 Second
of Three Parts
The party of Russian Molokans who
detrained
at Glendale early in the morning of Aug. 31, 1911 was said by
newspapers
of the day to be the largest single group of settlers to arrive in the
Salt River Valley up to that time.
They were heartily welcomed by the
Southwestern
Sugar and Land Co., always in need of toilers in the sugar beet fields.
But their welcome by Glendale's populace of 1,000 and farmers in the
area
was anything but hearty.
IT WAS THOUGHT that the new comers would compete unfairly with
native
labor when not engaged on their own plots of newly-purchased ground.
And,
anyway, they were a strange people speaking a strange tongue, a people
with dress, customs and a religion that did not conform.
Consequently, the new arrivals retreated to
their little farms, where at first they lived in tents, and kept
themselves
to themselves. Those first years were indeed years of adversity what
with
unfriendly neighbors, the language barrier and crop failures.
But they persisted, and, after all they did
have the religious freedom they sought. In those years their whole life
centered around the church.
Back in Russia in the early 1800s (1805),
the Czar had promised that they could worship as they pleased (but
not evangelize). However, the Russian Orthodox Church was
every
bit a powerful as the Czar and a lot less lenient when it came to the
matter
of a competing religion. The Molokans, a comparatively small sect, were
persecuted without let-up until around 1840 when the state church
directed
them to leave their native region and move to southern Russia.
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(In
1830,
Tsar Nicholas I issued a decree ordering all religious sectarians
classified
as "most pernicious" [destructive] [Molokans, Doukhobors,
Subbotnikiki,
but not Old Believers] who were "state peasants" [owned by the Tsar]
and
not eligible for the military to move to the Transcaucasus. By 1890,
75%
of the Russians in the Caucasus were sectarian, mostly Molokans.)
There in an area not far from the capital
of Georgia, they lived in small, isolated villages while farming plots
of State-owned land and working at other tasks. Always their faith
remained
at odds with the decrees of government. (Molokans
were settled throughout the Caucasus, starting in the east, in southern
Azerbaijan, last in western Armenia.)
AROUND 1905, singly and in small groups (largest
group: 300), the Molokans (mainly
those
in Kars province, Armenia, in the Russo-Turkish war zone) began
working their way toward America, journeying from first one country to
another as they worked and saved for the final jump across the Atlantic
and on westward.
Their stay in Los Angeles and San Francisco
merely was a stopgap until they could establish permanent colonies, for
few of them cared for city life. Some settled in northern Mexico, some,
came to Glendale and a few went to Cottonwood (Chino
Valley), although they did not stay long in the latter
place. (About
20 settlements in the West.)
That first group in the Glendale area was
joined from time to time by other Russians, not all of them Molokans.
Some
from Canada were Doukhobors, a feisty offshoot of the Orthodox Church.
Some were just plain Russian immigrants who sought the companionship of
other Russians, no matter their religion.
THE TENTS gave way to sturdy frame houses. The small plots of
land expanded
into more acreage as a frugal, hard-working, shrewd people gradually
acquired
more ground and more know-how about American farming. Still for most
the
church continued to be the center of their lives, and the elders of the
church ruled with an iron band.
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(By
1920,
four Molokan villages were established along 6 miles from Tolleson
[83rd
Ave. and McDowell Rd.] to Glendale [75th Ave and Northern]. Each was
from
a different village in Armenia and had its own minister and church.)
THEIRS WAS a strict religion, but, as in all religions and
governments
some took the rules and regulations more seriously than others.
Nevertheless,
in those earlier years of the settlement, few rebelled.
Like farmers everywhere, some of the Molokans
did well in those first years and some not so well. It soon became
apparent
to all that growing sugar beets was no road to fortune despite the
promises
originally held out by the Southwestern Sugar and Land Co.
It was around then that some of the Russians
became discouraged and left the colony to join other members of the
sect
in California. Those determined to remain turned to vegetable growing,
cotton and milk cattle for a livelihood.
Then came the post World War I depression
of 1920. More left, but many of those returned within a year or so as
the
depression began to abate. Once more the colony was restored with, in
general,
the customs of the Old World church still retained.
Those few families who struggled through the
hard times in Arizona, enduring all sorts of hardships, are the hard
core
of what remains of the colony.
It is their names foreign sounding names like
Popoff, Tolmachoff and Conovaloff, that appear on the rural mailboxes
along
75th avenue and adjacent roads. Mostly, however, the mailboxes are
those
of descendants, for the only original settler still alive is aged Paul
Popoff. (Popoff died in 1984? But, also born
in
Russia was Martha Conovaloff-Papin, who lived on 83rd at Encanto and
died
in 1996, a few days short of 100 years old.)
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