Schuylkill Hub Search

New immigration (1880s–1920s)

The Slovaks of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania

The quintessential anthracite “new immigrants” — rural, unskilled, devoutly organized into fraternal-benefit societies, and split between Roman and Greek rite in ways that blur into the Rusyn story. Markers: ★ verified · ✔ confirmed · ✎ corrects a common error · ⚑ open/caution.

Overview

The Slovaks were, in many ways, the archetypal anthracite “new immigrants”: rural, poor, often illiterate, taking the most dangerous mine jobs because no others were open to them — “It was not unusual for them to arrive in the country one day and march into the mine the next.” ★ Some 500,000 Slovaks immigrated to the United States between 1880 and the mid-1920s, and the gravitational center was Pennsylvania: of the 619,866 Slovaks counted in the 1920 U.S. Census, almost half lived in Pennsylvania — which is why “more than half of their national fraternals also appeared in this state.” ★ The Slovak Heritage Society records the local entry point precisely: Slovaks “began moving into the southern coal fields in Schuylkill County,” and by 1908 formed “a substantial number” of the entire anthracite workforce; the Library of Congress dates a first group settlement to about 1873, with early footholds at Mahanoy City and Lansford. ★

Two features define the Slovak experience here: the fraternal-benefit society — which arose to fill a total void of injury, illness, and death compensation, and which typically founded the parishes and newspapers — and the Roman/Greek rite split that makes “Slovak” and “Rusyn” identities overlap in the records. The preeminent historian is M. Mark Stolarik (Chair in Slovak History, University of Ottawa), whose work anchors this profile.

Sources: M. Mark Stolarik, “Slovak Fraternal-Benefit Societies in Pennsylvania,” Pennsylvania Folklife 44 (1994), via HSP; Slovak Heritage Society of NE PA — “Slovaks in Pennsylvania”; Library of Congress — Slovaks in America: A Chronology.

Two rites, one people — and the Slovak/Rusyn blur

The single most important complexity in the Slovak story is religious. Western and central Slovakia were Roman (Latin) rite Catholic; the Prešov region of eastern Slovakia was heavily Greek (Byzantine) Catholic — a church that since the Union of Uzhhorod (1646) had shared centuries of history with the Ruthenian (Rusyn) Greek Catholics and contained “a considerable number of ethnic Rusyn Greek Catholics.” ★ The result, in the coal towns, is a genuine identity ambiguity: as the scholarship puts it, “some people adamantly argue that they are Slovak, while others from the same village or even family will state they are Carpatho-Rusyn.” ✔

Language mirrors the split. Slovak is a West Slavic language close to Czech, but “eastern Slovak dialects are less intelligible to speakers of Czech and closer to Polish and East Slavic,” while Rusyn is an East Slavic language in Cyrillic — so a Greek-Catholic Slovak from Prešov spoke a tongue audibly between literary Slovak and Rusyn. ★ The institutional embodiment of the overlap is the chief regional fraternal, founded in 1893 as the Pennsylvania Slovak Roman and Greek Catholic Union — its very name uniting both rites. ★ (For the Greek-Catholic side of this shared world, see the Carpatho-Rusyns & Ukrainians profile.)

Sources: The Eastern Church — Slovak Greek Catholic Church history; Wikipedia — Rusyns; Wikipedia — Slovak language; HSP — Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Union finding aid 3028.

The Slovak Roman Catholic parishes

The Diocese of Allentown / PA-GenWeb roster confirms the county’s Slovak Roman Catholic national parishes — and disambiguates them from same-town parishes of other ethnicities: ★

ParishTownFounded
Assumption B.V.M. (Slovak)Mahanoy City1892
St. Mary (Slovak)McAdoo1893
St. Stephen (Slovak)Shenandoah1899
Immaculate Conception (Slovak)Saint Clair1905
SS. Cyril and Methodius (Slovak)Coaldale1920

