Marche, Arkansas, Little Poland
Near Little Rock, Arkansas
Marche, a small community north of Little Rock on the Arkansas River, carries one of the state's most distinctive immigrant stories. In eighteen seventy-seven, Count Timothy von Choinski, a Polish nobleman and political refugee who had been teaching school in Milwaukee, bought about twenty-two thousand acres of land here with the goal of creating a farming colony for Polish immigrants stranded in the tenements of New York and Chicago. He came with his wife, the Countess Loccadia Barbara Dembinski Choinski, their ten children, and twenty-two settlers.
They named the community Marche, from the French word for marketplace. The community grew steadily, built Catholic parishes, maintained Polish traditions for generations, and remains one of the most successful immigrant resettlement efforts in Arkansas history.
