LESNIEWSKI, Walter J. (Nov. 21, 1931 -- April 2, 2012)
Cement contractor.Historians have paid little attention to the impact of the Lesniewski families in the United States.
According to the 2,000 census, 928 persons in the nation were named Lesniewski and ranked 25,076 out of 151,671 surnames. The first one of note, written up in Bolek's Who's Who in Polish America, and included in the Pinkowski Files, was the Rev. Francis Philip Lesniewski. He was born at Grzybowa, a village in the Russian partition of Poland, March 15, 1884, and boarded the Batavia on April 10, 1901. He studied for the priesthood at the Polish Seminary in Detroit (later Orchard Lake, Michigan) and then at St. Joseph's Seminary in Yonkers, New York. He was ordained at St. Patrick's Cathedral, New York, May 17, 1913, and spent the rest of his life in the New York archdiocese. He was pastor for the second time of Sacred Heart of Jesus Church in Port Chester, N. Y., when he died May 16, 1945.
Editor's note. Harper's Weekly, 7 Nov. 1874, has a wood engraving of passengers boarding the Batavia at Hamburg, Germany. The Hamburg Ameryka liner was later renamed Polonia.
In a less prominent role, Walter J. Lesniewski, a self employed cement contractor, played an important role in Conshohocken, where 11.54 percent of the population has Polish roots. Over the years, a tire plant, a steel and iron mill, a boiler factory and quarries on both sides of the Schuylkill River attracted their forebears who built their own church, school, and other institutions. Walter Lesniewski was president for over 30 years of the Tadeusz Kosciuszko Association in Conshohocken, known as the T. K. Club, and was a great promoter of polka music. Various polka bands played there. On one occasion it honored me for discovering the last residence of General Kosciuszko in America (Third and Pine streets, Phila.).
Walter Lesniewski was one of seven children raised by John and Mary Lesniewski at 726 East Elm Street in Conshohocken. The brick house was three stories and three bedrooms, two on the second floor and one on the third floor. In the beginning the family used an outhouse in the backyard. Few are aware that the value of the house rose in his lifetime from $5,000 to $284,000.
Often confused with another person of the same name in Philadelphia, John Lesniewski of Conshohocken came in 1912 from Brzoza, a village of 2200 in north-central Poland, six miles south of Bydgoszcz, and first lived in Nanticoke, near Wilkes-Barre, with his mother, sister, and two brothers. By 1917 he switched from shoveling coal in a Nanticoke mine to operating a lathe in the Midvale Steel Works at Nicetown in Philadelphia. After the war, in the 1920s, the company laid off thousands of workers, and Lesniewski was one of them.
John Lesniewski then found a job in an iron mill at Conshohocken and moved there with his wife, Mary, whom he married in 1917, five years after she came from Poland, and the first of their seven children. Like his father, Walter Lesniewski spent much of his time at the T. K. Club and the Polish church in Conshohocken. For 54 years he was married to Dorothy Cyzio, the daughter of Polish immigrants, with whom he had three daughters. As a talented baseball player in his youth, he passed on his interest in the game to five grandchildren. He was buried in St. Benedict Cemetery in Conshohocken.
Author: Edward Pinkowski (2012) [email protected]