The Founding of Holy Cross Parish, Salamanca, New York

Abstract

The creation of Holy Cross parish in Salamanca, New York, was the product of a constellation of events that became ensnared in European and American history in the late nineteenth century. Unfortunately, much of the rich detail of the early history dating back 100 to 150 years is lost but enough pieces still exist to construct at least a part of the mosaic. What on the surface might appear to be simply a task of organizing a group of people to purchase some land and build a church on Broad Street in Salamanca was in fact a complex web of foreign oppression, mass migration, ethnic pride, and bizarre Indian leases, all unfolding in a small town in western New York. Economic and cultural survival appear to be the driving force in explaining the sudden appear- ance of such large numbers of Polish immigrants in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Their survival in the United States seemed to be tightly woven around an intense involvement with a local Polish parish. The Poles came to the United States trading their oppressed political and economic past for a promising future where as one Polish newspaper commented “the smokestack is as sacred as the steeple”.