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How the Polish Immigrants Came to New England

Before Polish immigrants arrived in New England they had already made it to the Jamestown colony in Virginia as craftsmen.

John Evanowski, Polish immigrant, at the Fafnir Bearing Co. in New Britain. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Over the centuries Polish immigrants came to New England in waves, the first from 1870 to 1914, the second after World War II and the third following Polish independence in 1989. By 1900, 9.3 percent of Polish immigrants in the United States lived in New England. That number increased to 10.9 percent in 1930. Only the Great Lakes and Mid-Atlantic states attracted more Polish immigrants.

Today, Massachusetts and Connecticut rank 10^th and 11^th in total population of people with Polish ancestry. Connecticut has the third densest population of Polish-Americans in the country, with 8.85 percent, behind Wisconsin and Michigan.

Poles have been soldiers and journalists, farmers and factory workers, priests and rabbis, entrepreneurs and entertainers. Tadeusz Kosciuszko and Kazimierz Pulaski were heroes of the American Revolution. Igor Sikorsky, who had Russian and Polish parentage, built a helicopter factory in Connecticut. Martha Stewart, nee Kostyra, built a business empire.

Some of New England’s most prominent politicians have Polish ancestry: Connecticut senator Chris Murphy, the late U.S. Secretary of State Ed Muskie and U.S. senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders. Red Sox icon Carl Yasztremski grew up on a potato farm and spoke fluent Polish, while the New England Patriots’ former stars Stephen Gostowksi and Rob Gronkowski claim Polish ancestors. Paul Newman was part Polish; so is Steven Tyler, Aerosmith vocalist.

The 1st Wave of Polish Immigrants

Philip Sowa. Photo couresty Library of Congress.

Philip Sowa. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Most Polish-Americans are descended from the first wave of immigrants, when an estimated 1.5 million fled poverty and starvation in Germany, Russia and Galicia. People called them the za chlebem, or ‘for bread’ immigrants, because most had neither money nor land. A large number were Jewish, escaping persecution.

They came to New England to work in the factories, primarily textile mills. They came in family groups and settled in neighborhoods with large Slavic populations. In Lawrence, Mass., for example, Polish immigrants arrived en masse at the turn of the 20^th century.

Around 1912, Michael and Jadwiga Narkiewicz emigrated from Wilno, Poland, and settled in Westminster, Vt., where they ran a dairy farm. Then the paper mills came to Bellows Falls, and the Narkiewiczs followed.

Polish-American Club, Bellows Falls, Vt.

In 1903, 600 Polish immigrants lived in Lawrence, Mass. That number more than tripled in seven years, to 2,100. They mostly worked in woolen and worsted goods manufacturing. Two years later, Polish women working at the Everett Mill shut down their looms and started the Bread and Roses strike.

The Mills

When strikes in New Bedford’s cotton mills in 1894 and 1898 caused many workers to leave, Polish workers replaced them, though not as strike breakers. By 1910 several thousand Poles worked in the New Bedford mills — and they were still arriving.

Polish immigrants had large families, and the children often went to work in factories at a young age. Social reformer Lewis Hine photographed 14-year-old Philip Sowa at the Shoe Mill in Fall River, Mass., where he had applied to be a doffer. “Liked to go to school,” Hine noted in a caption to the 1916 photograph.

Another crusading photographer, unknown, photographed the overcrowded home of cotton mill workers in the Olneyville section of Providence. “Eight persons live in these three small rooms, three of them are boarders,” noted the photographer. “Inner bed-rooms are 9 x 8 feet, the largest room 12 x 12 feet. 23 Chaffee Street, Polish People. Property owned by the mill.”

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Thousands of Poles came to Massachusetts to work in mills in Springfield, Chicopee and Holyoke. Many saved their earnings from factory work and bought cheap, abandoned farms in the Connecticut River Valley. They moved into old colonial homes and transformed the land viewed as useless into thriving onion and tobacco farms.

