germans from russia in fort collins, 1900-2000 - Libraries

SECTION II
Germans from Russia in Fort Collins
Volga Germans in large numbers first
arrived in Larimer County shortly after
Loveland’s sugar factory opened. In the
spring of 1902, special trains, sponsored by
the sugar companies, brought hundreds of
Volga Russian families from Nebraska and
Kansas to northern Colorado. As they tended
the fields, the families lived in tents or vacant
shacks. 29 The German-Russia laborers proved
to be so effective that sugar beet farmers and
producers hastened to receive them the next
spring. The Fort Collins Colorado Sugar
Company brought forty-eight families to Fort
Collins in April 1903. Farmers rushed to town
to acquire the laborers. “Indeed, their
employers were in town with teams waiting
for them to arrive so that the newcomers
could be taken to their homes without delay,”
proclaimed the Fort Collins Weekly Courier.
“The arrivals are bright, intelligent looking
people and will no doubt make good citizens.”
30 Among the arrivals was a young
Volga German girl who emigrated from
Russia to Kansas when she was six. “My
father worked in the hot wheat field during
the summer,…but my mother said we should
go where we could all work,” remembered
Mrs. Peter L. Miller in 1976. “So we came to
Fort Collins in a boxcar, when the sugar factory
opened. Our first home was a new granary
and a tent northeast of town. …In the
winter my father got a job in the sugar factory.
We came into town and lived in the
Jungles north of town.” 31
As the German-Russians arrived in Fort
Collins with their broad caps, felt boots, and
long, sheepskin coats, the reaction among
residents seems to have been cautious, confused,
but largely positive. That the German-
Russians would live among them was a foregone
conclusion for many in the community;
they understood that the immigrants were
here to stay. Adrienne Roncolle, wife of a
Fort Collins-area farmer, aired her feelings in
a letter to the Weekly Courier entitled
“Welcome to the Russians.” In it, she begs
her fellow Fort Collins residents not to prejudge
the German-Russian families “as
strange beings to be looked upon with curiosity.”
Instead, she considers them “harbingers
of prosperity.” The German-Russians are
“friends whom we can trust and esteem, since
for the next few months it will be their labor,
their knowledge of the soil which will cause
our lands to bring forth wealth in the form of
sugar beets.” Yet, despite her best intentions,
Roncolle commits an error in identity that
would plague the German-Russian community;
she refers to them simply as Russians, an
insult to these proud Germans. 32
Despite the ethnic confusion, many of
the German-Russian beet workers who
arrived in Larimer County in 1902 elected to
remain in Loveland and Fort Collins at the
end of the beet season rather than return to
Kansas and Nebraska. Several worked in the
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