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Reading Level: Grades 3-4 • Interest Level: Grades 3-9

Between 1880 and 1914, at least 7.5 million people from Eastern Europe migrated to the U.S. These immigrants were part of what is known as the "second great wave" of American immigration, in which 27 million immigrants landed on U.S. shores.8 Locally, Eastern Europeans first arrived in the Connecticut River Valley around 1890, with their presence increasing throughout the next two decades. In 1890, 90 individuals from Poland lived in Franklin County; by 1900, the number had grown to 716 individuals from Austrian Poland, German Poland, and Russian Poland combined. By 1920, 2006 individuals born in Poland lived in the county, comprising approximately 4% of the county's population.9

Immigrants from Poland (which at that time was divided among three larger empires, Russia, Prussia/Germany, and Austria) and from other Eastern European territories were most often landless peasants, displaced by land redistribution efforts employed after the abolition of serfdom. While suffering from poverty and overpopulation, many peasants also experienced religious and cultural oppression, sometimes through legal measures and sometimes through violence. Many landless peasants migrated from the countryside to the cities in continental Europe, either around their homeland or in nearby industrializing Germany. There they worked in factories or in mines before traveling to the U.S. The hope of higher wages and greater security often pulled them to the harbors of New York or Baltimore.10

Because most of the Eastern Europeans coming to the U.S. were peasants, they were among the poorest "ethnic" groups entering the country. Lack of money prevented many Eastern Europeans from moving out of the port cities in which they landed or the transit centers through which they passed; many found industrial jobs in these locales. But the story of Franklin County reveals that some Eastern Europeans eventually landed in rural areas where they worked as agricultural laborers. Nationwide, only 10.9% of "Poles" worked in agriculture; by contrast, in the town of Deerfield, 83.6% did.11