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2 Newton, Kansas A prairie never rests for long, nor does it permit anything else to rest. It has barriers to neither men nor wind and encourages them to run together, which may be why grasslands men are notorious travelers and hard-goers, driven by wind and running with it, wild and free. —John Madson (1982:52) The land on which Emil Walter Haury was born and that nurtured him through childhood and young manhood is a hard land, a place where the wind cuts like a knife and has whittled down the contours of topography to the bare bones. Newton, Kansas, sits on the edge of the tallgrass prairie in the heart of America. Home to a colony of Mennonite pioneers who busted sod and built a community on hard work and turkey red wheat, Newton also was the site of Bethel College, the Mennonite institution that Haury’s father helped to raise from the tall grass and where he taught. In this unique setting, a place where intellectual pursuits, a simple lifestyle, faith, and hard labor merged, nature and nurture combined to shape the person who became the famous archaeologist, the scientist and humanist, an individual with keen intellect and creative insights. Haury was born May 2, 1904, in Newton, Kansas, to Gustav Adolf (1863–1926) and Clara Katharina Ruth (1865–1935) Haury, the youngest of four boys. Family histories in the Mennonite Library and Archives at Bethel College tell that Gustav’s father, Jacob, was born in Bavaria and emigrated to the United States in 1848. Married in Iowa to Maria Schmidt, Jacob Haury moved his family to Moundridge, Kansas, where they produced eleven children, of whom Gustav was the eldest. In the late 1800s, when many Mennonites moved to Kansas from other parts of the Midwest, Kansas had not yet become the completely humanized agrarian landscape that it is today. Prairie grasses still rippled in the wind like ocean waves, and the flat land stretched limitless and featureless in all directions. We could not learn what Jacob Haury did for a living , but we guess that he probably farmed the rich, black Kansas soil that today yields wheat, corn, soybeans, alfalfa, and milo, as did his Mennonite brethren. It must have been an exhausting life.A homesteader woman quoted at the Kauffman Museum in Newton wrote,“Life was wretchedly uncomfortable. . . . We made the most of our circumstances and of each other. . . . Life was worthwhile, even then.” The Mennonite movement to Kansas in the 1870s was simply the last chapter in a long history of perpetual migration. From Holland the Mennonites moved to Germany, and from Germany to Russia, eventually discovering a new life in the Americas. Historian Cornelius J. Dyck (1993:211) has written that their history “reflects an endless pilgrimage from one corner of the earth to the other.” Clearly, Mennonites were fearless travelers , unafraid to tackle new lives in unknown lands. Mennonites value the simple life, shaping their communities around discipleship, group discipline, compassion, witnessing, suffering, and rejection of violence and war, but they also value education. The history of Mennonite migrations is in part a history of struggling to develop educational institutions to train ministers and their congregations. Mennonites were not permitted to have their own schools in Germany, for example. In Kansas, the desire to develop Mennonite centers of higher learning began with the Emmental school in 1882, which became the Halstead Mennonite Seminary the following year.A short-lived, separate department for training Native American students opened at this college preparatory and teacher-training institution in 1885. Gustav Haury, who at the time was principal of the Hillsboro school, came to Halstead in 1892 and taught English there until Bethel College opened. As Peter J. Wedel writes in The Story of Bethel College (1954), the 1880s were a time of transition for Mennonites. The threshing stone—a cruciform block carved from local limestone—had been replaced by the threshing machine,the ox cart by the spring wagon and buggy.Wood-frame long houses sheltering more than thirty immigrant families gave way to individual cabins and then to more spacious and better-constructed homes. A greater variety of foods replaced the spare European diet. A cultural and intellectual boom accompanied these changes in technology and lifestyle , and one of its outgrowths was Bethel College (fig. 2.1). The site selected for the college “was pleasantly located about a mile north of Newton on a slight elevation that has since...

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