Between half past seven and eight on a weekday morning a century ago, you could stand on a Lincoln street corner and watch a dozen women pass, little black woolen shawls tied under their chins, heading uphill from the flats by Salt Creek to clean the kitchens and offices of a city that called them, simply, the Russians. They were not Russian. They spoke German, prayed in German, and farmed land their grandparents had broken open on the Volga steppe. The Volga Germans in Lincoln built two whole neighborhoods out of that contradiction, and the city has been eating their cooking ever since.
Lincoln, Nebraska: The Place
Lincoln sits in the Salt Creek valley of southeastern Nebraska, the state capital and home of the University of Nebraska. The two neighborhoods that the immigrants made their own, the South Bottoms and the North Bottoms, lie in the low ground along the creek, hemmed in by the rail yards that drew them there. Both are flat, gridded, and tightly built, the South Bottoms southwest of downtown and the North Bottoms pressed up against the university. The name says it plainly: this was bottom land, the cheap and flood-prone ground nobody else wanted.
How Lincoln Became Home to the Germans from Russia
Before the Volga Germans
Lincoln was barely a decade old when the first German families from the Volga stepped off the train. Founded as the capital in 1867 on a salt-flat townsite, it grew fast, and by 1890 the population had reached roughly 55,000. The bottom lands near Salt Creek filled with the people who powered that growth: railroad hands, brickyard workers, and warehouse laborers who needed to live within walking distance of their work.
To understand who arrived, you have to go back to the Russian steppe, and before that to a single document. On July 22, 1763, Empress Catherine the Great issued a manifesto inviting Europeans to settle and farm the open land along the lower Volga River. The terms were generous: free land, interest-free loans, freedom of religion, thirty years without taxes, and exemption from military service. Tens of thousands of Germans, worn down by the wars and hardship of the divided German states, took the offer and built closed villages on the steppe with names like Norka, Frank, Balzer, and Huck.
The Volga Germans Arrive
For more than a hundred years those villages stayed stubbornly German, marrying among themselves and keeping their dialects intact. Then, between 1871 and 1874, the Russian government began stripping away the old privileges, including the exemption from military service that meant the most. Rather than send their sons into the Tsar’s army, families looked west across the ocean to the Great Plains, where the climate and the flat horizon felt like the steppe they knew.
The first colonists reached Lincoln in 1874, arriving from the village of Balzer, and a small group of about thirty followed close behind. Hundreds more came after them, the largest contingents from Frank, Beideck, Huck, Balzer, and Kukkus, with so many families from Norka that Lincoln became perhaps the single largest settlement of that village’s people anywhere in America. They came the way most immigrants did, by chain: one cousin wrote home that there was railroad work in Lincoln, and a year later half a village had followed.
Lincoln at Its Peak
They settled first in the South Bottoms, in the Salt Creek floodplain southwest of the city center, and the houses they built there gave them away. Small and closely spaced, set on narrow lots with the entrance on the side and only windows facing the street, they echoed the village houses left behind on the Volga. In the deep, narrow backyards families added summer kitchens, chicken coops, and sometimes a second small house for grown children. Vegetable gardens ran to the property lines, and watermelons, the arbus they had grown on the steppe, ripened against the fences.
The North Bottoms came later. Its development began in 1888 as families moved to live nearer the Burlington railroad roundhouse, where so many of the men were employed. The two enclaves grew into the largest and most homogeneous immigrant neighborhood in Nebraska. By 1915 some 6,500 people lived in the Bottoms, and by 1924 the number had passed 9,000. A young University of Nebraska sociologist named Hattie Plum Williams, who spoke German, walked the streets house by house and in 1909 produced the first serious study of the colony, insisting to a skeptical city that these were Teutons, not Slavs.
Daily life turned on the railroad and the beet. The men worked the Burlington yards and the section gangs that maintained the track. Each spring, special trains left Lincoln carrying whole families west to the North Platte and South Platte valleys and on into Colorado to thin, weed, and top sugar beets under contract, returning in the fall when the harvest was in. It was stoop labor done by the whole household, children included, and it seeded permanent Volga German communities in Scottsbluff and across the beet country.
The Change
The First World War was hard on a neighborhood that still prayed and gossiped in German. Anti-German feeling swept the country, sauerkraut was rebranded liberty cabbage, and the colony learned to keep its language quieter in public. The dialects held on at home and in church for another generation or two, but the children grew up in Lincoln schools speaking English, and the tight grip of the old village loyalties began, slowly, to loosen.
What pulled the community apart in the end was success. As families saved and moved up, they moved out, to better-drained ground on higher streets and eventually to the suburbs, the way the descendants of the German immigrants of New Ulm, Minnesota spread out from their own river-valley colony. The Bottoms slowly emptied of the people who had made them, even as the city around them kept eating their food and the churches kept their German names.
The Landmarks of the Bottoms
The churches anchored everything, and several still stand. Friedens Lutheran Church (corner of 6th and D Streets) was organized on February 15, 1907, and dedicated its building that December 1; a 1925 fire took down its west steeple, which was never rebuilt. It is the oldest church structure of the Germans from Russia in Lincoln and the last of their congregations left standing in the South Bottoms, claiming 450 members by its twentieth anniversary in 1927.
Zion German Congregational Church began in 1900, when the Rev. E.C. Osthoff and some forty families received letters of dismissal from the First German Congregational Church to form their own. They first built at 4th and F Streets, then put up a larger building in 1927 at 9th and D. St. John’s Congregational Church was organized in 1907 by a group of families in the North Bottoms, one of the two congregations that served that side of the tracks near the university.
