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The Polish influx to Pennsylvania and the Philadelphia region began in the 1870s and accelerated after 1900. Poles remained the largest group (337,000) coming to Pennsylvania until 1901 when southern Italians and Sicilians pushed them into second place. An additional 340,000 Poles arrived between 1899 and 1914. Approximately 85-90 percent of the Polish population settled in the anthracite regions (primarily Northumberland, Luzerne and Schuylkill Counties) and the Pittsburgh area (Allegheny County), with the remainder in the greater Philadelphia region. Poles were attracted to Pennsylvania by the availability of unskilled work in heavy industry. In some years, Poles and their native-born sons were the majority of those employed in the anthracite mines. By 1910, 65-75 percent of all Pennsylvania steel workers were foreign-born, with Poles and Slovaks the leading groups. Poles also dominated the state’s leather (tanning), meatpacking (slaughtering), oil, chemical and shipping (stevedores and longshoremen) industries, all of which had a significant presence in the greater Philadelphia region. The location of heavy industrial work eventually led to the establishment of at least fourteen settlements throughout the area. Because this work was volatile and not always permanent, these settlements were extremely transient places. In some years the turnover was more than half the population.
Despite the extreme transiency, Polish immigrants formed strong, stable communities in the places where they found work. The increasing presence of women in the years 1907 to 1914, which led to marriage, children, and the need for institutions such as churches and schools, constrained mobility. In an economy of erratic male employment, the ability of women to find work as cleaning personnel or in paper, candy, or terra cotta factories, or to supplement household income by taking in lodgers and boarders or piecework, also reduced mobility. Property ownership, made possible by the affordability and ubiquity of the region’s row houses, further restrained geographic movement. Finally, an infrastructure of institutions and organizations enabled stable communities to form and remain intact, no matter how often the population changed. Polish workers could move from Nicetown or Port Richmond to Camden, Wilkes-Barre, or Chicago and find a Polish parish, school, newspaper, and fraternal or beneficial society that supported their needs. The Poles referred to this vast and comprehensive social network in America as Polonia.
The Philadelphia Parishes
Initially, Poles in Philadelphia and Camden traveled to Trenton, Baltimore, or Shenandoah, Pennsylvania, to hear Mass and receive the sacraments in their own language, or they attended local Irish and German Catholic churches. Neither solution was satisfactory. Traveling long distances was unsustainable, and relying on “foreigners”—German and Irish—was untenable. Relations between Poles and Germans were often tense, a carryover of Bismarck’s Kulturkampf, and newer arrivals from Russia and Galicia did not speak German. At home, Poles were used to choosing their priests and overseeing parish finances, but in America the Irish hierarchy had total control of appointments and finances. And lack of Polish representation in the hierarchy was intolerable. Responding to the situation, in the 1890s Poles from Pennsylvania’s coal regions were instrumental in forming the Polish National Catholic Church, the only successful schismatic movement in American Catholicism. John Joseph Krol (1910-96), born in Buffalo, New York, became one of the first Polish-Americans to serve in the national Roman Catholic hierarchy and the first in the nation to be appointed archbishop when appointed to serve Philadelphia from 1961 to 1988. He was designated Cardinal in 1967.
Between 1882 and 1927, Poles established seventeen parishes in the Philadelphia metropolitan region, sixteen Roman Catholic and one Polish National Catholic, all in neighborhoods with heavy industrial work that had prompted their settlement. On January 29, 1882, Poles from Camden, Chester, Wilmington, and Philadelphia met at Muellershen Hall (347 N. Third Street, in the Northern Liberties section of Philadelphia) to plan the first local parish. Forty-seven families took up a collection to construct or purchase a church building. Local Protestants blocked the attempt on four occasions. Resorting to a ruse, Polish priests and leaders passed themselves off as German businessmen and purchased land at the corner of Vienna (later Berks) and Memphis Streets in Kensington. They constructed a large “basement” and used it as a church until completion of the upper church level in 1890. With members of the local hierarchy in attendance, the Poles dedicated the first Polish church in the region to St. Laurentius on September 21, 1890.
In time, St. Adalbert, founded in 1904 with six hundred souls from Galicia and Russian Poland, became the area’s largest Polish parish and confirmed Port Richmond as the mother colony of the Polish population in the Delaware Valley. The parish built a grand church at Allegheny and Thompson Streets with money collected during the Panic of 1907. All parishes included a school staffed by one of the Polish sisterhoods–Sisters of the Holy Family of Nazareth, Felician Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis, and the Bernadine Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis. The Holy Family Sisters also founded Nazareth Academy, a private elementary and secondary school for girls; Holy Family College (later University); and Nazareth Hospital, all located in Northeast Philadelphia. The Felician Sisters founded and staffed St. Joseph’s Hospital, at Sixteenth Street and Girard Avenue.
Source: https://philadelphiaencyclopedia.org/archive/polish-settlement-and-...