A Cold Welcome

They weren’t always welcome. A novel published in 1913, called The Invaders, described how people of English ancestry reacted to the newcomers. So did a 1933 article in New England Magazine titled The Pole In The Land Of The Puritan:

In the smiling country along the Connecticut river and included within Massachusetts, there was three decades ago possibly the most distinctive survival of early New England Puritan life. The first Poles came in the early eighties; many of them were attracted by glowing reports of returning Jews, who told of a land of boundless freedom and countless dollars. Soon the descendents of the Pynchons and the Chapins were marvelling at the expressionless Slavic faces, which looked as if flattened against a board at birth; at stunted figures that bespoke grinding toil; at the masculine forms of the women, that told of field-work beside brother and husband and domestic animal. To-day the Polish tide, swelled by continuous immigration and prolific births, is steadily rising in this old Yankee community. The Massachusetts section of the valley is the home of twelve to fifteen thousand of these aliens.

Catholics and Jews

Many of the Polish farmers were Jewish and settled on abandoned farms in Connecticut with the help of Jewish relief societies. Many Jewish families who fled persecution in Poland dreamed of owning a small farm. They ended up, though, in tenements on New York’s Lower East Side.

Those who made it out of the tenements tended to settle on Connecticut farms near other Jewish farmers, in Colchester, Norwich, East Haddam and Newtown.

A Polish immigrant couple, Mr. and Mrs. Andrew Lyman, on their tobacco farm near Windsor Locks, Conn.

Many other Polish immigrants belonged to the Roman Catholic Church. In 1889, Fr. Franciszek Chalupka founded a Polish-American parish in Webster, Mass., the first in New England. The parishioners of St. Joseph Parish raised money to pay for his seminary tuition. He later founded St. Stanislaus Parish in Chicopee.

Poles and other immigrant groups suffered high unemployment after the 1893 financial panic. Father Chalupka visited wealthy people door-to-door asking for money to buy food and coal. He is remembered today for saving the Polish immigrants of Chicopee.

The 2nd Wave

World War II created the second wave of Polish immigrants who escaped ethnic cleansing by Germany and Russia. Many Poles died in German concentration camps or Russian massacres. The Soviet government also deported millions of Poles to Siberia and other remote regions of the empire.

Between World War II and 1968, 140,000 Poles came to the United States. Poles escaping repression in Europe came from diverse backgrounds and social classes. Most, however, left their home for political rather than economic reasons. A good percentage belonged to the middle- and upper-middle-classes in Poland.

The bulk of the second wave of Polish immigrants arrived between 1948 and 1952. Some were former soldiers, some were relatives of Poles already living here and some arrived under the Displaced Persons Act.

When they arrived in the United States, they tended to seek white-collar and professional jobs.

Today there are 78 Polish-American parishes in New England, mostly in the Springfield-Hartford-Worcester area, but also in Boston, Fall River, and Manchester, N.H. Three dozen Roman Catholic churches in New England offer Mass in Polish.

New Britain’s Little Poland

Many of New England’s Polish neighborhoods have disappeared as Poles assimilated quickly. Not so New Britain’s Little Poland, a thriving ethnic community in central Connecticut. The neighborhood retained its Polish character since it started in 1890. The third wave of immigrants came to New Britain after Polish independence in 1989.

Polish-Americans from nearby towns in Connecticut bolster Little Poland’s population of 30,000. They can spend a day doing business completely in Polish, shopping, buying an airline ticket, getting a home loan, taking dance or driving lessons and ordering dinner. On weekends, thousands attend Mass at Sacred Heart Church.

On the last Sunday in April, Little Poland is thronged with visitors to the Little Poland Festival on Broad Street. It features crafts vendors from around New England, food and a live stage with folk dancing and live bands.

This story about Polish immigrants was updated in 2023.

Image: Polish and American flag By Elevatorrailfan – Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=41217488.

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Gentleman Gerald Chapman, Connecticut’s Celebrity Gangster

Gerald Chapman, Prohibition’s celebrated “Gentleman Bandit,” might have escaped the gallows if he hadn’t gone on a crime spree in Connecticut.

Gerald Chapman. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

While in prison, Gerald Chapman found a mentor who taught him that dapper dress and good manners diverted suspicion from criminal activity. Before he pulled off the biggest armed robbery in history, Chapman dressed well, lived in New York’s posh Gramercy Park neighborhood and frequented expensive nightclubs. He even affected a British accent.

