Lee County Iowa
Genealogy
The Mennonites and the Busch Church and Cemetery
Erma Derosear researched, recorded and
submitted the following story
This story covers a time frame of 160 years and will be written in two parts. The first part tells how and when the Mennonite Busch Church was organized; part two will tell about the current interest to preserve the Busch Cemetery and will include a partial list of burials, including some names from official Mennonite Church records.
The first Mennonites to settle in Iowa came to West Point Township, Lee County, in the fall of 1839. John C. Krehbiel and his wife and son were the first to come. John and his wife were both born in Germany but had settled first in Butler County Ohio before coming to Iowa. Their daughter Hannah was born here and according to church records, she is the first Mennonite child to be born in Iowa. Other settlers followed.
Henry Leisy (Leiza), who plays an important role in this story, came out of southern Ohio in 1844 and bought 80 acres of land in Section 30 of West Point Township. He cleared his land, built his cabin and in the spring of 1845 went back to Ohio to marry Elizabeth Miller, the daughter of John Miller (Mueller), a Mennonite preacher. They had been married a couple of months when the Leisys, the Millers, and the Rissers came back to this area. Daniel Risser was married to Amelia Miller, another daughter of the Millers.
By 1845 there were enough Mennonites in the area to build a church. They had been without a place of worship since their coming and they needed spiritual help in their lives and a place where they could receive the sacraments which meant so much to them. But, they had no one to serve as pastor. When John Miller arrived, he was approached and asked if he would serve in the church they planned to build. He consented and promised to preach on Pentecost which was May 11, 1845. But the previous night, two robbers entered the cabin on Sugar Creek and brutally murdered Miller and wounded Leisy who was to die several weeks later.
Plans for a church were thwarted for several years. In 1849, after years of discussion and organizational meetings, another attempt was made to form a Mennonite congregation. Mrs. Christoph Schenck, who was the former Elizabeth Miller Leisy and the widow of Henry Leisy, gave ˝ acre of her farm land for a site to build a church and cemetery; John C. Krehbiel was elected preacher of the Mennonite church at West Point, a position he held until his death in 1886. The little log church was named Busch Church because it sat back in the woods; it was also known in church history as West Point Busch Church. It was the first Mennonite Church west of the Mississippi and was less than ˝ mile east of the murder site. The first service was held on the day of Pentecost in 1850 in memory of John Miller who, five years before, was to have preached to them on that day. But the people were not entirely satisfied; until an elder was ordained or one visited them, they could not observe the Holy Communion services. A Mennonite elder named Henry
Ellenberger moved to Lee County in the fall of 1850 and on the day of Pentecost in 1851, they observed their first communion service in “far off America.”
Mennonites continued to pour into the area around West Point and some did not want to travel to the church in the country – some found it an effort to travel that far so a new church was built in West Point and dedicated on July 26, 1863. Services were no longer held in the little log church on Sugar Creek and the church and cemetery were more or less abandoned.
The old Lee County atlases show that the land purchased by Henry Leisy -- and the site of the old church, the cemetery and the murder -- changed hands several times. In 1874 the land was owned by Fred Knabe; in 1897, a J.L. Cooney; and by 1910, Daniel Wilson, who passed it on to his son Delbert Wilson in the 1920s. Delbert love this land and raised four daughters and two sons in house within a a few yards of where the log cabin had stood and where the murder had taken place.
The children attended Maple Grove School; Anna Weber, a spinster Mennonite lady, taught the school. Anna was interested in history and she would take the Wilsons’ oldest daughter to the cemetery and try to read the stones, which were in German. The church had long since disappeared and there were only a half-dozen stones standing among the hedge trees. Situated in a pasture, the cemetery was neglected and forgotten.
In 1960, there was a large Mennonite Conference in Donnellson and one of the historians from the Bluffton, Ohio archives came up with the idea that it would be impressive if the old stones could be taken off the Busch Cemetery and placed along the fence of the Zion Mennonite Church on the Primrose road so they could be viewed by Mennonites attending the conference. This was done. Not only was it illegal but the information off the stones was never recorded. After sitting there for a period of time, they were lost. The most likely story and one of several which have been told is that a Mennonite farmer threw them into the back of his truck and hauled them to a ditch on his farm. At that period in history, people were not interested in old tombstones.
Delbert Wilson was devastated when the stones were taken. He feared that when he was gone, the old cemetery would be plowed up. He died in 1992 and at his sale, it was announced that there was an old cemetery in the pasture which was never to be ploughed.
Next month read about the partial list of burials, which include burials from the Mennonite Church records. Information for this article was taken in part from Mennonites in Iowa by Melvin Gingrich and personal interviews with two of Delbert Wilson’s daughters, Doris (Wilson) Hammer and Nadine (Wilson) Krebill.
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