Not long after Portage County was reduced to its present proportions occurred an event of far-reaching influence upon its development. With the coming of its first Polish immigrants to the farms east and northeast of Stevens Point was inaugurated an infusion of new stalwart blood which has meant much to the growth of both the city and the county. Industrious, ambitious and intelligent Poles also settled at Stevens Point, added to its population and trade and proved a potent factor in bringing the location of the county seat to it and establishing it in an enlarged and permanent prosperity.
The best sketch descriptive of the first incursion of Polish people into Portage County has been drawn by Prof. Albert H. Sanford, of the University of Wisconsin, in the "Proceedings" of the State Historical Society for November 1907. The special occasion calling for its publication was the fiftieth anniversary of the arrival of the pioneer Polish family in that section of the state. "Within the half century," says Professor Sanford, "their numbers have increased until the immigrants with their descendants are now more than ten thousand strong, constituting approximately one-third of the county’s population. Two-thirds of the Poles in Portage County are farmers, varying in material condition from extreme poverty to affluence. On the whole they constitute a prosperous and substantial element of the population. The same may be said of the remaining one-third of their number who dwell in Stevens Point.
"The present study includes: First, an investigation into the early history and later development of this foreign group, and second a description of conditions among them, and such comments upon Polish characteristics as relate to the social and economic problems involved in their progress toward complete Americanization.
"The first Poles who came to Portage County were Michael von Koziczkowski and family, consisting of his wife and nine children; they were followed, a year later, by the three families of Adam Klesmit (or Kleinshmidt), John Zynda and Joseph Platte. No dissent from the opinion that these were the earliest immigrants have been encountered and no records have been found to contradict it. As to the dates of their arrivals, tradition, even among those who then came as children with their parents, is at variance. These facts, however, are sufficiently settled by papers on file in the office of the clerk of the Circuit Court in Stevens Point, where the declaration of intention to become a citizen made by Koziczkowski states that he arrived in 1857. The papers of the others named give the date of their coming as 1858, and, corroborating this evidence are the baptismal records of the Zynda family with the same year thereupon, furnished by the parish priest upon their departure for America and still in their possession. The following year saw the arrival in Portage County of Christian Dzwonkowsky, Franz Wojak, Casimir Lukaszewitz, Joseph Jazdzewski, ____ Green and ____ Werochowski. Peter Kronopeski came either this year, or the year before, from Winona, Minnesota.
"The pioneer of this early group of immigrants, Koziczkowski, had been the owner of a small farm in the region of Dantzic, West Prussia. He realized that the economic future of his nine children was dark and, having read of America, sold his farm and started for the New World without knowing his destination. Arrived in Chicago, he heard of cheap lands to be had on the upper Wisconsin River. In Milwaukee2 he learned more, for there was at that time a movement among the Germans to take up lands in Marathon County. Proceeding in this direction, Koziczkowski arrived at Stevens Point in September 1857, with but fifty dollars in money. He left his family in Stevens Point while he went to Wausau to look at land, which proved unsatisfactory because too heavily wooded.3 Returning, he spent the winter (1857-58) in Stevens Point, and in the following summer worked for farmers a few miles east of the city. In the meantime, he had written to friends at home, and the three families of Klesmit, Platta and Zynda had found their way to Portage County and were employed in the same neighborhood.
"These first Polish settlers and others who soon followed endured great hardships. Since there was little demand for labor on the farms, the men were paid but fifty cents a day for cradling, and twenty-five cents a day for digging potatoes, or they were paid in kind at the rate of one bushel of potatoes per day. The wife of one of these first comers worked for a loaf a day, and a sixteen-year old girl hired out for fifteen dollars and board for a year. In such cases the compensation for labor seems to have been the same as that to which they had been accustomed in the Old World. Under these circumstances only the bare necessities of life could be secured. Often their bread contained more of middlings than of flour4 and was more often made of rye than of wheat. Potatoes were much used and, in accordance with a European custom, generally entered into the composition of their bread. A soup of milk and potatoes was often the sole constituent of a meal.
The first lands secured by these settlers and other Poles who followed were pre-empted. Later, purchases were made of state lands at $1.00 and $1.25 per acre, and of lands from the Fox and Wisconsin River Improvement Company at prices ranging from $50 to $100 for forty acres.5 After the enactment of the Homestead law (1862) advantage was taken of its provisions. The location of the first Polish farmers some ten miles northeast of Stevens Point seems to have been determined by the fact that a German settler, Joseph Oesterle, chiefly engaged in hunting and trapping, induced Koziczkowski to secure land in his neighborhood. His location became the center of what was probably the earliest Polish agricultural community in Wisconsin and one of the earliest in The United States. The community is known as Polonia, and its growth was influenced by conditions of soil, topography and forests.
