Many had come
at the urging of Father Moczygemba, one of five priests chosen by
Bishop Jean Marie Odin of Galveston
to work in Odin’s sprawling Diocese, which covered the entire state
of Texas. Moczygemba arrived in Galveston
in 1852 and traveled first to New
Braunfels as a resident pastor but was in Castroville
when immigrants from Silesia began arriving by the hundreds in 1854.
Upper Silesia, where Moczygemba grew up, had been under Prussian
rule since 1742 but the region’s peasants maintained their Polish
language, traditions and faith. Moczygemba wrote letters back to
Silesia urging people to come to this new world of freedom and abundance.
Other Silesian letter writers talked of free land, fertile fields
and even golden mountains, which we suspect was lifted from earlier
descriptions of California. One letter writer described Texas
as “a land without winter.”
The situation in Poland, complete with floods, a bad economy and
epidemics of typhoid and cholera, made for attentive readers. Hundreds
of Poles set sail for Galveston
in 1854 and landed there on Dec. 1 of that year. Moczygemba wasn’t
there to greet them as they had expected so they walked 200 miles
to San Antonio. Moczygemba
hurried to greet them there and take them to their new home. Just
as his fellow Silesians’ quick arrival took him by surprise, the
settlers were taken back by what they found at Panna
Maria, which wasn’t much. Moczygemba had unwittingly chosen
a place that rattlesnakes had already claimed as nesting site, sort
of a viper metropolis among the brush and mesquite. The settlers
arrived on Christmas Eve so Moczygemba conducted a Christmas mass
and Thanksgiving, which turned into a plea for perseverance and
guidance in this harsh new world.
One Silesian wrote of the early struggles: “What we suffered here
when we started! We didn't have any houses, nothing but fields.
And for shelter, only brush and trees. There was tall grass everywhere,
so that if anyone took a few steps, he was lost from sight. Every
step of the way you'd meet rattlesnakes. And the crying and complaining
of the women and children only made the suffering worse. How golden
seemed our Silesia as we looked back in those days.”
Moczygemba hosted a reconciliation banquet at his home where the
settlers were allowed to air their complaints. He listened patiently
and assured his fellow countrymen that they had turned the corner
toward creating their own civilization and that the worst was behind
them. Just as everybody settled down to dinner, a rattlesnake fell
from the rafters onto the table, which pretty much put an end to
dinner plans and put reconciliation on hold.
organized the building of a church at the site in 1856. A room inside
the first barn was set aside as a school, which conducted the first
Polish classes in the country. (A separate schoolhouse was eventually
built in 1860.) The winter of 1856-57 was cold and wet, which delayed
planting, but it didn’t matter because an extreme drought hit that
spring; it didn’t rain in Panna
Maria for 14 months. Wells dried up, the earth cracked, livestock
perished and no one could grow food or afford to buy it.
The settlers directed their frustration toward Moczygemba, whose
life was threatened though there was disagreement as to whether
he should be hanged or drowned. Moczygemba retreated first to Castroville
and then north, serving Polish communities in Wisconsin, Illinois,
Indiana, Michigan, Missouri and New York for the rest of his life.
He is best known as the cofounder of Saints Cyril and Methodius
Seminary in Orchard Lake, Michigan, the only successful major Polish
seminary in the country. He died in Michigan in February of 1891.
More than 80 years later, his remains were reinterred at Panna
Maria under the oak tree beneath which he had offered Mass for
the first arriving Polish immigrants in 1854. A monument was erected
at the site honoring him as the “Patriarch of Polonia.”
Fortunately, rattlesnakes were nowhere in sight.
© Clay Coppedge
17, 2012 Column
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