Waterloo County, 1925: The Mennonite Farms That Said No to the Car

In 1889, in the farm country north of Waterloo, Ontario, a group of Mennonite families decided that their church was changing too fast and that they would not change with it. By 1925 their neighbours had cars and telephones, and Niagara power had been running into nearby Kitchener for fifteen years; they still drove a black buggy to the meetinghouse and worked every field with horses. This is how the Old Order Mennonites of Waterloo County lived, told beside the diary a neighbouring farm wife kept that same year — and why a church that turned down so much of the twentieth century grew instead of disappearing. 📌 What you'll learn • Where the Mennonites of Waterloo County came from: the Swiss families who came north from Pennsylvania by Conestoga wagon in the early 1800s, the German Company deed of 1805, and the quarrel over Sunday schools, evening revival meetings and English preaching that divided the church in 1889 • How an Old Order farm worked around 1925: the bank barn built into the hill, the doddy house for the grandparents, horses in every field, Pennsylvania German at the table and German in the meetinghouse, a Sunday meeting with two doors, two sermons and no organ, and the same winter of sleighs and butchering as the neighbours across the road • Why a telephone was allowed in a mill but not in a kitchen, what bicycles had to do with the division of 1917, how the car split the church again in 1939 and produced the plain black cars of the Markham-Waterloo Mennonites, and what happened to Ontario's Mennonite young men in two world wars • What remains today around St. Jacobs, Elmira and Wallenstein: the buggies on the road, the schools of their own since 1966, Martin's meetinghouse on King Street in Waterloo, and a church that has grown from 1,061 baptized members in 1957 to about 4,500 in Ontario Images are reconstructions; real photographs and records are held by the Mennonite Archives of Ontario at Conrad Grebel University College — links below. Educational and historical content. 📚 Key sources • Ella (Ellamanda Krauter) Maurer, farm diary, Woolwich Township, 1925 — Rural Diary Archive, Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph • Mennonite Archives of Ontario, Conrad Grebel University College, Waterloo — Old Order Mennonite, Markham-Waterloo and First World War collections • Isaac R. Horst, The Markham Waterloo – Old Order Mennonite Division, and Amon Weber, Old Order Mennonites: Our Life and Faith — Mennogespräch 6:2, Mennonite Historical Society of Ontario, 1988 • Barbara Draper, Church and Community Life of Waterloo Mennonites in the 19th Century (2003), and Charlotte Martin, My Relatives: Ultra Conservative Mennonites (1998) — Ontario Mennonite History, Mennonite Historical Society of Ontario • Young Center for Anabaptist and Pietist Studies, Elizabethtown College — Old Order Mennonites (Horse-and-Buggy), figures from Families of the Old Order Mennonite Church in Canada, 2017 and 2025 — and other sources. #Mennonites #WaterlooRegion #Ontario #CanadianHistory #HowWeLivedHere ℹ️ About this video Educational and historical content. The script, research and edit are the author's own, based on the sources listed in the description. The visual reconstructions and the narrator's voice are created with the help of AI, for illustrative purposes — these are not real recordings or authentic archival footage. Stories are simplified for a general audience and may contain small approximations. Purpose: to inform and to remember. 🕰️ Historical context The events described took place under legal and social conditions very different from today's. They are presented for historical understanding, without intent to justify or condemn any person, community or group.