I02 ANDREW J. SHIPMAN MEMORIAL 



named after them. Our Revolution brought from Poland 

 Kosciusko, the hero of two lands ; Pulaski, who died at 

 Savannah, and Niemcewicz, the Polish biographer of Wash- 

 ington. After the partition of Poland, and in the early part 

 of last century, occasional Polish emigrants arrived. The 

 Polish insurrection of 183 1 sent us a considerable and more 

 abiding contingent, many of whom settled in Texas. 



Their success may have induced others to come, for in 1855 

 a large body of them, headed by the Rev. Leopold Moczy- 

 gemba, a Polish Franciscan, settled in Texas, where their 

 first colony was named Panna Marya (Our Lady Mary) and 

 where the first Polish church in America was built. The 

 Panna Marya settlement was quickly followed by other 

 Polish colonies in Texas, five of which founded churches the 

 next year and eleven others in the course of the next two 

 decades. The next settlement was at Parisville, Michigan, 

 in 1857. 



The Poles also settled early in Wisconsin. The earliest 

 settlement was Polonia, in Portage County, in 1858, where 

 they also established a church. The church (dedicated to 

 the Sacred Heart) is there yet, now a structure towering over 

 the country-side, built at a cost of $70,000. There is a 

 magnificent school beside it, and the entire community, who 

 are almost all Poles from Russia, is said to be prosperous. 

 Other Polish colonies took root in Wisconsin, which now has 

 over 250,000 Poles, foreign-born and native. In 1866 they 

 settled in Missouri; in 1869 in Chicago, Illinois, and in 1870 

 in Pennsylvania. Indiana, Michigan, Ohio, New York, Min- 

 nesota, follow in order of Polish settlement. In the twenty- 

 six years from 1855 to 1880, there were eighty-five Polish 

 churches founded, for the Pole, like the Irishman, is usually 

 a practical Catholic and insists on having his Church and 

 Faith expressed visibly as soon as he can. 



The great mass of Poles who came to this country after 

 1870 were the poorest of all our immigrants in the goods 

 of this world. The great mass of them went to the coal 

 and iron mines of Pennsylvania. Some one has said of their 

 coming: "At one time they came in batches, shipped by the 

 carload to the coal fields. When they arrived they seemed 

 perfectly aimless. It was hard for them to make themselves 

 understood, and sometimes they would go up into the brush 



