|
|
|
| Current Issue |
|
|
| Resources |
|
|
|
Polish-Americans in Wilno: 'Out on the Wind'
| Article
# : |
17518 |
|
|
Section : |
CULTURE
|
| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1990 |
3,449 Words |
| Author
: |
Thaddeus Radzilowski
Thaddeus Radzilowski is director of rural studies and
professor of history at Southwest State University, Marshall,
Minnesota. He has published several works about Eastern
European history and American ethnic and immigrant studies,
receiving the Haiman Prize for distinguished contributions to
the study of Polish-American history in 1983. In 1987 he and
Gaylen Ross completed a one-hour documentary on the most
recent Polish immigration to the United States, entitled Our
of Solidarity: Three Polish Families in America, which won the
1988 CINE Golden Eagle Award. He is currently a consultant to
the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights and the U.S. Bureau of the
Census. |
A visitor to the prairie country of southwestern Minnesota adventurous enough to wander off the main highway - perhaps in search of some vestige of the world Laura Ingalls Wilder described in Little House On the Prairie - might be startled by the sudden appearance of a large baroque-style church standing alone and majestic amid the cultivated fields of Lincoln County. The sight could easily jolt the visitor's imagination back from pioneer rural America to the medieval European countryside. Another half-mile journey from the country road brings those two worlds of imagination together into a single vista, as the traveler comes upon a scene that indeed combines elements of a turn-of-the-century pioneer settlement with an Old World village: a tiny cluster of wooden houses, hidden from the road by trees and a dip in the land, scattered around the base of an impressive east central European church. The "Cathedral in the Cornfield," as it is known locally, is the center and heart of the unusual Polish-American farming community of Wilno, Minnesota, situated only a few miles from the South Dakota border.
Only a small number - less than 10 percent - of the several million Polish rural immigrants who arrived and stayed in the United States after the Civil War ended up as farmers. When they first came, almost all Polish immigrants went to work in coal mines, steel mills, packing houses, and auto factories. It wasn't land that they sought here; they wanted to make enough money as quickly as possible to buy a farm or save the existing family farm back in the old country. About 35 percent went back to their villages on the Polish plain-some disappointed, many successful. The rest remained in the United States because they found the new life in America more attractive then the old one or because war, changed circumstances at home, or insufficient earnings frustrated their return. The vast majority who gave up the battle for their own countryside chose to become permanent industrial workers and urbanites. Only a few transferred their dream to rural America.
Most Polish peasants who sought to become American farmers looked for inexpensive land in long-settled areas. Many became truck farmers near large cities and purveyors of specialty food items that their urban countrymen could not easily get in American stores. Others took over exhausted American farms in the Northeast in places like eastern Long Island or the Connecticut river valley and, by intensive labor, turned them into successful tobacco, onion, or potato farms. Carl Yastrzemski of the Boston Red Sox was the son of one such Polish immigrant potato farmer on Long Island. Whatever the differences in crops and methods of cultivation between the two countrysides,
...
Read Full Article
Look for this article in Ask.com
|
|
