Polak, Rev. John
Clergyman. In 1855 he was at Stevens Point, where he founded the Polish settlement: "Polonia," near Stevens Point, Wis. On July 20, 1860 he settled in Stevens Point, Wis., as missionary of St. Stephen's Church. Died May 15, 1862, in Poland Corner, Wis.From: "Who's Who in Polish America" by Rev. Francis Bolek, Editor-in-Chief; Harbinger House, New York, 1943
Rev. John Polak
(Jan. 14, 1817 - March 13, 1862)Do you know who started the first Polish colony in the backwoods of Wisconsin? Until now no one, has said that the Rev. John Polak, who was born January 24, 1817, the son of a Polish nobleman, was largely responsible for beginning it.
The records of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee show that he came from Poland in 1850 to do missionary work in Minnesota and Wisconsin. Nothing is known of his travels into the woods. For the first time, in the middle 1850s, he turned up in New Berlin, a city in Waukesan County, Wisconsin, when he served the religious needs of German Catholics and built Holy Apostles Church. Since then New Berlin has grown from 1200 to more than 38,000 persons After moving to New Coeln, Wisconsin, where he became pastor of St. Stephen's Church on July 5, 1857, he offered Mass every other Sunday in other places of Wisconsin. Once a month, when he was pastor of St. Matthias' Church in Milwaukee, in a German enclave known as Whiskey Corners, he traveled to Holy Trinity, another German church on the other side of the city, to hold Mass for Polish Catholics. Years later, after the first Polish church in Wisconsin was established in Portage County, the Poles in Milwaukee formed St. Stanislaus Church.
The accomplishments of Father Polak and the first Polish settlers in Portage County should not go unnoticed, Very few exactly know the opposition they met, the trials they had to endure, and how they coped with them in the backwoods. The chain of events that led to the first Polish church in Wisconsin began when Peter Eiden, a German farmer in Sharon Township, in the northern part of Portage County, donated a piece of land for a Catholic church. Bishop John Henni, whose diocese then covered all of Wisconsin, sent Father Polak, an experienced church builder, to build one on Eiden's land. It was called St. Martin's.
Shortly after Polak celebrated the first Catholic mass in Peter Eiden's farmhouse, he went by a horse and buggy to the logging camps in the backwoods and the saw mills along the rivers to plead for logs, unfinished and hewed, to build a church. It was twenty by thirty feet. The Koziczkowski family, which arrived in the port of New York on September 4, 1857, was the first Polish family to sit on planks and attend services in the church. It included Michael Koziczkowski and his wife, Frances (nee Zielinska), whom he married October 30, 1838, in Suleczyna, just to the west of Gdansk, and seven of their eleven children. Four children died in infancy.
One wonders when the Koziczkowski learned about Father Polak. According to Anton Hintz and the pastor of their church knew where Michael Koziczkowski was going in Wisconsin. But in 1919 the author of A Standard History of Portage County gave a different version, which he probably found in his research, that the man left his wife and young children in Stevens Point and went to Wausau, in Marathon County, where Germans set up a colony. He didn't like the land and returned to Stevens Point. For one year he did odd jobs and saved enough money to buy 160 acres of land in the section where Father Polak was pastor of St. Martin's Catholic Church.
As soon as he settled in Portage County, Michael Koziczkowski wrote letters to friends and relatives in the old country and started a chain migration. Many families in the chain were identified by Adeline 14. Sopa, who wrote about them in an article that appeared in Rodziny [Families], the quarterly magazine of the Polish Genealogical Society of America, May 1996. At times she found different spellings of the Kaszubian pioneers in newspapers, ship's manifests, and other paper trails, and here I'll use the original names with ski for the males and ska for the wives.
Evidently the first families stimulated by Koziczkowski's letters arrived in New York on the Atlantic, a merchant sailing ship, from Bremen on August 9, 1858. They were Adam and Marianna (Dera) Klesmit and two children from Msciszewice; John and Clara (Szyszka) Zynda and six children, ranging in ages from 19 years to six months, from Skorzewo; and Joseph and Marianna (Konopacka) Platta and four children from Skorzewo.
Nine families came on two different ships in 1859. The Elbe, which left Hamburg, Germany, for Quebec on May 14, 1859, brought Joseph Daczyk from Koscierzyna and his wife, Anna (Kropidlowska), and three children. Some of the families that followed the Daczyks soon afterward, as in the case of the Grzenia family, stayed awhile with other Polish families in Canada, until they could afford to travel, and then went by rail and water to Gill's Landing, a steamboat landing established in 1853 on the Wolf River, where they were probably met by someone from the Polish colony. Others took a stage coach to Stevens Point, where for a small amount of money they could lease or buy 40, 80, or 160 acres of land, and waited there until someone came for them from Sharon. One imagines that the first one to greet them was Father Polak.
In addition to Joseph and Dorothea (Jadzewska) Grzenia and their three sons, Anthony, 13, John, 9, and Peter, still a babe in arms, the passenger list of the Amelia contained the names of Christian and Josephine Dzwonkowski, three children, and Josephine's parents, Stanislaw and Marguerite Konopacki; Jacob and Marianna (Rzepinska) Werachowski, five children, Mathias and Theodosia Rzepinski, Josephine's father and sister; Casimir and Veronica (Jakubowska) Lukaszewicz, 32 and 26, respectively; Joseph and Justina (Lukaszewicz) Jazdzewski and their 12-year-old daughter; and the largest family of all, Anthony and Frank Woyak, father and son, with their wives and seven children
As is evident in the 1860 census of Sharon township, the influx of Polish settlers in Father Polak's time fell like a cataract. The records show that 76 of the 781,558 persons in Wisconsin were from Poland, 69 of them in Sharon. The number of persons in the township was 454. The other seven from Poland were in Stevens Point, a city of 1681 persons in 1860. The Poles in Milwaukee were listed in other categories. As the colony grew, the crossroads, where St. Martin's Church was built, was called Poland Corners. When a post office was opened there in 1867, it was called Ellis, a slap in the face of the Polish pioneers.
Sunday was the busiest day of the week in Poland Corners with virtually every Polish family in Sharon coming to church. Father Polak treated the men who had spent long days in isolated homesteads, grubbing stumps, clearing land, and raising families, like Polish royalty. Their German neighbors were not so friendly, for they considered the church theirs, Slowly, as they were pushed around, the Poles became disenchanted with the Germans. Father Polak saw trouble ahead and was unhappy. The bishop transferred him in 1860 to St Stephen's Church, Stevens Point, which had hardly any Polish parishioners Three years after that, the Poles broke away from St. Martin's and built their own church, which they named in honor of St. Joseph, and the Rev. Bonaventura Buczynski, 0. S. F., formerly a Franciscan missionary in China and Chile, picked up the pastoral duties. St. Joseph's at Poland Corners was, then, the first Polish church in Wisconsin.
Meanwhile, in 1861, for the first time, Bishop Henni traveled to Stevens Point to confirm a class in Father Polak's church. One wonders what Der Wahrheitsfreund, the German newspaper that Henni owned in Milwaukee, said about the visit.
In 1862, when he got sick, Father Polak was taken to St. Mary's Hospital, the oldest hospital in Milwaukee, where he died March 13, 1862. He was laid to rest in Calvary Cemetery, which Bishop Henni consecrated in 1857 in the town of Wauwatosa, three and a half miles from Milwaukee, but was re interred in St Adalbert's Cemetery in Milwaukee.
From: FIRST POLISH PRIEST IN WISCONSIN by Edward Pinkowski (2007)