Steinbach () (Plautdietsch: /ˈʃtɛinbaχ/) is the third-largest city in the province of Manitoba, Canada, and with a population of 17,806, the largest community in the Eastman region. The city, located about southeast of the provincial capital of Winnipeg, is bordered by the Rural Municipality of Hanover to the north, west, and south, and the Rural Municipality of La Broquerie to the east. Steinbach was first settled by Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonites from Ukraine in 1874, whose descendants continue to have a significant presence in the city today. Steinbach is found on the eastern edge of the Canadian Prairies, while Sandilands Provincial Forest is a short distance east of the city.
Steinbach's economy has traditionally been focused around agriculture; however, as the regional economic hub of southeastern Manitoba, Steinbach now has a trading area population of about 50,000 people and significant employment in the financial and insurance services industry, automobile sales, tourism, retail, and manufacturing.Trading Area, Business & Industry The city had a population growth of 11.1% between 2016 and 2021 and has gained national recognition as an immigration destination of Canada and a model for immigrant integration in the country.
Etymology Steinbach means "Stony Brook" in German. Steinbach's stony brook was drained sometime after settlement. Low German-Mennonites named the town Steinbach in 1874, after a village also called Steinbach in Borosenko colony, Ukraine.
History Treaty 1 and the East Reserve After the Assiniboine and Cree First Nations left the region in the 1820s, the Anishinabe hunted in and moved seasonally through the area on their way to the burial grounds in the Whiteshell. A bison trail ran alongside the Steinbach Creek on the far eastern edge of the Canadian prairies, a trail that was used by First Nations people for a number of years after settlement. In 1871, the Imperial Crown of Great Britain and Ireland and Anishinabe people signed Treaty 1, after which time the Canadian government began recruiting European farmers to the region, establishing the English and Scottish settlement of Clear Springs in 1872, just north of the present day location of Steinbach, and partially contained within the modern city limits. At the time of English and Scottish settlement, the nearest settled area was 17 km north in Ste. Anne, Manitoba, a Métis village founded 17 years earlier in 1856.
In 1873, the Canadian government sent William Hespeler to recruit Mennonites to move to the area. By the 1870s, some Plautdietsch-speaking Mennonites in Ukraine became dissatisfied with increasing Russification and the removal of their military exemption and were persuaded by Hespeler to investigate Manitoba as a possibility for relocation. These Mennonite communities were not ethnically Russian, but had Dutch ancestry dating back to 16th century Friesland and Flanders, after which time they lived in Prussia for two centuries and then the Russian Empire where they became known as Russian Mennonites, a misnomer given that they were ethnically Dutch.
In 1873, the Mennonites sent delegates to North America to investigate and negotiate terms of immigration. After touring a number of locations in North America, many of the delegates decided to move their people to Kansas, however, the more conservative groups were persuaded to settle in the new Canadian province of Manitoba, because the Canadian government was more generous in their guarantees of religious freedom. In 1873, a Privilegium was signed between the Mennonite delegates and the Canadian government, and a year later Mennonites started to arrive in the region. The document guaranteed, among other things, military exemption, freedom of religion, private schools, and land, known as the East Reserve. In the year following the signing of the Privilegium, Mennonites from the Bergthaler and Kleine Gemeinde groups immigrated to Manitoba, aided by Ontario Mennonite Jacob Yost Shantz, and founded dozens of villages in the East Reserve.
Early history (1874–1909)
Steinbach's original 18 Mennonite settler families were almost entirely of the new Kleine Gemeinde sect of Mennonites, a small conservative minority known for being gifted farmers. They left the Borosenko colony (a newly-formed offshoot of the larger Molotschna (or Milk River) colony) in Ukraine and arrived in Canada late in the summer of 1874.
Aided by their Métis neighbours, the families disembarked on the far west side of the reserve at the forks of the Rat and Red Rivers, near present-day Niverville. As they moved east across the reserve, they found that much of the better land in the reserve had already been settled a few months earlier by the Bergthaler and earlier Kleine Gemeinde families. The earlier settlers had come to realize the area suffered from excessive moisture and settled upon much of the higher lands and gravel ridges. Steinbach's settlers chose the best land that was available to them, which was in the very northeast corner of the East Reserve. The 20 homesteads were laid out on the northeast side of present-day Main Street along the creek, where they founded the village of Steinbach, taking the name "Steinbach" from the village where they lived in Borosenko.
Contrary to the preferences of the Canadian government, the early settlers of Steinbach, like other Mennonite villages, organized the village into a Strassendorf, or street village, with each family occupying a long narrow strip known as a Wirtschaft. In the first year they built temporary shelters known as semlin, before building more permanent housebarns. Most of the settlers were farmers, but in a somewhat urban setting, and lived, to some degree, communally, and shared a common pasture at the end of the village. They started a school in the first year, and in the following year of 1875 built a school and teacherage. Steinbach's Main Street was hacked out of thick poplar bush along the creek, where a bison trail ran, a trail that was still used by Indigenous people during Steinbach's early years.