✎ Disambiguation matters in McAdoo, which had three “St. Mary”-type risks: the Slovak Roman Catholic St. Mary (1893) is distinct from McAdoo’s St. Stephen (Hungarian, 1900), St. Kunegunda (Polish, 1893), and especially the separate St. Mary’s Ukrainian (Greek) Catholic Church (1891) — a textbook case of the rite overlap, since McAdoo’s Greek-Catholic faithful in the 1890s “would hike to Shenandoah” for want of a local Byzantine church while their Latin-rite Slovak neighbors had St. Mary. ★

These were national parishes — organized by language rather than territory — and, as Stolarik stresses, “almost all Slovak parishes, of all religious denominations, were founded by fraternal-benefit societies.” St. Mary’s McAdoo bears this out: it “was founded in 1893 by a group of ardent Slovaks from McAdoo, Tresckow, Beaver Brook… and Lofty,” services beginning in a public school in 1891. ★ The parishes have since consolidated — Coaldale’s SS. Cyril and Methodius closed in 2008; Shenandoah’s St. Stephen merged into Divine Mercy Parish in 2014.

Sources: PA-GenWeb — Schuylkill County RC parishes; St. Mary’s Ukrainian Catholic Church, McAdoo; Stolarik, Pennsylvania Folklife; Divine Mercy Parish — history.

The fraternal-benefit societies: the heart of Slovak life

Stolarik explains why fraternals were the foundational Slovak institution: “When Slovaks started to immigrate… in the 1880s, they found this country singularly devoid of social services. If an immigrant fell ill, had an accident, or died, no one gave him or his family any support” — and workmen’s compensation “did not come into being until 1915.” So the immigrants “had to help themselves,” founding 50 local fraternals in the 1880s, 25 of them in Pennsylvania. ★ These federated into national bodies after 1890:

  • National Slovak Society (Národný Slovenský Spolok) — founded February 15, 1890 in Pittsburgh by Peter V. Rovnianek; non-denominational, “to unite Slovaks of all religious persuasions” (some Catholics thought it too secular); 39,473 members by 1920. ★
  • First Catholic Slovak Union (Jednota) — founded September 4, 1890 in Cleveland under Rev. Štefan Furdek; Roman Catholic; its newspaper Jednota moved its printery to Middletown, PA in 1911 and became the largest-circulation Slovak paper in America. ★
  • First Catholic Slovak Ladies Association — founded August 1892 in Cleveland, to insure women and children. ★
  • Slovak Evangelical Union — Slovak Lutherans, founded 1893 in Freeland, PA (just over the Luzerne line); 7,821 members by 1920. ★

The regional fraternal serving the Schuylkill-area Slovaks was the Pennsylvania Slovak Roman and Greek Catholic Union (PSRGCU → PSCU), organized at meetings on June 24–25, 1893, in Pittston (home office at Wilkes-Barre), first president Frank Oravec, first spiritual advisor Rev. Matthew Jankola, beginning with “seven branches and 456 members.” ✔ Its women’s counterpart, the Ladies Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Union (1898, Hazleton), had 12,771 members by 1920. ★ ⚑ (Stolarik’s text says “Wilkes-Barre 1893” while the archival finding aid places the founding meetings in Pittston — best read as founded at Pittston, home office Wilkes-Barre.)

What the lodges actually did, per Stolarik, makes the culture vivid: they founded parishes; fined members for drunkenness, swearing, or missing services (thereby “Americanizing” them); wore uniforms, the Slovak white-blue-red tricolor banners, and two-sided badges (bright for festivals, black for funerals); required every member to attend a fellow member’s funeral; and built “Slovak Halls” with bars, bowling alleys, and stages in nearly every Slovak community. ★

Sources: Stolarik, Pennsylvania Folklife; HSP finding aid 3028 — PSCU; NSS Life — history; Encyclopedia of Cleveland History — First Catholic Slovak Union.

