Eastern Europe’s Emigres
Told by Joseph Gresko
Originally appearing in Slackwater, Volume 3
Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash
“Mr. Gresko, you’re not going to make it here,” a local farmer warned Andrew Gresko, who in 1911 had come to St. Mary’s County from Poloma, Slovakia, by way of Pennsylvania coal fields. Gresko’s youngest son, Joseph, tells the story: “My father didn’t have anything to start with, but he raised a good batch of hay. So the time came along for this certain farmer to go look in on my father. And this certain farmer, his crop had failed. So my father said to him, ‘I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll trade you my hay for your cow, and I’m going to get started!’ Oh, that cut that certain farmer pretty deep, that cut that farmer pretty deep. So my father started like that, you see. He got the cow, and he started having milk and everything else.
“But everything was against us. I mean, nobody liked the Slovaks at all. They just didn’t like our nationality. But my father learned a lot from the other farmers. And as years went on by, he learned so much that the people came to him for advice.”
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For most, St. Mary’s City brings to mind Lord Baltimore’s seventeenth-century colony, Cecilius Calvert’s dream of planting English ways in a foreign land. St. Mary’s City, Calvert imagined, would follow a baroque design, with a series of continuous tracts laid out in two triangular areas—a plan which went only partially realized, as both investors and indentured servants spilled out into surrounding areas and took to growing tobacco far in excess of what Calvert had imagined.
Almost three hundred years later, St. Mary’s City became the site of a second town plan and a second wave of immigrants, when in 1910 the National Slavonic Society in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania, bought 2,813 acres from then-owner J. Wilson Humbird of Cumberland. This land included “Snow Hill,” originally patented to Justinian Snow, and the long stretch of river lands that by the late 1800s had become known as the John Broome farmlands. The land was subdivided and sold to a group of about twenty-five Slav families. These families had come to America during the 1890-1920 period of immigration that brought eastern and southern Europeans in waves. During 1910, for example, more than 2,000,000 emigrated from Austria-Hungary alone.
According to historian Joseph Stefka, the National Slavonic Society was a fraternal organization set up to sell insurance and other annuities to those newly arriving from Eastern Europe. It purchased the St. Mary’s land “as a site for an orphanage and old folks’ home,” and a Slovak community. The organization, however, suffered a number of setbacks. The town hall burned down within a year of being built; charges of profiteering splintered Society leadership; and the group’s communal leanings were greeted with suspicion, even acrimony.
Still, individual families persisted, and the community prospered. Greskos, Gurskeys, and Kohuts; Lukacs, Ziedeks, and Baltas; Baroniaks, Jourovatys, and Sivaks; Demkos, Gasparovics, and Gereks—these were some who found their way to St. Mary’s County between 1911 and 1914, and whose descendants continue to live the area.
Born in 1883, Andrew Gresko was only twenty when, like so many of his countrymen, he left home and sailed to America. Like most Slovaks, he found work in this country dynamiting coal and hauling it out by mule. After three years he was able to return to Poloma for his fiancée, Zuzana Hlavac, and by August 1906 they were married and living in Washington County, Pennsylvania, near the West Virginia/Western Maryland board. By 1911, Gresko had decided to move his family to St. Mary’s City.
Gresko’s daughter, Sue Roskos, was four when she, her baby brother and sister, and her parents docked at Portobello Wharf. “I remember the water,” says Roskos, born in 1907, “and I remember coming to this big old farmhouse. And I remember that we came to St. Mary’s City where all the Slovaks were Catholics, and we were the only Lutherans.”
In August 1911, Gresko purchased the 197-acre Turkey Neck farm, which lay just outside the perimeter of the Slavonic Society land and adjacent to the farm of fellow countryman Mike Sivak. “I was seven years old when I started school,” Roskos recalls, “and I didn’t know a word of English. My mother and father, in their rough way, taught me from books that they got from the National Slavonic Society. At the end of their working days, they would sit down at night to teach me my ABCs by the coal oil lamps.” Only a few years earlier, her father’s labor had helped to make such lamps possible.
Farm life was hard for the struggling newcomers. Plans to grow produce and to distribute it through a cooperatively owned canning factory was pushed aside by the relentless demands of raising tobacco. “We kids were barefooted,” Roskos remembers, “with big brim hats, hoeing in the tobacco fields. I planted it, hoed it, stripped it, hung it up in the barn, and packed it into hogsheads, but I never knew what the tobacco was for. I just knew that it was our money crop.”
To supplement the family income, her brother Joseph hunted and trapped. “I would trap animals for their pelts,” he said. “The muskrat and the mink and the fox, and all that stuff. After I’d stretch the hide and let it cure for a while, I would send it off to places in New York or Pennsylvania. A few dollars a pelt, that was my extra money. But we weren’t allowed that much money as kids because pop needed all he could get to get going.”
It was the harshness of the life, especially the hardships his mother endured, that led the children eventually to leave the farm.
“Most everybody had left home,” Joseph Gresko remembers, “and my father didn’t have nobody to help him on the farm. He wanted me to stay, but I could not see getting married and having my wife on the farm to work like my mother did. It was almost like slavery. It was just a hard life.
“I remember my mother carried us babies on her back like an Indian papoose while she cut corn and tobacco. And that is a hard life. Then she had to finish the day’s work and then go back to cook and maybe make butter or can a little bit of stuff. It was way late at night when she went to bed because she had us six to bring up, and it wasn’t easy. My father said that he’d give me [a large share] of the money if I had taken the farm, but I said, ‘Nope, I’m not going to do any farming. I’m giving up,’ so I went in the military.”