"The majority of the early Polish immigrants of Portage County became farmers. Others settled in Stevens Point; among them, Jazdzewski (1859), Kuklinski (1860), Paul Luzaszewitz (1861),
Polebietski (1862) and Leopold Kittowski (1864). The last named started from Kreis Konitz with his father and two brothers, Joseph and Thomas, in company with the families of John Boyer and Michael Mozuch. This group landed at Quebec, where they remained for about two years, except Leopold K.ittowski who came direct to Stevens Point. They then moved to Detroit, where, it is said, there were then two or three Polish families.6
The pioneer Polish family of Portage County was large as was the Old World rule. Six children were born before America was reached and they all attained maturity. Then came five who died in infancy. The last four of the fifteen children also survived the uncertainties of the earlier period, less than twenty-six years having passed between the birth of the first in Poland and the last about two miles east of Polonia, on Section 2, Sharon Township. Joseph, the first to be born after the family settled in the county, is now in his sixty-first year; is a large land owner both in Portage and Marathon counties; is a leading stock breeder, especially of Ayrshire cattle and is a prominent democrat. From facts which he has furnished and which are elaborated in another volume, it seems that his parents were Michael and Frances (Vonzelewaka) Koziczkowski, and that they were natives of German Poland - the father born on September 11, 1811, and the mother, December 4, 1818. After the birth of eleven of their children they left Poland on February 8, 1857, took passage on a sailing vessel at Hamburg, Germany, and landed in New York City September 4th of that year. Not long afterward the family settled in Section 2, Sharon Township, where Joseph Patrick, his wife and large family still reside.
The father, founder of the family and pioneer of the Polish element in Portage County, was industrious, thrifty and honorable, and at his death in 1882, at the age of seventy-one years, was the owner of a landed estate of 480 acres. The mother survived him until 1905 and lived to be eighty-eight years of age. Michael Koziczkowski was a sturdy democrat, served for several years as chairman of the County Board of Supervisors, was a member of the School Board and was otherwise honored in a way which indicated his intelligence and reliability. He was, in fact, a man of fine education, and had a fluent command of Polish, German, French, Latin and English. With his scholastic attainments also went a deep religious sentiment which found practical outlet not only in faithful worship but in generous monetary contributions to the founding and support of several of the early Catholic churches.
Among his fellow countrymen Michael Koziczkowski was famous as a pioneer horticulturist. Several years after settling near Polonia he sent to his native land for apple and pear seeds, started an orchard on his land and raised some hardy trees and good fruit. One of his old pear trees and one apple tree are still living and bearing fruit. Culture of pears is not generally practiced as far north as Portage County, and this venerable pear tree is one of the few found in the district. Its fruit is remarkably sweet and is much superior to the native American pears. The apples are a deep blood red color and are also of an exceptionally fine variety.
1.) The name was thus written at first, but later the "von" was dropped. Concerning the ending ski, which occurs so frequently, Professor Leo Weiner, of Harvard University, writes as follows: "Ski is an adjective ending (ska is feminine) denoting derivative from origin, etc., and is a common family ending in all Slavic languages." In many cases this suffix is added to the name of a town, as Modlinski, Grudziadski and Suwaiski. In a list of heads of families belonging to the Polish Church in Stevens Point (1901) about 40 per cent had one of these two endings.
2.) Much uncertainty exists as to the beginnings of Polish settlement in Milwaukee. It is the opinion of John W. S. Tomkiewicz, author of "The Polander in Wisconsin" (Wis. Hist. Soc. Proceedings, 1901), that there were no Poles in Wisconsin before 1857. F. H. Miller, in "Parkman Club Papers," X, 1896, asserts that "there had been a very gradual immigration since 1855," the first Poles coming to Milwaukee about that year. No names or records are cited. The latter further states: "it was ten years (1863) before there was a church, and at that time there were only about thirty families." Rev. Wenceslaus Kruszka ("Historya Polska w Ameryca" - Milwaukee, 1905-07, VII, p. 125) states that there were Poles in Milwaukee as early as 1814, but that the first permanent settlers came there in 1860.
3.) Describing conditions in Marathon County at this time. Kate Everest Levi says: "It took ten years to break forty acres of land, no harvest could be raised for the first three or four years, and until 1861 wages were only fifty cents a day."—Wis. Hist. Colls., XIV. p. 359.
4.) One man worked a week in order to earn middlings for bread.
5.) ‘Wis. Hist. Colls., XI, pp. 409-455; Proceedings, 1899, p. 186. Vol. 1-5.
6.) Henry M. Utley "Michigan as a Province, Territory and State" (New York, 1906), is authority for the statement that the first Poles came to Michigan in 1855 when some five or six families arrived in Detroit. In 1857 the first farming community was established at Parisville, Huron County.