The Lutheran parish in Schöntal was founded in 1864 as an independent parish with a resident pastor. Schöntal served as the lead parish for four surrounding congregations.
Schöntal (Pleasant Valley) was a Lutheran colony located on the Jeruslan River about 60 miles southeast of Saratov . It was founded in 1856 by settlers from Yagodnaya Polyana and 162 settlers from Pobochnaya added to the population in 1857.
Little remains of Schöntal. It is now called Dolina and is merged with Neu-Yagodnaya-Polyana .
|
Year
|
Households
|
Population
|
||
|---|---|---|---|---|
|
Total
|
Male
|
Female
|
||
| 1857 |
|
|
|
|
| 1859 |
|
873
|
|
|
| 1883 |
|
1,453
|
|
|
| 1889 |
|
1,652
|
|
|
| 1897 |
|
2,037*
|
1,019
|
1,018
|
| 1905 |
|
2,728
|
|
|
| 1910 |
|
2,897
|
|
|
| 1920 |
385
|
2,573
|
|
|
| 1922 |
|
1,990
|
|
|
| 1923 |
|
1,708
|
|
|
| 1926** |
366
|
1,981
|
981
|
1,000
|
| 1931 |
|
2,498***
|
|
|
*Of whom 1,996 were German.
**Of whom 1,956 were German (355 households: 966 male & 990 female).
***Of whom 2,444 were German.
Lutheran
Diesendorf, V.F. Die Deutschen Russlands : Siedlungen und Siedlungsgebiete : Lexicon . Moscow, 2006.
German Settlements in the Years 1917-1941 [in Russian] (wolgadeutsche.net)
Preliminary Results of the Soviet Census of 1926 on the Volga German Autonomous Soviet Socialist Republic (Pokrovsk, 1927): 28-83.
Schnurr, Joseph. Die Kirchen und das religiöse Leben der Russlanddeutschen Evangelischer Teil (Stuttgart: AER Verlag Landsmannschaft der Deutschen aus Rußland, 1978): 197.
"Settlements in the 1897 Census." Journal of the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia (Winter, 1990): 17.