VOLUME 16 Winter 2008-09 NUMBER 4 DROBNE ECHA From the issue of March 17, 1887: Installment #15 A German has hookwinked the Poles. Dateline: Gnesen From Wiarus, 1886-1888 Gniezno [Gnesen], March 15. By Greg Kishel <
[email protected] Dear Master Editor! Deign to publish these several words, After the historic events of this fall, elections are still on which I relate from our Polish farming everyone’s mind. We’ll use that theme for this installment of our colony of Gnesen. It lies 15 miles from coverage of Minnesota’s past in the Polish-language press. This Duluth, and hitherto only Poles have time we go to Gnesen Township in St. Louis County just north of resided here; but a couple of months Duluth - an early Polish agricultural settlement and probably the ago a Kraut settled here, and since then only place in the United States that can be said with certainty to quarrels immediately broke out among have been named after the ancient capital of the early Polish 1 us, about which I will inform Master kingdom. From Winona’s Wiarus, the first Polish-language Editor at greater length. newspaper published in Minnesota, we present breaking news of On March 8 speeches were held here the township elections in the late 1880s. It’s a tale of immigrants’ for the election of clerks for our experiences with American democracy on the local level, the township. Thus the Kraut fell to ethnic competition that tinged the events, and an accusation of Gnesen Article …. continued page 27 perfidy within the Polish-American community at Gnesen.