Newspapers nicknamed him the “Count of Gramercy Park” and the “Gentleman Bandit.” He was the first celebrity gangster and the first criminal the press dubbed “Public Enemy No. 1.”

Gerald Chapman

Gerald Chapman came into this world as George Chartres in Brooklyn, N.Y. — or maybe it was Manhattan’s Lower East Side – sometime in August 1887. As a youth he drifted into petty crime.

Police arrested him for the first time at the age of 14, and he spent most of his young adulthood in Sing Sing. He met his mentor, George “Dutch’” Anderson, after his transfer to Auburn Prison.

Anderson’s real name was Ivan Dahl von Teler. Born into a wealthy Danish family, he attended Heidelberg and Uppsala universities. Then he dropped out of the University of Wisconsin to take up crime. Anderson saw in the younger Gerald Chapman someone who had enough smarts and daring to commit big-time heists.

Prohibition

Gerald Chapman in his Wethersfield prison cell. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.

When the two men were out on parole in 1919 they formed a gang with Charles Loerber, a getaway driver. He posed as their chauffeur while they plotted their crimes. Chapman pretended to be an oil baron, and Anderson his business partner. The gang quickly seized the opportunities presented by Prohibition and began bootlegging in the Midwest. They also arranged confidence scams on the side.

In 1921 they branched out into armed robbery. They plotted the route of a U.S. mail truck that ran regularly along a street in New York’s Tribeca neighborhood. On Oct. 24, they blocked the mail truck with two cars and assaulted the driver. Chapman and his gang made off with $2.4 million in cash, bonds and jewelry – the biggest heist in U.S. history.

They should have lain low, but instead they committed a string of robberies in upstate New York. But robbing the post office is a federal crime, and federal investigators soon hunted them down.

3rd Time the Charm

An undercover postal inspector nabbed them when he bought stolen Argentine gold notes from Gerald Chapman. He and Anderson were tried and sentenced to 25 years in the Atlanta Federal Prison.

Gerald Chapman then managed to escape after three tries. During his first attempt he tried to outrun a posse of 200 men. They shot him in the arm, kidney, hip and back. Six days later he escaped from Atlanta General Hospital, only to be captured again. After returning to the Atlanta penitentiary, he promptly broke out again and made a clean getaway in March 1923.

The press ate up the story of the Gentleman Bandit. Chapman paved the way for future celebrity gangsters like John Dillinger and Al Capone.

According to True Detective in 1929,

Newspaper feature writers used miles of typewriter ribbon on him, and ended by creating an idealized character which combined the daring of Jesse James, the ruthlessness of the apache, Clair Raoul, the suavity of Doctor Crippen and the ingenuity of the notorious Perugia, who committed the famous theft of the Mona Lisa.

Anderson escaped in December that year.

Death in New Britain

Gerald Chapman with his attorneys. Photo courtesy Boston Public Library, Leslie Jones Collection.sp

In the fall of 1924, Gerald Chapman and another man went on a crime spree in Connecticut. They were spotted trying to rob a New Britain department store, and five police officers rushed to arrest them. In the ensuing shoot out, Chapman killed Officer James Skelly and escaped. The police captured the other armed robber — Walter Shean, the ne’er-do-well son of family from Springfield, Mass. Shean ratted out Chapman rather than hang for Skelly’s murder.

Gerald Chapman went into hiding at the farm of Ben Hance in Muncie, Ind. Three months later, Hance did his public duty and tipped off the police to Chapman’s whereabouts. Police arrested Chapman and sent him back to the federal prison in Atlanta.

Though the federal government had jurisdiction, the State of Connecticut wanted to try Chapman for murder. In March 1925 he was extradited to Connecticut State Prison in Wethersfield. His trial would turn into a media circus.

Awkward

Dutch Anderson ‘Wanted’ poster.

Ben Hance and Walter Shean testified against Chapman. The prosecution also showed that spent cartridges from Officer Skelly’s body matched Chapman’s gun. Chapman denied he’d ever been in New Britain. He also denied knowing Ben Hance or Walter Shean or that he was even Gerald Chapman.

