Spryszynski, Lawrence Rev.
(Aug. 9, 1845 - 1887)

Rev. Lawrence Spryszynski, the first Polish priest in many watering holes of the United States, deserves more attention than he received in Bolek's Who's Who In Polish America.

He was born August 9, 1845, in Kutno, now a town in central Poland with 48,000 inhabitants, and was ordained by Bishop M. Majerczak in August 1868. Little is known of his first assignments. One source wrote that he married his brother and a nun in Poland.

He was in Rome, Italy, when the Resurrectionist Fathers steered him in October 1876 to their colleague, Rev. Vincent Barzynski, CR, pastor of St. Stanislaus Kostka Catholic Church in Chicago, Illinois. When the six-foot, 31-year-old priest arrived in Chicago, the second edifice of the oldest Polish parish was under construction on the corner of Noble and Ingraham streets. "The imposing and commodious house of worship," as the Chicago Tribune described it, measured 80 x 200 feet and was Romanesque in style. The architect was Patrick C. Keely, who came from Ireland in 1841, and, although self-educated, designed hundreds of Catholic churches and cathedrals, mostly in the Gothic idiom, throughout the country. The pastor of St. Stanislaus selected Keely shortly after he designed the Cathedral of Holy Name in Chicago. In 1876 and 1877, while Barzynski watched over church construction, Father Spryszynski and three other assistants baptized hundreds of babies and married scores of couples. Occasionally Barzynski sent him to hear confessions of Polish Catholics and celebrate Mass in New Posen, Nebraska, and other places.

In March 1878, when the pastor of St. Stanislaus got tired of his assistants eavesdropping on his business, Spryszynski found himself in the mountains and forests of Trempealeau County, Wisconsin, where Polish farmers and lumberjacks, who came from Winona across the Mississippi River and Canada, built the third oldest Polish parish in Wisconsin, The church in Pine Creek, known to Czechs as St. Wenceslaus and to Poles as Sacred Heart, was at different distances from their homesteads. His work among 190 scattered families continued indefinitely. With the arrival of Father Dominic Najer in 1778, Spryszynski was out in the cold and had no resting place until Bishop William 0'Hara of Scranton accepted him in 1880. He served the Polish coal miners of Tioga County, who built St. Mary's Church in Blossburg, in the Scranton diocese, from 1880 to July 1885 when the Polish families of Plymouth, in Luzerne County, who numbered more than Blossburg, requested the regular services of a priest.

Bishop 0'Hara sent Father Spryszynski to organize the parish of the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin, and combine the Poles and Lithuanians in Plymouth. It was considered the fourth oldest Polish parish in the Scranton diocese. As he struggled to work with everybody in the mining town, he realized he had no future there. He saw little difference between him, the organist, and the janitor. The trustees controlled the bank account of the parish. Finally, because he couldn't change the mind of the trustees, he resigned September 2, 1886.

Exactly what he intended to do in the future is not certain. Monsignor John p. Gallagher, author of A Century of Progress (The Diocese of Scranton 1868 1968), wrote "he left for the west" shortly after his resignation. Yet on April 6, 1887, about seven months later, in Wilkes-Barre Deposit and Savings Bank, with one of the finest banking lobbies in the Wyoming Valley, on the Public Square in Wilkes-Barre, across the river from Plymouth, he received a passport to leave the country. Father Waclaw Kruszka reported in his monumental A History of the Poles In America to 1908 that Father Spryszynski passed away in 1887 in a hospital on Oshkosh, Wisconsin.

From: Edward Pinkowski (2009)

Spryszynski, Rev. Lawrence
Clergyman. Came from Poland to Chicago, Ill., in 1876; assistant at St. Stanislaus parish, Chicago, Ill.; pastor in Blossburg, Pa., in 1877, later in Pine Creek, Wis. Deceased.

From: "Who's Who in Polish America" by Rev. Francis Bolek, Editor-in-Chief; Harbinger House, New York, 1943