Labor: Lattimer and the “new immigrant” worker

The Slovaks were central to the anthracite labor story, and to its bloodiest moment. At the Lattimer Massacre (September 10, 1897) near Hazleton, a Luzerne County sheriff’s posse killed at least 19 unarmed striking miners — “mostly of Polish, Slovak, Lithuanian and German ethnicities,” many shot in the back. ★ Stolarik’s distinctively Slovak reading of the event (from the Slovak-American press) found that the editors of Amerikánsko-slovenské noviny and most Slovak papers “attributed the blame for the Lattimer massacre to the mine owners,” criticizing the deputies’ nativism; the lone dissenter was the Hazleton paper Slovenské noviny — funded by the Hungarian government and hostile to Slovak nationalism. ★ ⚑ (These specifics rest on a single source, Stolarik’s 2002 article, freely hosted at PSU.) The massacre catalyzed the UMWA, drawing 15,000+ new members — and ended “a longstanding myth about the docility of non-English-speaking miners.”

Sources: Wikipedia — Lattimer massacre; Stolarik, “A Slovak Perspective on the Lattimer Massacre,” Pennsylvania History 69:1 (2002).

Homeland politics: the road to Czechoslovakia

The coal-region Slovaks were active in the transnational politics that created their homeland state. The Slovak League of America was founded at the first All-American Slovak Congress in Cleveland in 1907 (Rev. Furdek, first president), formed in reaction to the Magyarization laws suppressing Slovak language and culture in Hungary. The League signed the Cleveland Agreement (1915) with the Czechs, and then the decisive Pittsburgh Agreement (May 31, 1918) — signed under Tomáš Masaryk, endorsing a unified Czech-Slovak state and promising Slovakia autonomy — chosen for Pittsburgh because “more than half of the roughly 500,000 Slovak immigrants had settled in western Pennsylvania.” ★ The grievance that the Czechs never honored the autonomy promise outlived the founding and animated Slovak-American politics for decades — a homeland debate carried on through the same lodges and papers that served Schuylkill’s Slovaks.

Sources: Wikipedia — Pittsburgh Agreement; PA Heritage — The Pittsburgh Agreement; Encyclopedia of Cleveland History — Slovaks.

Culture, schools, and foodways

Slovaks were religiously plural — Roman Catholic, Greek Catholic, Lutheran, and Reformed all had their own fraternals and parishes (the Slovak Calvin Presbyterian Union was founded in adjacent Mount Carmel in 1901). Their parish schools were staffed by the Sisters of SS. Cyril and Methodius, the teaching order founded in 1909 by Rev. Matthew Jankola expressly “to preserve the faith and culture of the Slovak people” — the order behind Slovak parochial education across the anthracite region. ★ The community rested on what Stolarik calls its three components — parishes, newspapers, and fraternals — with a rich press (Amerikánsko-slovenské noviny, the first Slovak-American paper, 1886; Jednota; Národné noviny).

Slovak foodways overlap deeply with their Polish and Rusyn neighbors and survive in the county’s tables: the national dish bryndzové halušky (potato dumplings with sheep’s-milk cheese), pirohy (the Slovak pierogi, “shared with neighboring Poland”), klobása (smoked sausage), and kapustnica (the Christmas sauerkraut-sausage soup). Life-cycle customs included the wedding čepčenie (capping the bride) and a full year of mourning marked by All Souls’ (Dušičky) grave-visiting — and the fraternal lodges wove death into community ritual through mandatory funeral attendance and their black-sided badges. ★

Sources: Stolarik, Pennsylvania Folklife; Sisters of SS. Cyril and Methodius — early history; Will Fly for Food — Bryndzové halušky; Encyclopedia of Cleveland History — Slovaks.

