tensions embedded in an economy that required a larger population and the cultural clashes that accompanied the integration of these diverse ethnic and linguistic groups into Canadian society. In James Urry’s analysis of these competitions, both the strong vision of progress articulated by the judges and the apparent buy-in from Mennonites are striking and raise questions about the willingness of rural Mennonites to embrace measurements of merit initiated from outside the community.
While these articles address a number of important themes related to railroads, there are still many within the Canadian context yet to be researched. One of those themes is depicted on the cover: Mennonite men in Canada building the railway as conscientious objectors during the Second World War. Not only did railroad-building offer Mennonites a somewhat respectable alternative to military service, but trains would become essential in facilitating the travel of religious leaders as they established regional, national, and international communities. Although the railway challenged the values of Mennonite communities in a number of ways, it also created new spaces for the preservation and promotion of those same values.
Personal family histories are also closely connected to the experience of the railway. Migration stories from the 1870s often feature trains, as Mennonites sped through the European countryside, enthralled by the views out the window, but also suffocated by the smoke of the steam engine. Within my own family, my paternal grandfather, Isaac Dyck, engaged in freighthopping as he rode the train from Manitoba into the United States in search of work during the Great Depression. While these individualized stories might seem to have little historical significance, in reality they reveal the ways in which Mennonite life was shaped by the rails.