The Teschemacher cabinet organ has been part of the same Mennonite family since it was purchased by Johannes Deknatel in the late 1750s. Rosi Penner Kaufman ('85) and Donna Hetrick ('91), both organ teachers at Bethel, will share about the history of this gem and play music for “The Organ at Home.”

The Kansas Land Trust addresses climate change through habitat restoration, public access to protected areas and agricultural practices that sequester carbon in regenerative ecosystems. Jerry Jost '76 discusses the impact land trusts can make on the world.

The Bethel bell once rang in the only known integrated school in Kansas, in Prairie Bell School in Thomas County. Later the children from rural Thomas County attended school in Oakley which led to the integration of public schools nationwide by order of the United States Supreme Court case Brown vs. Board of Education. Meanwhile […]

Organist Roseann Penner Kaufman will perform pieces on the museum's historic cabinet organ, built in 1750 by German master organ builder Teschemacher. Kaufman will play pieces representing the time periods and locations the organ encountered during its move across two continents. Soprano Lois Harder will join Kaufman on a song from the early 20th century.

A hard-riding hunter, frontier scout, and showman, at one time Buffalo Bill was one of the best-known men in America. But a gourmet? William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody was as comfortable eating at Delmonico’s in New York City as consuming wild game around a campfire. He dined with kings, queens, princes and presidents as well […]

A Swiss immigrant, Emil Kym decorated houses. He could hang wallpaper, do wood graining on doors and paint a hallway so the walls looked like marble. But what he did best was paint scenes of his home country in Mennonite farmhouses. Some of those scenes as well as Kym's woodgraining tools are on exhibit at […]

Roseann Penner Kaufman and Donna Hetrick will explore music in the Gesangbuch mit Noten, a hymnal published by the General Conference of the Mennonite Church of North America in Berne, IN in 1890. The copy of this hymnal belonging to Wilhelmina Van der Smissen, who donated the organ to Bethel College in 1910, was recently found at […]

In 1974, Mennonites in South Central Kansas commemorated the 100th anniversary of migration from Russia to Kansas. As part of the celebration an unassuming three-room wood house was moved from one mile east of Goessel to the grounds of Kauffman Museum. The story of the Voth-Unruh-Fast house is the story of a family and a […]