In June 1875, Steinbach's spiritual leader Rev. Jakob Barkman, who had led the Kleine Gemeinde to Canada, drowned in the Red River, along with Jakob K. Friesen on a trip to Winnipeg for supplies. This left the community without religious leadership for some time.
After a plague of grasshoppers destroyed the crops in 1876, residents of Steinbach met in Blumenort to discuss the possibility of migrating to Minnesota or Nebraska. However, 60-year-old matriarch Elizabeth Rempel Reimer persuaded the group to stay in Steinbach, a stirring and historically significant speech which signified the important role of women in the community and resulted in Steinbach's continued survival as a community, unlike dozens of other East Reserve villages which have since disappeared.
In 1877, Lord Dufferin toured Manitoba's new Mennonite settlements and stopped just west of Steinbach where he could see "half a dozen villages" in the distance. A crowd of 1000 people greeted his arrival. That same year, the first windmill in the town was built by Abraham S. Friesen.
The death of Rev. Barkman left Steinbach without religious leadership for a number of years, creating a vacuum that made the villagers receptive to John Holdeman when he visited in 1881. After Holdeman's visit, many locals from the Kleine Gemeinde joined his new church, Church of God in Christ, Mennonite. This was the first of many schisms and revivals in Steinbach and eventually the town would be known for having dozens of churches, many of them different variations of Mennonite, a dynamic that has shaped the city's character. After a period of eight years, in 1882, Mayor Gerhard Giesbrecht said that the village had grown to 28 families with a population of 128.
Various epidemics swept the area in the late 1800s, including scarlet fever, whooping cough, and diphtheria. In the spring of 1884 alone, more than seventy people died, mostly children. Another whooping cough epidemic took place in 1900.
By 1900, the settlers had drained the swamps and cleared the land making it more suitable for the farming of wheat, barley, oats and potatoes. In the 1901 census, Steinbach had a population of 366, and almost the entire population still spoke Plautdietsch, with only a few reporting a knowledge of English.
End of the Strassendorf (1910–1945) In 1910, the street village linear settlement, or Strassendorf (Straßendorf in German) for the community ended. Prior to this time, the settlers of Steinbach lived in long narrow strips, called Wirtschaft (plural: Wirtschaften), along the Steinbach Creek. Following the lead of the neighbouring Mennonite village of Blumenort, who had abandoned their Strassendorf system a year earlier, the village of Steinbach was surveyed and land was redistributed with individual titles to open-field properties. Those who were given inferior land were financially compensated by the others. Although a communal pasture for cattle was maintained for some decades after this, the end of the linear settlement meant the end of the traditional communal lifestyle of the Mennonites in this area, but also opened the area up to greater entrepreneurial enterprise. The mayor, or schulz, of Steinbach at this time was Johan G. Barkman, Steinbach's longest serving schulz, who held that position for twenty-five years, including overseeing such significant events as the end of the Strassendorf. In 1911, the Kleine Gemeinde church, who had met in the village school up until this point, constructed a building on the south end of the village.
In 1912, J.R. Friesen opened a Ford auto dealership in town, which was the first Ford dealership in Western Canada. At the time, Friesen was excommunicated from the Kleine Gemeinde for adopting the modern technology, but within a few years, many Steinbachers accepted the automobile as an acceptable mode of transportation.
By this time, Steinbach had a third Mennonite church, the Bruderthaler, who, unlike the Kleine Gemeinde and Holdeman Mennonites, taught that being successful in business was not a sin and, in fact, was to be encouraged. The new theology moved Steinbach from a more traditional and agriculturally-based economy to one that emphasized business and industry. Entrepreneurs took advantage of the business opportunities at the time and several small businesses sprang up. Many other important and large businesses developed as well, helping to establish Steinbach as a regional service centre for the area.
By 1915, Steinbach had grown to a population of 463 and continued to attract immigrants from Europe. Many of the new immigrants were Bergthaler Mennonites, but Steinbach also was the destination for new German and Lutheran settlers, as well as some British families who had previously settled in the Clearspring Settlement slightly to the north. Steinbach's first bank, the Royal Bank, opened in 1915.
During World War I, most Steinbach Mennonites were given an exemption from military service, as promised in the Privilegium they had agreed to upon immigration in the 1870s. Mistakenly considered "ethnic Germans", even though they were actually primarily of Dutch ancestry, the Mennonites were caught up in the anti-German sentiment of the time and Conservative Prime Minister Robert Borden banned Mennonites from Steinbach and other areas from voting in 1917.
A year later, in 1918, as soldiers returned to North America, Spanish flu struck the village, killing many. Mennonites in the region were particularly affected by the outbreak, dying at a rate nearly twice that of other ethnic groups.