POLK, FRANCIS (April 27, 1812 -- Dec. 1, 1906)Village maker. No matter how often the issue is raised, Parisville, nestling in Huron County and the thumb of Michigan's lower peninsula, was founded in 1856 when Francis Polk, Francis Susalla, Anthony Slawik, Thomas Smielewski, and Ambrose Ciechanowski, who changed his name to Smielewski, pawed like cats through the wilderness to their tracts in Township 15. After Congress made it easier in 1855 to buy swamp lands in states like Michigan, each one bought a tract of 40, 80, or whatever the number of acres, at the Detroit land office on September 16, 1856, and a few months later received a certificate of ownership, with no strings attached to it, from President James Buchanan. Panna Maria, Texas, was two years older than Parisville.
Francis Polk, who bought 80 acres for 50 cents an acre in Township 15, was an obscure Polish pioneer until Charles Chase (the original family name was Ciechanowski, but he changed his name from Chinoski to Chase) did a lot of research on him. Francis Polk was his gr- gr- grandfather. He traced him back to Boronow, now a village of 2,793 people, 29 miles north of Katowice, and his gr- gr- grandmother, Josephine Slawik, to Dembowa Gora, two miles east of Boronow, in Lubliniec County, in southern Poland. Too small to have a church, Dembowa Gora sent its people to an old church, built in 1611, at Boronow. It was where Francis Polk and Josephine Slawik were married on September 14, 1835, and baptized eight children from 1841 to 1852.
"We do know that the family left Hamburg, Germany, on 18 or 19 April 1855, aboard the ship Archimedes," Chase wrote. "The Archimedes then sailed to Hall on the east coast of England." Shortly afterward the family arrived in Canada, and it knew the exact time because Francis, the ninth child in the family, was born in a railroad boxcar at Paris, about 60 miles southwest of Ontario, Canada, on July 27, 1855.
The Polks was one of thePolish families attracted to this side of the Atlantic as early as 1853 because labor was needed to build five railroads, ranging in length from 31 to 180 miles, in Canada. Labor was scarce and railroad agents picked up their bodies wherever the immigrants landed. Francis Polk and his cohorts labored on the railroad from Quebec to Richmond. It was longest railroad under construction.
When the Polish railroad workers began to filter into Michigan, the Polish coal miners in Trevorton, Pennsylvania, wasted no time in following them to the swamp lands in Huron County. Pretty soon, in 1861, Francis Polk, whose namesake was born in Paris, Canada, as were others too numerous to mention, persuaded the powers that be to change the name of Township 15 to Paris.
As is evident in the 1860 census of Paris Township, including Parisville, Francis and Josephine Polk had a large family. In 2007, their gr- gr- grandson, Charles Chase, and Evelyn Clor, also a relative, posted an account of Francis Polk and itemized the children who were born to Francis and Josefa (Josephine) Polk in Dembowa Gora, now little more than a few farms with 111 people. For the record, the children were Mary (1836), Josefa (1838), Bartek (1841), Frances (1843), Caroline (1845), Josef (1849), Sophie (1850, and Wincenty (1852). Josephine Polk, still of child bearing age, had three more sons -- Francis in Canada, Anthony (1861) and Peter (1865) in Parisville. "No records of their deaths have been found," Chase and Clor wrote.
Well, among the information I found in 1964, when I was in Michigan and spoke to many of the oldtimers, was the death record of Mary Susalla, daughter of Francis Polk, on page 2 of Volume 4, Death Records, Huron County, in the courthouse at Bad Axe, Michigan. She died on February 28, 1934, in Paris Township at the age of 98 years, 2 months, and 2 days, which meant she was born December 26, 1836. The informant was her son, Alex Susalla (1869 1966), of Ruth, Michigan. Her body was autopsied. For awhile she was the pastor's housekeeper in Parisville.
Until a 95-year-old woman (whose ancestor came to the land of swamps in 1857) told me the story in 1964, no one in Parisville knew that Mary Susalla was one of the people responsible for bringing the Polk and Susalla families to Michigan. Lo and behold, Chase and Clor have found printed notes of my interview, without mentioning their source, and ran it in their article, "Francis Polk: A Founding Father of Parisville, Michigan." It is worth repeating.
"During the fall of 1855," they wrote, "John (Susalla) was working in a quarry where they prepared the local rock to be used for railroad beds. John was working with a Frenchman with whom John did not get along. Apparently, the two men had a significant disagreement as to how the rock should be quarried. The Frenchman threatened John by raising a pick over John's head. Before he could bring it down, John swung his shovel, hitting the Frenchman in the throat, killing him. John was thrown in jail, but escaped that evening. Shortly after his departure, it was found out that Mary Polk (daughter of Francis and Josephine Polk) was pregnant... The Polks and Susallas followed John..."
The two families, having gold coins in their pockets, each bought 80 acres of swamp land in Township 15 and scattered for the winter, working at various jobs, and returned the following spring. John and Mary Susalla and their children turned up for the first time in the 1870 census of Paris Township. John Susalla died September 9, 1907, as I saw in Death Records, Vol 2, No. 360, in Bad Axe, and his father died April 25, 1885 (Vol. I, Death Records). Josephine Susalla died August 28, 1888. The records of these people littered the books in Bad Axe. Wait a minute, John and Mary Susalla were listed in the 1860 census under the names of John and Mary Saddler. Their child, as the census taker reported, was three years old and born in Michigan.
