Russia Revoked a Promise, and German Catholics Left for Dakota

The German Catholic and Lutheran families who settled south central North Dakota beginning in the 1870s did not come directly from Germany. Their ancestors had already emigrated once before, into Russia's Volga and Black Sea regions under an invitation Catherine the Great issued in 1763 promising German colonists religious freedom, self governance and permanent exemption from military conscription in exchange for developing the empire's frontier farmland. That arrangement held for over a century until the Russian government revoked the exemptions in 1874 and subjected the German colonies to the same conscription law as everyone else, and within a few years tens of thousands of Germans from Russia, as they came to call themselves, left for the American plains, drawn to North Dakota's homestead land by the same climate and soil conditions their communities had farmed successfully along the Volga. They brought a distinctive prairie church architecture with them, steepled brick and stone parishes still standing across the state's south central counties, visibly different from the wood frame churches Anglo American settlers built elsewhere on the plains.

Norwegian Lutheran immigrants settled the Red River Valley and much of eastern North Dakota in the same general decades, building enough rural congregations that the state remains one of the most Lutheran in the country by proportion, and Hutterite communities descended from a related but separate migration still maintain communal colonies today. Mainline Protestant identification leads at twenty five percent of adults, per Pew's 2023-24 study.