In May 1893, a short item in the Shenandoah Evening Herald recorded a familiar scene in Pennsylvania’s Coal Region.
A group of Polish immigrants – about thirty men – arrived in Shenandoah after spending two weeks in quarantine at Ellis Island in New York. They stepped off the train into a Schuylkill County mining town that had already acquired a sizable Polish identity.
The article, simply titled “New Arrivals,” captures the moment in vivid detail.
From the Shenandoah Evening Herald, May 26, 1893:
New Arrivals
Thirty Polish immigrants who had been quarantined at Ellis Island, N. Y., for two weeks, arrived in town early this morning. They were all men, young healthy and, big, and were comfortably dressed.
They loitered about the depot for some time until men and women of town arrived and led them away in different directions, in groups of twos and threes.
There were only two instances where receptions seemed to be given by relatives and then there were profuse exchanges of kisses by both men and women.
Excited chatterings, wild gesticulations and the handling and reading of letters and pieces of paper marked the other receptions.
This short newspaper article provides a view of a much larger immigration story.
Between 1870 and the 1920s, more than 1.5 million Polish immigrants came to the United States, with hundreds of thousands settling in Pennsylvania’s industrial regions. Mining towns like Shenandoah became centers of Polish life in America, where the language was spoken in homes, churches, and on the streets. By 1915, a quarter of the town’s population of 27,500 people were Polish immigrants or their descendants.
By 1910, nearly a million people in the United States reported Polish as their primary language. A decade later, in 1920, that number went over a million.
The brief newspaper account below preserves one small moment in that migration that reshaped the Coal Region and created a cultural legacy that remains today through religion and, especially, food.
Long live pierogies and kielbasa!
Read more about immigration in the Coal Region
An unaccompanied Hungarian immigrant girl arrives in Hazleton, PA | 1900
“Not very desirable immigrants” | A nativist editorial from Pennsylvania’s Coal Region in the 1880s
An Irish immigrant’s letter from Pottsville, Pennsylvania | 1832
A 1938 editorial from the Coal Region urged loosening of immigration restrictions for refugees
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