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Newtown Conn.

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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A Short History of Scrabble (and Some Fun Scrabble Facts)

Starting in 1938, every single giant toymaker in the United States rejected Alfred Butts’ idea for a new word game. All, that is, except for a retiree in Newtown, Conn., who saw the potential in the game we now know as Scrabble.

Aversion to Spelling

Alfred Butts was a shy architect from Jackson Heights, Queens, who lost his job in 1931. As an amateur artist he tried making a living at painting, but that didn’t work. So he got a part-time job as a statistician and decided to create a game he could sell.

Butts came up with the idea for Scrabble while reading a short story by Edgar Allan Poe. In Poe’s The Gold Bug, a character decodes a message by comparing symbols to letters. Poe wrote,

Now, in English, the letter which most frequently occurs is e. Afterwards, the succession runs thus: a o i d h n r s t u y c f g l m w b k p q x z.

Ironically, Alfred Butts didn’t like to spell.

It took him seven years to come up with the right balance of numbered letters. He figured out the number for each letter in the Scrabble game by counting the letters from such newspapers as The New York Times, the New York Herald Tribune and the Saturday Evening Post. He sampled 12,082 letters and 2,412 words to come up with the — presumably — statistically reliable breakdown of letters. Then Alfred Butts called the game Lexiko.

Lexiko

The game had no board. For four years Alfred Butts sold Lexiko to friends, and tried to interest the Parker Brothers in Salem, Mass., and Milton Bradley in Springfield, Mass. No dice.

He added a board to Lexiko so words could be created crossword style, and called the game Criss-Cross Words. He made the games himself, hand- lettering the tiles and gluing them to balsa wood. They sold for $2.

Somehow Butts came into contact with James Brunot, a former social worker looking to start a business in his home in Newtown, Conn. They struck a deal that gave Alfred Butts a small royalty for each copy of the game sold.

Scrabble, Finally

James Brunot

Brunot bought strips of scrap lumber, silk screened letters onto them and hired woodworkers to saw them into tiles. He ordered the boards from a New York game company, Selchow & Righter, which made games for other companies. Brunot and his wife Helen renamed the game Scrabble and assembled 2,251 copies in their living room during 1949. They lost $450.

But the Brunots soldiered along, selling a few hundred games a week, until one day in 1952. That day they came home from a week’s vacation to find orders for more than 2,000 games.

According to legend, a Macy’s department store executive had discovered the game while at a summer resort and ordered copies for the department store shelves. To keep up with demand, James and Helen Brunot moved production to an abandoned schoolhouse in Newtown, then to a converted woodworking shop.

They hired workers to put the game together, but by late 1952 they could only make 6,000 games a week — not enough to keep up with orders. Brunot licensed the game to Selchow & Righter, but kept the rights to make a deluxe version himself. Why was it deluxe? Because pieces were made with plastic.

An Enjoyable Life

In 1953, Selchow & Righter sold 800,000 Scrabble games, but still couldn’t keep up with demand. Christmas shoppers had to either put their names on a waiting list or linger by a store counter hoping for a new shipment to arrive.

Scrabble sales peaked in 1954, with 4 million copies sold. Today 150 million Scrabble games have been sold in 121 countries in 29 languages.

Coleco bought Selchow & Righter in 1986. Then three years later, Hasbro — a Pawtucket, R.I., based company — bought Coleco.

Alfred Butts retired on his Scrabble royalties. He liked to say, “one-third went to taxes, I gave one-third away, and the other third enabled me to have an enjoyable life.”

Alfred Butts

Scrabble Fun Facts

Three out of every five American households has a Scrabble game – and more than half of British households.
There are an estimated 1 million Scrabble tiles lost in the world — somewhere.
The North American record for high-s coring tournament game was set in 2011 by former World Champion Joel Sherman when he scored 803 points at an event in Stamford, Conn.
Benjamin Woo discovered a way to earn 1782 points – the highest possible score — for OXYPHENBUTAZONE. He played it across the top of the board, hitting three Triple Word Score squares while making seven crosswords downward.
In 2006, a carpenter named Michael Cresta and a supermarket worker named Wayne Yorra set three records for sanctioned Scrabble in North America while playing in a Unitarian church in Lexington, Mass. They set records for most points in a game by one player (830), the most total points in a game (1,320) and the most points on a single word (365, for QUIXOTRY).
John Chew, co-president of the North American SCRABBLE Players Association (NASPA), got death threats when he removed the two-letter word ‘da’ from the Scrabble Dictionary.
Richard Nixon regularly played Scrabble in the White House. Other aficionados included Queen Elizabeth, John Travolta, Mel Gibson and Vladimir Nabokov.
Every hour, people start at least 30,000 Scrabble games.
The Metropolitan Museum of Art acquired six of Alfred Butts’ paintings.
The first annual National School SCRABBLE® Championship took place in Boston on April 26, 2003.
In New England the literacy rate was 60 percent between 1650-1670, 85 percent between 1758- 1762 and 90 percent between 1787-1795 – far higher than in other parts of the country. Maybe that’s why Scrabble took root here!
In November 2022, the seventh edition of the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary included the words COVID, VAX, GUAC, ZOODLE and SKEEZY.

