Turkey Red Wheat

The board tells the seed story as fact; the Kansas Historical Society calls it legend. Family lore has Mennonite families loading kitchen crocks and traveling trunks with Turkey Red seed before leaving Russia and planting around Goessel after arriving in 1874. For the 1974 Kansas Wheat Centennial, Goessel sold souvenir bottles of the seed to raise money for a museum. Some experts doubt that the immigrants carried enough seed for a significant first crop, and say Turkey Red was not the variety Mennonites typically grew in Russia. Many modern Kansas wheats still trace genetically to Turkey Red.

What the plaque says

Turkey Red Wheat Children in Russia hand-picked the first seeds of this famous winter wheat for Kansas. They belonged to Mennonite Colonies preparing to emigrate from the steppes to the American prairies. A peace-loving sect, originally from Holland, the Mennonites had gone to the Crimea from Prussia in 1790 when Catherine the Great offered free lands, military exemption and religious freedom. They prospered until these privileges were threatened in 1871. Three years later they emigrated to Kansas, where the Santa Fe R.R. offered thousands of acres on good terms in McPherson, Harvey, Marion & Reno counties, and where the legislature passed a bill which exempted religious objectors from military service. Within a month after landing in New York the Mennon- ites planted the red-gold grains their children had selected. The harvest was the first of the great crops of hard Turkey Red and its derivatives that have made Kansas the Granary of the Nation. Erected by Kansas Historical Society and State Highway Commission

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Kauffman Museum — 6.2 mi
  Bethel College's museum in North Newton of the Mennonites who settled the central plains in the 1870s, home to the copper plates of the 1685 Martyrs Mirror.
• Chaplain Kapaun Museum and St. John Nepomucene Church — 27 mi
  The old rectory beside the Czech brick church in Pilsen, where Emil Kapaun said his first Mass and served as a young priest before he died a prisoner of war in North Korea in 1951.
• Kansas Oil Museum — 31 mi
  Butler County's ten-acre museum in El Dorado, telling how a town that envied its neighbors' gas wells hired the state geologist in 1914 and found one of the great oil fields of its day.

More markers nearby

• The Mennonites in Kansas — 11 mi
• Indian Treaties of 1865 — 23 mi
• Kansas Indian Treaty — 23 mi
• Towanda - Land of Many Waters — 29 mi