People and the census question

  • Rev. Matthew (Matúš) Jankola (1872/73–1916) — the most consequential Slovak figure in the NE-PA anthracite Church: organizer of Slovak parishes, first spiritual advisor of the PSRGCU (1893), founder of the Sisters of SS. Cyril and Methodius (1909), and namesake of the Jankola Library and Slovak Museum (Danville, PA). ★
  • Peter V. Rovnianek — founder of the National Slovak Society and editor of the first Slovak-American paper. ★
  • Rev. Štefan Furdek — founder of the FCSU/Jednota and first president of the Slovak League. ★
  • Frank Oravec — first president of the PSRGCU (Pittston, 1893). ★

✔ The census identity problem explains the census data: because no Slovak state existed, immigrants were recorded as Austrian or Hungarian (pre-WWI) then “Czechoslovakian” (post-WWI) — which is exactly why the 2,182 “Czechoslovakia”-born in the 1920 county census were overwhelmingly Slovaks, not Czechs (only 44 Bohemia-born appear in 1900). Schuylkill drew Slovaks, not Bohemian Czechs — confirming the Czech “negative” finding and locating the county’s Slavic-Catholic mass squarely on the Slovak (and Rusyn) side. ★

Sources: Sisters of SS. Cyril and Methodius; HSP finding aid 3028; Carpatho-Rusyn.org — Slovak Research (census categories).

Assimilation and legacy

Stolarik traces the post-war unraveling of the fraternal world: the Depression stripped dues-payers, New Deal social welfare made lodge self-help “redundant,” and television killed lodge social life — so most Pennsylvania Slovak fraternals merged away, leaving mainly the National Slovak Society and the Ladies PSCU still Slovak-identified. Parish consolidation followed (Coaldale’s SS. Cyril and Methodius closed 2008; St. Stephen Shenandoah into Divine Mercy, 2014). ★ Yet the heritage persists — in foodways shared across the coal towns, in surviving collections at the Jankola Library and Slovak Museum (Danville) and the Slovak Museum and Archives (Middletown), and in the broader regional bodies keeping Slovak culture alive.

Sources: Stolarik, Pennsylvania Folklife; Outskirts of Suburbia — SS Cyril & Methodius, Coaldale; Jankola Library and Slovak Museum.

Open questions

  • Verbatim confirmation of Stolarik’s Lattimer-article claims (the Slovak press’s blame of mine owners; the Hungarian-funded Hazleton exception) from the PSU full text.
  • A named Schuylkill Slovak Hall and local fraternal lodges/branches with charter dates. (One named unit is confirmed — a Slovak Gymnastic Union Sokol lodge, No. 79, in Mahanoy City — via the Sokol USA lodge listings; FCSU/Jednota and Pennsylvania Slovak Catholic Union branch numbers still require the fraternals’ own records.)
  • Confirmation of the 1920 “Czechoslovakia”-born = 2,182 / 1900 Bohemia = 44 figures against the published 1900 and 1920 census tables.
  • The proportion of the county’s Slovaks who were Greek-rite (and how many of those identified as Rusyn).

Sources

Frequently asked

Why are Slovaks called the archetypal anthracite 'new immigrants'?
They were rural, poor, often illiterate, and took the most dangerous mine jobs because no others were open to them — 'It was not unusual for them to arrive in the country one day and march into the mine the next.' Of the 619,866 Slovaks counted in the 1920 U.S. Census, almost half lived in Pennsylvania.
Why do 'Slovak' and 'Rusyn' identities overlap in the county's records?
The Prešov region of eastern Slovakia was heavily Greek (Byzantine) Catholic, a church that since the Union of Uzhhorod (1646) shared centuries of history with the Ruthenian (Rusyn) Greek Catholics. As the scholarship puts it, 'some people adamantly argue that they are Slovak, while others from the same village or even family will state they are Carpatho-Rusyn.'
How were Slovaks counted in the census?
Because no Slovak state existed, immigrants were recorded as Austrian or Hungarian (pre-WWI) then 'Czechoslovakian' (post-WWI). This is why the 2,182 'Czechoslovakia'-born in the 1920 county census were overwhelmingly Slovaks, not Czechs — only 44 Bohemia-born appear in 1900.

Towns: Mahanoy City, McAdoo, Shenandoah, Saint Clair, Coaldale

Related peoples: Poles, Carpatho-Rusyns & Ukrainians

← All cultures & peoples · Census spine →