A City of Immigrants: Welsh, Irish, Poles, and Italians
Near Scranton, Pennsylvania
No single story explains who built Scranton, because the city was built by dozens of peoples arriving from dozens of places over several generations. Understanding the city means understanding that layered immigration.
The first skilled workers to arrive in large numbers were the Welsh. Coal mining was their craft, and the anthracite region of northeastern Pennsylvania desperately needed people who knew how to do it. Between eighteen sixty and nineteen twenty, roughly eighty thousand Welsh immigrants settled in and around this region. More than seventeen percent of all Welsh immigrants to the United States in nineteen hundred lived in or near Scranton and Wilkes-Barre. The Welsh brought with them their chapels, their male voice choirs, their literary festivals called eisteddfodau, and their deep attachment to community. Scranton was known in Welsh-language circles as Athen Cymru America, meaning the Welsh Athens of America.
The Irish had arrived a generation earlier, many of them fleeing famine in the eighteen forties and finding work in the mines and on the railroads. Then came the Eastern European wave: Poles, Lithuanians, Ukrainians, and Slovaks, who poured into neighborhoods like Minooka and the Hill Section in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They built churches with onion domes. They established social clubs that ran entirely in their native languages. They published newspapers in Polish and Ukrainian long after they had begun to learn English.
Italians settled in North Scranton and the Plot section, bringing food traditions that still mark the city's culinary character. A Jewish community established one of its first congregations in eighteen eighty-six.
The religious architecture of Scranton told this whole story at a glance: Gothic spires for Irish parishes, Byzantine domes for Ukrainian churches, Romanesque forms for Polish and German congregations. You could cross three languages and two continents in the space of six city blocks.
