Posen: The Polish Colony That Sold Twelve Thousand Lots

Posen, incorporated in nineteen hundred, takes its name from the German word for Poznan, a city in western Poland. The village's Polish character was no accident. In eighteen ninety-three, a Chicago real estate firm hired seventy-five agents in Polish-speaking parts of Germany to sell land to emigrants dreaming of America.

Those salesmen sold lots to their countrymen by the many hundreds. Factory workers, mostly employed at nearby Harvey, arrived and planted gardens on their new lots. The Roman Catholic Archdiocese of Chicago established a mission for Polish residents in eighteen ninety-four.

In a generation, a flat Cook County farm field became a working-class Polish village, a small piece of the old country transplanted to the South Side of Chicago.