The Blumengard Church served as a meeting place for its surrounding area from 1889 to the 1940's. With the building of the new, larger church at Silberfeld (two miles to the west) in 1944, a number of smaller Chortitzer meeting places in the area, including Blumengard were closed. The building was moved to Rosengard.

Today, a heritage cemetery is all that remains on the Blumengard site.

Located in the Rural Municipality of Hanover, the Blumengard CMC Heritage Cemetery is maintained by volunteers.

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It is hard to imagine the type of terrain our ancestors first laid eyes on as they walked to the southeast corner of Section 35 in the East Reserve and cut their first piece of sod to build their first home. Piecing together the bits of information left to us by these people helps to paint a picture of what may have taken place in the fall of that first year in 1874.

On July 16, 1874, the families of Cornelius and Julius Banman stepped onto a ship in Liverpool, England called the Nova Scotian and began to make their way with other members of the Bergthaler group to seek a new life and a home in this promised land called Canada. Arriving in Manitoba in the fall of 1874, Julius and Cornelius made their home on the highest point of land on the southeast corner of Section thirty-five, township seven, range five east. The highest point was actually only a slight rise that ran at an angle from the southeast to the northwest and was surrounded by mosquito-infested swamp land, parts of which, they were to learn the next spring, would not dry out well enough to be worked until the month of July in the summer. Other areas, however, contained the rich, fertile land that was to bring the village a good crop yield within the next few years.

(Source: Historical Sketches of the East Reserve 1874 - 1910 p 64 [Adapted])

When Mennonites settled the East Reserve in what is now the Rural Municipality of Hanover, farms were set up in small villages with communally-owned fields and pasturelands arranged in long narrow farmsteads. The result was a large number of villages with graveyards. This cemetery was established for one of these villages, Blumengart, started in 1874. The village broke up in 1910. The earliest burial marker in the cemetery is dated 1908.

(Source: Manitoba Historical Society)

Dominion Land Survey coordinates: LSD01-35-07-05-E1

A part of the story of the town and its inhabitants from the early days of European settlement through roughly 2009 is told in the volume "Settlers Of The East Reserve -- Moving In - Moving Out - Staying" and in the related volume (as cited above) "Historical Sketches of the East Reserve 1874 - 1910", especially starting on page 63. Free digital versions of these and many other Manitoba local history books can be found online in the University of Manitoba Digital Collections. There is also a list of such books organized by district and town name on the Manitoba Historical Society's website on their page entitled "Finding Aid: Manitoba Local History Books".

A list of burials in this cemetery is available from the Manitoba Genealogical Society, as transcribed by members in 1989. Also available to MGS members is a searchable online database named the MGS Manitoba Name Index (or MANI).