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Unterdorf was founded in 1852 near the Volga city of Kamyshin. A so-called "daughter colony," It was created by a group of Lutherans from other Volga villages at the same time that the neighboring villages of Rosenberg and Oberdorf were formed.

It was an agricultural village, and crops included wheat, oats, and rye, among others. One emigrant from Unterdorf, Katherine Steinbrecher Behm, remembered that many villagers kept cattle, pigs, sheep and chickens. "For our drinking and cooking water,we had to carry water from the river. This was done with big wooden buckerts, hung on ropes and carried on both sides as they hung from a carrier on our shoulders."

When a census of Unterdorf was conducted in 1912, some 60 years after the village was created, there were 1,574 residents. It was about half the size of nearby Rosenberg, which served as Parish headquarters. By 1912, many of the villagers had already departed for greener pastures elsewhere. If times were tough, they would become even more devastating a decade later when drought and famine took a horrible toll on German communities throughout the Volga Region.