The Promised Land

Across Alberta's fertile grainlands, no farmers work their soil with greater diligence or more fruitfulness than the Hutterites, the bearded and devout descendants of German-speaking immigrants who fled Russia in 1874, seeking freedom to practice their austere faith. But Alberta's 4,000 Hutterites have been increasingly cramped by a provincial law restricting their land purchases and urgently want room to expand. Last week some of them seemed to have found their promised land in the Big Bend country of the Columbia River in the state of Washington.

Spiritual followers of Jacob Hutter, a 16th century Moravian patriarch who preached literal obedience to the Scriptures, the Hutterites first settled in South Dakota; in 1918 many of them moved to Alberta to escape U.S. draft laws. They established seven colonies, or Bruderhofe, each with 50 to 75 members. As each colony became overcrowded, it divided its assets to set up a new Bruderhof.

In World War II, while Hutterite sons stayed home as conscientious objectors, an irritated Alberta government forbade the Hutterites to buy any new land.* The law was later relaxed to permit some newland purchases, but none within 40 miles of an old Bruderhof. The Hutterites had to look to Saskatchewan and Manitoba, and back to the U.S. for new living room.

This spring the Hutterites of Pincher Creek, Alta. quietly bought 1,000 acres of farmland near Lind, Wash., leased an additional 5,000 acres with an option to buy. Last week 23 members of the Bruderhof who went ahead to take over the new land were bringing in their first grain harvest. Pincher Creek's President Paul Gross was delighted with the results.

The Pincher Creek colonists were already eating vegetables from their Washington farm, looking forward to harvests of apples, cherries, raspberries, peaches and grapes. Even more gratifying to Gross was the welcome their new neighbors extended: "People from the Methodist, Mennonite and Lutheran churches came to visit us. They were very kind. There has been no objection against us whatever."

* A similar law passed by the South Dakota legislature in 1955 was voided as "too vague, indefinite and uncertain to be enforceable" (TIME, July 23).

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