Polka Heartland by Rick March

Author:Rick March
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wisconsin Historical Society Press
Published: 2015-04-07T04:00:00+00:00

Concertina Millie Kaminski

Musicians and fans gathered to see Concertina Millie at Martin’s Tap in New Berlin, Wisconsin.

Concertina Millie performs with the father-and-son duo, Gunter and Tony Langeweg.

Rick Raclawski

Martin’s Tap

7

PULASKI POLKA DAYS

Amanda Raflick and Adam Hembel dancing at Pulaski Polka Days

A well-known song by Alvin Styczynski begins, “Pulaski is a polka town.” Indeed, there are few other places where the polka has made the kind of impact it’s made here, in this small farming community northwest of Green Bay. Pulaski has produced great polka bands over the years; it seems like everybody in town knows how to dance; and, since 1978, the highlight event of the year comes in late July—Pulaski Polka Days.

Pulaski was not the original American home for the Polish immigrants who settled there. The land around Pulaski was low-lying, covered in brush and pine stumps. Beginning in the mid-1880s, a Chicago land developer named John J. Hoff decided to market this unpromising acreage to land-hungry Polish immigrants working in Milwaukee, Chicago, and other industrial cities. Many Polish immigrants, who had endured years of hard labor in American factories and mines, yearned for an opportunity to use their native farming skills to improve their lot. Hoff provided loans, tools, and food staples to Pulaski’s settlers, who grubbed out stumps and dug stones from the fields, ultimately creating the flourishing agricultural area found there today.38

Its unique history distinguishes Pulaski from other rural, Polish American communities in Wisconsin, where the settlers came directly from a particular Old World region. For example, the Poles around Stevens Point are mainly Kaszuby from the Baltic Sea area in northern Poland, and the Armstrong Creek Poles are overwhelmingly Gorale from the Tatras Mountains in southern Poland. But the disparate Poles who carved out the farms in Pulaski came to the United States from many different provinces. They proudly united their new community under the name of Casimir Pulaski, the Polish general who was a hero of the American Revolutionary War.

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