About 25 people including direct descendants of the first Mennonites took in what organizers called a soft opening of the Peace Trail at the Mennonite Landing.
It was on that site that on Aug. 2, 1874, those Mennonites left the paddlewheel, The International, to start their new life. It began as a five mile walk to the Schantz Sheds, before moving on to start villages in the East Reserve.
Held on June 1, Manitoba Trails Day, the ceremony also included an introduction to the Peace Trail itself, highlighting the ten waypoints designed to allow people to reflect on the Mennonite experience.
Glen Klassen, EastMenn Historical Committee chair told the crowd the land they were on is important.
“We are now standing on a place where my great-great-grandfather Johann Koop and his family and his church family got off the paddleboat in 1874,” he said. “They stepped off the boat here and entered the promised land.”
As he shared the waypoints on the trail, Klassen remarked on the final stop, the Dirk Willems Peace Garden at the Mennonite Heritage Village. Willems was famously escaping prison across a frozen river when he returned to rescue a guard that fell through the ice, even thought that meant he would be caught and later executed.
“He was a giver,” Klassen said. “We on the other hand by settling on prairie soil were takers. How ironic then that we should take, albeit legally, so much land for ourselves.”
“Maybe walking, cycling or driving the Peace Trail is one way of saying thank-you to the previous owners, the Indigenous peoples and the Metis.”
A new pamphlet allows people to drive the peace trail, though some waypoints are reached only by dirt roads so caution is recommended.
Waypoints include the Mennonite Landing site, river lot panels, Hespeler Park Niverville, Shantz Immigration Sheds Cairn, Tourond Discovery Centre, Gruenfeld Cemetery and Cairn, Chortitz Church and Cemetery, Rosenthal Nature Park, Blind Creek Trailhead and Keating Cairn, and the Dirk Willems Peace Garden at the Mennonite Heritage Village.
Klassen said some work remains to be done as panels are planned for some of the stops.
Memorandums of Understanding are still required between the four municipalities which the trail flows through.