After finding the site of my maternal grandfathers birth place and learning about the hardships of the Colorado coal miners I became more curious about the other immigrants in my family. I received a message from my mom “Grandma was born in Sugar City, Colorado.” I had never thought to ask grandma where she was born and here it turns out that she was born just a hundred + miles from where Grandpa Slavec was born, yet they met and lived their lives in Sacramento, California. What would bring grandmas family to the plains of Colorado and why did they choose to leave their home country for a new and completely strange land? Life has a way of pulling us in directions that we don’t intend.

This year my grandma turned 100 and as she says “Everyone says that I’m amazing!” and she is. At 100 she is still fairly independent, living in senior apartments with my aunt where they truly take care of each other. I’ve always been told that she is German, and that her parents immigrated from the home land. She was raised on a farm with a number of siblings and that her dad was studying to be a doctor before he immigrated to America. Grandma has actually talked very little about her mother and my mother’s memory of her grandmother was of a distant woman who only spoke German and was always waiting to leave when ever she came to visit.

So Mitch and I went in search of Sugar City, Colorado. Driving along the highway we pass miles and miles of drying open prairie with old glass top power lines broken and leaning lining the road side. We find evidence of old farms and long ago deserted homes. On researching Sugar City I found that this once growing and thriving community of 1500 now has only 258 residents.

As the railroad made it’s way across America so did the business men who saw potential in these wide open plains. The National Sugar Company bought up this land and built a sugar factory, thus Sugar City was born. Large canals were built from the Arkansas river, as investors envisioned this to be “the land of milk and honey”, and the dry prairie land became an agriculture boom. A number of small farming communities popped up on the Colorado prairie like nearby Onley Springs and Ordway which today has the largest populous in Crowley county at 1080.

The first sign that we had made it To Sugar City was the Lake View Cemetery, a little fenced in graveyard on top of a small hill. Straight ahead of us was a giant grain tower with Sugar City painted in big red letters near the top and to the left, a quaint town park with a caboose car displayed at the corner. A right turn took us down a wide but quiet street. The post office established in 1900, a small cafe, and a few empty store fronts. Beyond the tiny town the street was lined with older homes and this led to a stately entrance to an empty field. This must have been where the beet factory was.

We circle through the tiny town and it’s little neighborhood passing a couple of churches tucked in among the homes. There are no signs of people but the houses are up kept and there were cars parked in driveways and on the street. It’s hard to tell what it is that is keeping this little town alive but the well kept park and clean streets show that there is still a sense of pride in this community. Displayed at the city park is the history of this fading little town.

Goodbye Old, Hello New

In 1900 when the National Sugar Company completed construction of their sugar factory a wave of people looking for work and opportunity came to this new city. The sugar company especially recruited German Russian immigrants as they were expert farmers. They were offered land, tools, and seeds and could sell their beets back to the sugar company for pay. My great grandfather Gottfried Keller left the Ukraine in 1906 and arrived at New York’s Ellis Island with his mother and younger siblings bound for Sugar City, Colorado.

There was a large wave of immigration happening with Russian Germans between the 1880’s -1920 due to the changes in immigrant laws in Russia. This large group of German settlers originally moved to Russia in the late 1700’s when Catherine the Great invited the Germans to come to Russia. They were promised to not have to serve in the military, had large tax breaks, and had freedom with their religious and cultural traditions. Many Germans suffering from religious persecution and poverty due to war took her up on her offer and created many German villages in the Russian countryside. Here they maintained all of their old ways including their language. One hundred years later, however, Catherine’s great grandson Alexander III began to impose reforms in the immigrant laws. Suddenly these small German villages were forced to learn Russian, lost their tax privileges, and had to do military time. These were self sufficient people who were expert farmers, and a highly educated part of the Russian bourgeoisie including engineers, doctors, aristocracy, and military officers. Taking away their autonomy was not acceptable and their ingrained beliefs were to not hold on to something that is not working for them, so they immigrated in droves to South America, Canada, and the plains of America with possibility of land through the homestead act.

My grandmother tells a story of her dad Gottfried’s childhood when the Tsar’s wife, dressed in her beautiful white gown, would come to the village with toys for the children and they dared not to touch her dress for fear of soiling it. This must have actually been Alexander III’s daughter Olga, the one my grandmother was named after. Later, claiming that she hated the name, my grandma would change her name to Clara.

Coming to Sugar City in 1906 immigration papers show Gottfried Keller was a farm laborer. He spent his adult life farming sugar beets, soy, and then later cows. He married Maria in Sugar City in 1907 and their first 5 children were born in Colorado, Henry being the first in 1911, then would come Mary, Alex, Sarah, Olga my grandmother, Ester, David and Hannah, the last two being born in Nebraska where Gottfreid moved the family and continued to farm until moving to California . My grandma still claims to hate sugar beets and can remember the acrid smell of the factory from her childhood.

A Little Deeper

In search of the German Russian plight I learned some very interesting insights into the thought process of this hardy group. You see, being of the salt of the earth close knit communities these people were realistic about their world. It was a hard life that was full of loss. It was not unusual to lose children, possessions, or land. They grew to learn to not be too attached to anything.
My grandma was never a sweet and coddling grandma. She was more matter of fact, and from what my mom remembers of her grandma there was not a lot tenderness there either. This discovery reminded me of a time when I asked my grandma why her and grandpa never had any pets. She told me this story that must have taken place in Sugar City.

When I was young we lived on a farm and we were poor. We had a dairy cow and she would only let me milk her. One snowy night I was invited to a rich girls house for dinner. I wore my best clothes and went to her house where they had a big spread of food on the table. I was so excited to get to eat and when it was time to sit down there was a knock at the door. There was my father, Gottfreid, “Olga you must come now, the babies are crying and hungry and cow won’t let anyone get near her. You have to come home and milk her”. Grandma did go home that night and milked that cow and she vowed then that no animal was going to tie her down again. And she never forgot that missed meal.

The Keller family moved from Sugar City to Nebraska, then moved once again to the San Joaquin valley in California. Grandma and her younger sister Ester go to work at the Burcut-Richards Cannery where she meets my grandfather Albino Slavec. They Marry in Reno, Nevada in May of 1937 and they would live in the Sacramento area throughout their 50+ years of marriage. Like my grandfather, grandma only spoke English to me, never the native tongue of German. They proudly believed in being american. Grandmas parents continued to prefer the German Russian community and spoke mainly German until the end although Maria did eventually learn enough English to gain american citizenship.

Some time in my thirties, I couldn’t remember the last time that my grandmother had acknowledged my birthday or Christmas. She didn’t come to my wedding for some reason that I also could not remember. I decided then that it wasn’t okay. I made up my mind to give her the attention that she had not given me. I began to send her monthly cards with a letter and pictures. I made phone calls, sent flowers at Christmas, made special trips for her birthday. After a number of years she began to tell me how much she enjoyed the cards and another decade after that, I began to get letters back.

Today grandma is sweeter than I’ve ever known her to be. I get smiles and hugs, still appreciation for the cards which are now postcards from every stop we make. I made an effort with her long before I understood where she came from or why love was so hard to give. I’m glad that I did. People are people. We can’t know what elements make them tick. We can only make an effort to understand and approach with kindness, even when they can’t.

https://library.ndsu.edu/grhc/history_culture/history/history2.html
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9vbKf9vyB9E The Germans from Russia: Children of the Steppe Children of the Prairie
https://www.colorado.gov/pacific/crowleycounty/sugar-city
http://traveltips.usatoday.com/history-sugar-city-colorado-22427.html
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Duchess_Olga_Alexandrovna_of_Russia