Just a short list. In 1870, the children of John and Mary Susalla were Mary, 13; Mathias, 10; Francis, 8; Caroline, 6; Martin, 4; John, 2; and Adele, 1. On Oct. 7, 1897, Frank, 24 years old, married Valeria Gwisdalla. On Jan. 18, 1875, Mary Susalla, who was born in a shack built of pine saplings in 1857, married Peter Gliniecki, who was nine years older than she was, and they were neighbors of Joseph Pawlowski, who also came from Paris, Canada, when he was three years old, and planted the first apple trees in Parisville. The marriage record said that Mary Susalla was 17 years old and born in Parisville. She was 13 in the 1870 census. In other marriages, Bertha Susala(sic) exchanged vows with Edward Zinger, Nov. 3, 1879; Matthew Susalla and Josephine Smith, Oct. 16, 1887; Martin Susalla and Mary Erdman, Jan. 24, 1887; and John Susalla and Josephine Rumptz, Nov. 24, 1890.
When it comes to new findings from Chase and Clor, it looks like Boronow, a village of 2,793 people in Lubliniec County, 29 miles north of Katowice, played a prominent role in the lives of the first Polish settlers of Parisville. The wooden church of the Holy Virgin Mary, Queen of the Holy Rosary, in Boronow was where Anton Slawik, said to be a heavy drinker, was married in 1848. After his marriage, his wife tried to reform him, but had a problem getting him away from other drinkers. It was not easy. Naturally, because of iron ore mines and breweries in the village, the workers drank a lot. Finally Anton Slawik sold a saw mill on the Liswarta River, a tributary of the third largest river in Poland, and sailed with his wife and three children to Canada. He didn't leave his birthplace until his third child was born in April 1855.
On September 16, 1856, he showed up at the federal land office in Detroit with Francis Polk, a carpenter who had probably learned his trade in Boronow and worked at Slawik's saw mill, and other friends and bought swamp land in Huron County. On March 5, 1859, Anthony Slawik and his wife sold 21 acres of their farm in Section 22, which became the heart of Parisville, to the "Polish Settlers" for $19. The first Polish church in Michigan was made of logs. Francis Polk did most of the carpenter work. In letters to Rome, Polk, Slawik, and John Susalla appealed to the Rev. Hieronim Kajsiewicz, head of the Resurrectionist congregation, to send them a Polish priest to marry people, hear confessions, prepare children for their Holy Communion, and take spirtual care of the 99 Polish families in Parisville and environs. Father Francis Breitkopf, who traveled 365 miles from St. Agatha in Canada to visit Parisville in 1865, wrote to his superior, "The territory is still so wild that it is impossible to cross it on horseback." No doubt the Polish settlers, including Francis Polk, wrote more details in their letters to various religious orders, and the letters are for the most part still untapped by family historians.
After the forest fire of 1871 nothing was left of St. Mary's church and Parisville but the people who fled from the fire. The pastor of Parisville, Father Simon Wieczorek, who fled to Detroit, about 100 miles south of the forest fire, wrote to another priest, "Not even the ashes are left as a souvenir because even they were carried off by the wind." The 29 people who died in the first fire included the teacher whom Father Wieczorek hired just a few weeks earlier and seventeen persons in the fields north of Frank Polk's farm.When another forest fire broke out in 1881, Father John Gratza, who came to the United States in 1872, ran to ring the churc h bells, but found them enveloped in flames. The fall of the bell tower knocked him off his feet. Francis Polk, who lived close to the church, and others who were racing away in wagons saw the unconscious priest on the ground and stopped to carry him to safety. The church, however, was not saved. With the help of Polk and other families the following year, Father Gratza built a new edifice, 62 by 160 feet, with three altars, 1600-pound bells in a high tower, and a large pipe organ.
The Polish colony did not give up easily. It was the kind that Michigan needed to turn the places covered with swamps and forests into profitable soil. Without courage and determination, no one would have been able to carve homes and villages out of swamp lands. Francis Polk was one of a kind. He traveled to Detroit to apply for his citizenship papers. His children struck out for themselves. By the turn of the century Polish families were spread out in all directions like wild mushrooms. For starters Thomas Polk moved to a farm in Verona Township, and, in his 80s, still worked daily in the fields. Most of the families that moved to other places wanted larger farms and none was available in Paris Township.
The children picked up the responsibilty of self-government where Francis Polk left off, tilled the Michigan soil, rebuilt St. Mary's church, and married one another more often than any of the families who were always on the go. Little did they know that one day Huron County would develop into the foremost farming section in Michigan. In 1932, when the heirs of Francis Polk were rich from the sales of apples, beans, and peas, Huron County had 4,155 farms, and one wonders how many acres were in the hands of Francis Polk's descendants.
From: Edward Pinkowski (2011) [email protected]