Salem Church (9th and Charleston Streets) rose in brick in 1916 to the designs of the Lincoln architect Alfred W. Woods, a sign that the colony was no longer poor and temporary but settled and prospering. The neighborhood itself is a landmark: the South Bottoms Historic District was listed on the National Register of Historic Places on July 17, 1986, with more than a thousand contributing buildings, the largest such immigrant district in the state.
The institution that gathers it all is the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (631 D Street), founded in 1968 and headquartered in Lincoln since 1973. It dedicated its present headquarters and Heritage Center on June 15, 1983, and today holds the largest collection of Germans from Russia documentation, artifacts, and genealogy in the Western Hemisphere. Out back, replica buildings, a church, a summer kitchen, a general store, and a barn, recreate the village world the immigrants carried in their memories.
And then there is the food, which became a chain. Runza was founded in Lincoln in 1949 by Sally Everett, born Brening, who went into business with her brother Alex selling an Americanized version of the bierock her family had brought from their village by way of Sutton, Nebraska. A runza is a yeast-dough pocket packed with ground beef, cabbage, and onion, and Sally trademarked the name. The Everett family still runs the company, now grown to more than ninety restaurants, most of them in Nebraska, and it sells runzas inside Memorial Stadium on Cornhusker game days.
Where the Lincoln Volga Germans Came From
Almost all of Lincoln’s Volga German families traced back to a cluster of colonies on the hilly, western side of the Volga, the Bergseite, southeast of the city of Saratov. Norka, Frank, Balzer, Beideck, Huck, and Kukkus supplied the bulk of the migration, and people from a single village tended to settle on the same Lincoln blocks and fill the same pews, so that the old colony loyalties simply transplanted themselves to the Bottoms.
Those villages were themselves a transplant. Their founders had answered Catherine’s 1763 manifesto and crossed Europe to a raw frontier, and the discipline of building German farming towns from nothing on the open steppe was exactly the skill their descendants brought to the Nebraska plains a century later. It was a community that had already moved once, and knew how. This sets them apart from the German settlers who came to America straight from the homeland, like the Hill Country founders of Fredericksburg, Texas: the Volga Germans had spent a hundred years as a German island inside the Russian Empire first.
Lincoln Today
The North Bottoms is student housing now. Generations after the railroad men, the narrow houses fill each fall with University of Nebraska undergraduates who cross the 10th Street bridge for cheap rooms, and most have no idea the porches they sit on were raised by sugar-beet families. The old churches still stand among the rentals, a few still holding services, the rest converted or quietly waiting.
The South Bottoms has held onto more of itself, a protected historic district whose small side-entrance houses still line the grid, and it remains an affordable foothold and a port of entry for Lincoln’s newest immigrants, just as it was for the first ones. Lincoln stays one of the great centers of Volga German descent in North America, part of an immigrant Nebraska that also gave the state the Czech town of Wilber an hour to the southwest. The AHSGR runs conventions and a busy museum, the kitchen smells of kuchen and grebble at family gatherings, and there is a Runza on what feels like every other corner.
There is one more thread the families here do not forget. The relatives who stayed behind on the Volga were deported en masse by Stalin in 1941, the autonomous German republic abolished and some 440,000 people shipped to Kazakhstan and Siberia. That the Lincoln branch boarded a ship in the 1870s, and the other branch boarded a cattle car in 1941, is a fact the museum on D Street keeps plainly in view. The story did not end in the Bottoms. It started over there, and it kept going west.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Volga Germans settle in Lincoln, Nebraska?
The Volga Germans in Lincoln came for work and cheap land in a landscape that resembled the steppe they had farmed in Russia. They settled the low ground along Salt Creek, the South and North Bottoms, because it was affordable and close to the Burlington railroad yards and section work that employed the men. Chain migration did the rest, as each arriving family drew relatives from the same Volga villages.
Is Lincoln still a German from Russia community today?
Lincoln remains one of the cities with the highest concentration of Volga German descendants in North America, even though the old Bottoms neighborhoods have changed. The North Bottoms is now largely student housing, while the South Bottoms is a protected historic district. The American Historical Society of Germans from Russia keeps its headquarters and museum here, and Runza restaurants carry the food into everyday Nebraska life.
What are the most famous Volga German landmarks in Lincoln?
The best-known landmark is the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia at 631 D Street, with its museum, research library, and replica village buildings. Friedens Lutheran Church at 6th and D, dedicated in 1907, is the oldest surviving Germans from Russia church structure in the city. The South Bottoms Historic District, listed on the National Register in 1986, preserves more than a thousand of the immigrants’ small houses.
Where did the Lincoln Volga Germans come from?
They came from German colonies on the western, hilly bank of the Volga River near Saratov, founded after Catherine the Great’s 1763 manifesto. The largest groups in Lincoln traced to the villages of Norka, Frank, Balzer, Beideck, Huck, and Kukkus. Families from the same colony often settled on the same Lincoln blocks and joined the same churches.
When did the Volga Germans first arrive in Lincoln?
The first Volga Germans in Lincoln arrived in 1874 from the colony of Balzer, with hundreds more following through the 1870s and after. Development of the North Bottoms began in 1888 as families moved closer to the Burlington roundhouse. By 1915 the two neighborhoods held about 6,500 people, growing past 9,000 by 1924.
If your family’s story passed through the Bottoms of Lincoln, or through any of the German villages of the Volga, the names and dates are only the start of it. There is a whole journey behind a single surname on a church register.