Want to win at Scrabble? Click here for the top Scrabble words that will give you a huge advantage.

With thanks to Timeless Toys: Classic Toys and the Playmakers Who Created Them by Tim Walsh. This story about Scrabble was updated in 2022. If you enjoyed it, you may also want to read about the Parker Brothers in Salem, Mass., here.

Images: Scrabble board By thebarrowboy – Flickr, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22817231. Alfred Butts By https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/find-a-grave-prod/photos/2012/94/19851353_133354897401.jpg, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=52441823.

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Flashback Photo: Jewish Farmers of Connecticut

In the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries, a small farm in Colchester, Conn., was a dream for many Jewish immigrants trying to eke out a living in the tenement slums of New York’s Lower East Side. Colchester and other Connecticut towns attracted hundreds and hundreds of Jewish farmers.

Mary Dallek by Jack Delano, Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Mary Dralick by Jack Delano, Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Land was cheap in Connecticut and help was available for Jewish immigrants who wanted out of the city.

A typical rocky Connecticut farm. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

By the end of the 19^th century, Yankee farmers were abandoning their farms in Connecticut. It was too hard to scratch a living out of the state’s rocky soil, help was hard to find and farmers could earn more money in the cities. So many farms were on the market during that period the Connecticut State Board of Agriculture published catalogs of farms for sale.

Baron de Hirsch

Meanwhile, European immigrants were coming to the United States by the millions. Jews fled Russia and Eastern Europe to escape persecution, arriving in America with little money. Jewish relief societies in the United States then tried to help them. In 1889, a wealthy German Jewish banker named Baron Maurice de Hirsch donated $2.4 million for resettling Russian Jews in the United States. The Jewish Agricultural Society in New York and the Baron de Hirsch Fund gave Jewish farmers small loans to establish farms.

Jewish farmers settled in clusters in Colchester, Norwich, East Haddam, and Newtown. By 1928, the Jewish Agricultural Society estimated Connecticut was home to 1,000 Jewish farms and 5,000 Jewish farm families.

Jewish farmers working in a small Colchester coat factory. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Life was hard on the farms, and many farmers worked part-time in small local industries. In the photo above, farmers worked part time in the Levine coat factory. Mary Dralick, pictured at the top of this page worked as a sewing machine operator at Levine & Levine Ladies Coats. She was shown on her father’s farm, where she helped with the milking and the chores after a day of work at the shop.

Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Lapping. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Picturing Jewish Farmers

In 1940, Farm Security Administration photographer Jack Delano went to Colchester to photograph the Jewish farmers. He was Jewish, and he wanted to illustrate the plight of the part-time farmer. During the Depression, people who both farmed and worked part-time in light industry weren’t eligible for federal relief programs aimed at helping farmers.

When Delano went to Colchester in November 1940, one-quarter of the town was Jewish – down from half in 1920. Colchester’s Jews ran dairy and poultry farms, clothing factories and retail stores. Delano took the photo of Mr. and Mrs. Abraham Lapping, Jewish poultry and dairy farmers. “They run a small farm and take in tourists during the summer,” wrote Delano.

Abraham Lapping. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Delano also took photos of Colchester’s synagogue and Hebrew School, below.

One of the Jewish residents of Colchester after the services in the local synagogue. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Below, children at the Hebrew school examine a map of Palestine.

Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Connecticut was close enough to New York that its Jewish farmers and small businesspeople could maintain family and social ties with the city. Some found a market for their products in New York.

Alphonsine and Jacques Makowsky fled Germany and then settled on a poultry farm in northeastern Connecticut to raise African guinea hens. A fire destroyed their henhouses and so they began to cross breed Cornish gamecocks with hens. The result: the Cornish game hen. The Makowskys then sold as many as 3,000 a day to New York restaurants like the 21 Club.

Levine and Levine, Colchester, Conn. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

With thanks to the Connecticut State Library, Jewish Farmers in Connecticut, and Picturing Faith: Photography and the Great Depression, by Colleen McDannell. This story was updated in 2022.

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