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Major Joseph N. Gorlinski

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Walentyna Tecla Gorlinski (nee Wrotnowski)

Polish Lovebirds in Louisiana

by Edward Pinkowski

If you had to pick two Polish originals, mother and father, together with their children and grandchildren, who made the greatest impact on American life, would you name Joseph Gorlinski and Valentine Wrotnowski? Chances are that you wouldn't, for they are virtually unknown to most Americans. In two books - Pills, Pen, and Politics in 1974 and Poles in America in 1976 -- I wrote a few lines about them and left a huge gap in their story. Now, when I hooked up with Charles Gorlinski of Carmichael, California, who helped me to revive memories of his ancestors and fill in many missing pieces, I present to you the story of an illustrious Polish family.

Never before were the portraits of Joseph and Valentine Gorlinski, each taken in the Washington gallery of Mathew B. Brady, whose coverage of President Lincoln and the Civil War made him the best known photographer in the world, published as they are in these pages. Unfortunately, Brady, who planned to publish them in a series of illustrious Americans, went broke at the time the Gorlinski portraits were taken, and sold 7,000 glass plate negatives, most of them without the names of the persons he had photographed to the federal government in 1875.

EARLY LIFE

Joseph Nicholas Gorlinski left very little written documentation of his early life. He was born September 9, 1825, in Plock, about sixty miles northwest of Warsaw, the son of Thomas Gorlinski and Anne Kwiatkowski. The next part of his story is a little murky. Instead of crunching the numbers to see that Joseph Gorlinski was only six years old at the time of the 1831 Polish uprising, the Salt Lake City newspaper reported that "he began the study of engineering in his native village and upon the breaking out of the Polish revolution he joined the patriots and when crushed by Russia he became a political exile in France."

The Polish refugees in Paris, France, were an interesting lot. Among them were Stanislaus and Catherine Wrotnowski, who were born and raised in Warsaw, Poland, and fled to Paris with their little girl, Walentyna, in the early 1830s. A countess took an interest in the education of the Polish children in Paris and employed Fryderyk Chopin, the composer and pianist, to give them piano lessons. When she grew up, Chopin helped Valentine, the English form of Walentyna, to develop her skills on me piano. One day, shortly after Walentyna, a Polish song, was published, Chopin autographed a copy to Mademoiselle Wrotnowska.

LOVE AFFAIR

The true-to-life story of how she and Joseph Gorlinski fell in love has, as far as is known, no parallel in literature. The young engineer had been given just a few hours notice to pack and rush to Havre, France, where the Manchester, which could hold less than 300 passengers, was waiting for high tide to leave for New Orleans.

Taking a berth on the Manchester marked a new beginning for Gorlinski. When he boarded the packet, one of the Polish passengers, who was engaged to Valentine Wrotnowski, introduced him to the oldest of Stanislaus Wrotnowski's four children. Then Valentine fell in love with Gorlinski. On the first day of 1851, they were married by a Jesuit priest, the Rev. H. C. Gache, in St. Joseph's Cathedral at Baton Rouge, a city of 2,564 white people, 250 free colored, and 546 slaves 120 miles north of New Orleans on the Mississippi River.

As they had children, Mrs. Gorlinski, who began to teach music at Mrs. Mary W. Read's Academy in Baton Rouge, had a house servant to help her. In addition to an infant, Joseph, who died in 1854, four more of her nine children did not live long. Three children, who were born between 1855 and 1859, were baptized in 1859 at St. Joseph's Cathedral.

RISE TO PROMINENCE

The versatility of Joseph Gorlinski was not discovered until he landed the surveyor's job of East Baton Rouge Parish. By 1860 he was doing a lot of civil engineering work. Up to the time of the Civil War, surveyors, civil engineers, draftsmen and others worked hard to produce maps of the new states and territories. Then, in the 1860s, the generals of the gray- and blue-clad armies wanted them to do maps of forts, battlefields, river crossings, and other geographical features. Gorlinski joined the Union Army to do this kind of work.

Without going into all the details, Valentine, who remained in Baton Rouge until the third battle for the possession of the city on August 5, 1862, saw him come and go. The first time he stayed until the city surrendered to Union troops and then went on to Vicksburg, where he drew maps of the fortifications. Just before the third battle, Valentine and her children, who in Major Gorlinski ordered to get out of their home in the middle of the battlefield, fled to the Mississippi River with a bag of French bread to eat on the way and arrived safely in New Orleans on a troop carrier. Soon afterwards, however, the boat they had taken, still loaded with wounded soldiers, was sunk by enemy fire. General Thomas Williams was killed in the four-hour battle at Baton Rouge. Gorlinski, who had served under Williams, was transferred to the staff of General Nathaniel Banks, former governor of Massachusetts, who suffered heavy losses in the siege of Port Hudson, Louisiana, where Valentine's brother, Lt. Ladislaus Wrotnowski, was killed on May 27,1863.

When Gorlinski took off his uniform in 1863, within a year he was appointed in succession surveyor of New Orleans, U.S. Deputy Surveyor and Civil Engineer, Louisiana Register of Public Lands, and member of a convention to frame a new constitution for Louisiana, not to mention his activities in abolitionist organizations like the Friends of Freedom. The local newspapers, mostly in favor of President Lincoln, had nothing but praise for Gorlinski.

IN UTAH

His most enduring accomplishments were the colored maps of the West that he drew in Washington, D.C, which now sell for hundreds of dollars, and his surveys of mineral lands in the West. The Polish emigres in the General Land Office, where he worked from about 1866 to 1868, were sorry to see him go to open the first federal land office in Salt Lake City, Utah, at the beginning of 1869. The population of his new habitat, founded in 1847 by Mormons, grew from 12,961 in 1870 to 53,531 in 1900. Despite the preponderance of Mormons, Gorlinski was always a strong Catholic. When he died on August 31, 1900, the Rt. Rev. Lawrence Scanlan, then in his ninth year as the first Bishop of Salt Lake City, officiated and "spoke beautifully of dear Papa," as his oldest son wrote of the services in the Cathedral of the Madeline. He was buried in a Catholic cemetery, but his wife, who died November 27, 1881, was not, because the only public one in existence at the time was the Salt Lake City Cemetery.

What their four children remembered most about life at home from Baton Rouge to Salt Lake City was the love of music that the matriarch of the family passed on to them. Valentine's desire was for her music to touch children's lives as it did in her time. However, no one remembers if she moved a piano from place to place, or bought a new one in Baton Rouge, Washington, or wherever she gave piano lessons, but the music books, beginning with one from Chopin in Paris, were always handed down from one family to the other. No wonder that the memory of Chopin still broods over them.

From: Zgoda, July 1, 2006

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