Background
Christian Krehbiel was born on October 18, 1832 in Weierhof, Palatinate, Germany. He was the son of Johannes and Katharina (Krehbiel) Krehbiel.
Christian Krehbiel was born on October 18, 1832 in Weierhof, Palatinate, Germany. He was the son of Johannes and Katharina (Krehbiel) Krehbiel.
Krehbiel's formal education was limited. When, at the age of eleven, he removed with his parents to Klein Schwabhausen, Bavaria, he received compulsory religious education an hour a week for three years.
Possessed of keen observation and a retentive memory, he soon gained a wide range of practical information. When he arrived at the age of eighteen, his parents, who were non-resistants, sold their property at a great sacrifice and came to America in order that their sons might escape compulsory military service.
Young Krehbiel first worked on a farm at Hayesville, Ohio, but soon went westward by water via Cincinnati, Cairo, Illinois, and Keokuk, to Lee County, Iowa, on the frontier. Here he lived in a log house, wielding the axe and the cradle, and receiving for his services as farmhand one hundred dollars a year.
In 1860 he removed to Summerfield, Illinois, a new settlement, where he farmed successfully for nineteen years, at the same time extending his sphere of usefulness to wider fields.
In 1864 he was elected to the Mennonite ministry, in which capacity he served forty-five years without pay. In the same year, though at that time he had four small children, he was drafted to serve in the Federal army, but was relieved by hiring a substitute.
In 1872 he began an agitation for a settlement of Mennonites in Kansas. He bought land in the central part of the state, and, as president of the Mennonite Board of Guardians, interested coreligionists in the eastern states and in southern Russia, with the result that in 1874 about six thousand Mennonites settled in Harvey, Marion, MacPherson, Butler, and Reno counties. The success with which the immigrants from Russia raised the Turkey-red hard winter wheat that they had brought with them was instrumental in giving Kansas its position as the leading wheat state of the Union.
From 1886 to 1896 he superintended an Indian industrial mission school on his own 640-acre farm near Halstead, where thirty to forty Indians were trained annually. For ten years after that he made his farm an orphan home through the medium of which eighty-seven children were placed in Christian homes.
On April 29, 1909, while he was working on his farm, a strong wind hurled a large barn door upon him, injuring him so badly that he died the next day.
Plain, intensely practical, with strong convictions and unswerving faith, he was at this time a man of impressive physical strength. Though he was not tall, his muscular body, his deep, resonant voice, his untrimmed, black beard and unruly hair combined to suggest his vigorous personality.
In 1858 he married Susanna A. Ruth, who became the mother of sixteen children and shared his life for over fifty years.