The jury deliberated for 11 hours and on April 4, 1925 delivered a guilty verdict. He was sentenced to hang by the “upright jerker.”

“Death itself isn’t dreadful, but hanging seems an awkward way of ending the adventure,” Chapman then said to his attorney. The upright jerker, a flawed hanging mechanism, dropped counterweights to pull the victim upward. Theoretically death resulted instantly from a broken neck. But in practice victims sometimes strangled slowly.

Chapman’s lawyers argued the state couldn’t execute him because he had to first serve out his federal sentence. President Calvin Coolidge solved that problem by granting Chapman a pardon. Chapman appealed his sentence all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court, but the high court ruled against him.

Chapman was hanged until he was dead shortly after midnight on April 6, 1926.

Eight months later, Ben Hance and his wife were killed in revenge. They fell victim to a roadside ambush on the Anderson-Muncie Highway. Mrs. Hance died instantly. But Ben Hance lived long enough to finger Dutch Anderson and an accomplice. Police later killed Anderson in a shootout.

This story about Gerald Chapman was updated in 2022.

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Charles Keeney Hamilton – Connecticut’s ‘Crazy Man of the Air’

In 1910, two newspapers, one in New York and the other in Philadelphia, put up a prize of $10,000 for the first pilot who could fly from one city to the other and back. Charles Keeney Hamilton, one of the most famous stunt pilots of the day, won it.

Charles K. Hamilton

It was probably the most notable prize of Hamilton’s career, but what he was best known for was crashing.

Hamilton, by some estimates, crashed as many as 60 times over his 11-year flying career. He broke most of his bones and often gave the doctors who put him back together a good challenge.

Yet time and again he would head back to whatever plane was handy and go back to the flying.

Charles Keeney Hamilton

Born in 1885 in New Britain, Conn., Hamilton took to flying at an early age, first in lighter-than-air dirigibles, balloons, kites and blimps. But he soon realized that heavier-than-air flying machines were capturing the public’s fascination. The air shows of Europe offered crowds thrilling races and competitions such as slow-flying or quick take-offs.

Hamilton signed on with early aviator Glenn Curtiss as part of Curtiss’ stunt-flying show, and he leased a plane from Curtiss. The two parted ways over a dispute over the lease payments on the plane and how big a share of his winnings Hamilton should pay Curtiss.

Hamilton replaced the Curtiss with his own custom-made plane, a 110-horsepower crate he called the Hamiltonian. He traveled from one end of the country to the other, sometimes joining in air shows and other times doing solo demonstrations.

Charles K. Hamilton in his Hamiltonian.

In 1909 and 1910, crowds were thrilled by the air shows, but very quickly the novelty of watching a plane fly wore off. The aviators had to add spice to their shows, and Hamilton proved masterful. He would push his plane high into the air and then, giving the appearance that his engine had cut out. The he dove toward the ground while the crowds shrieked.

Then, with polished timing, he would pull the craft out of the dive to everyone’s relief. At least, that’s what was supposed to happen. On occasion, Hamilton would miscalculate or his engine would fail during a show, and his plane would land in a heap.

Hamilton was also known as a heavy drinker (and chain smoker) who sometimes flew under the influence. That added an element of danger to the airshows as planes raced each other or sometimes automobiles.

Charles K. Hamilton racing against an automobile on a beach in Galveston, Texas.

Bird Men

Crashes were not the brutal and explosive events of modern times, but they were no picnic. The pilot was often battered by pieces of the plane’s fuselage, scalded by radiator fluid or just smashed into the ground.

Still, the daring aviators, known as ‘Bird men,’ were the stars of their day. Hamilton was branded “The Crazy Man of the Air” for his fearless flying, which once landed him in a lake in Washington state in front of an awestruck crowd.

He received a hero’s welcome in 1910 when he returned to New Britain, Conn. There he gave New Englanders their first demonstration of an airplane.

In total, Hamilton earned a quarter of a million dollars with his stunt flying by the end of 1913, but he kept very little of it. In January of 1914, the inevitable happened. Charles K. Hamilton died. Not in an airplane, but from tuberculosis.

If you enjoyed this story, you might want to read about Ruth Law here, or New Hampshire’s Bob Fogg here. This story updated in 2022.

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