In August 1900, a small story in the Hazleton Plain Speaker captured a moment that speaks volumes about immigration to Pennsylvania’s Coal Region at the turn of the 20th century.
A ten-year-old Hungarian girl arrived alone in Hazleton after crossing the Atlantic Ocean by herself, carrying little more than a tag tied to her clothing that read: “I am Mary Ubaniae, direct me to Hazleton, Pa.” Her parents had died in Hungary, and she had been sent across the ocean to begin a new life with relatives in one of the anthracite mining communities of Luzerne County.
Stories like this were not unusual during the great wave of immigration that reshaped Northeastern Pennsylvania between the 1880s and World War I. Thousands of families from Hungary, Poland, Italy, and other parts of Eastern and Southern Europe arrived in coal towns like Hazleton.
Many followed relatives who had already settled there, creating migration chains that connected remote European villages with the collieries of the Pennsylvania anthracite fields.
The brief newspaper account below preserves one small moment in that larger history. It tells us almost nothing about what became of Mary Ubaniae after she stepped off the train in Hazleton, but it offers a glimpse into the journeys that carried thousands of immigrants across the Atlantic and into the coal communities of Pennsylvania around 1900.
DIRECT ME TO HAZLETON.
Ten-Year-Old Girl Arrives Here Alone With Tag on Her Dress.
There arrived in this city yesterday morning a Hungarian girl, ten years of age, who crossed the Atlantic unaccompanied.
On the waist band of the girl, was tied a tag which bore this inscription: ‘I am Mary Ubaniae, direct me to Hazleton, Pa.’ The girl came from Hungary and as her parents are dead she was sent to America to make her home with friends.
When she landed at the Wyoming street depot from Conductor Reese’s train there was no one to meet her and for a time she seemed bewildered, but friends soon arrived and directed her to a place at No. 6 where she has relatives.
Read more immigration stories from the Coal Region
From Northern Ireland to Pennsylvania’s Coal Region | 1845
Housing conditions in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region | 1908
A letter from an Irish immigrant in Scranton, PA to family in Ireland | 1865
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