The presentation continues with a look at the Carpatho-Rusyn communities in eastern and northeastern Pennsylvania.
[Arrived here first? Jump back to the beginning of the presentation]
Carpatho-Rusyns began to immigrate to the United States in the late 1870s and their numbers increased greatly until the U.S. imposed restrictions on Eastern European immigrants in 1924. By that time at least 250,000 had come to the U.S., with fully half settling in Pennsylvania, at least for a time.
As many as half of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants lived at one time in Pennsylvania, but there were large groups who lived in other states, especially New Jersey, New York, Connecticut, Ohio, West Virginia, Indiana, and Illinois.
Eastern Pennsylvania had and still has major concentrations of Carpatho-Rusyns, almost as many as western PA. This map by Paul R. Magocsi shows some details of where important Carpatho-Rusyn settlements were located in eastern Pennsylvania. It’s good but in my opinion it isn’t nearly as complete as it could be.
Northeastern PA of course was dominated by the anthracite coal mining industry, whose recruiters were responsible for bringing many Slavs, Carpatho-Rusyns included, and other Central & Eastern Europeans to this part of Pennsylvania in the first place.
It was in northeastern PA that the first Carpatho-Rusyn institutions were founded: churches, newspapers, and fraternal organizations.
Here’s another map, this time of the Anthracite coal deposits throughout the region, and almost every place on this map had some kind of organized Carpatho-Rusyn community.
The large numbers of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants throughout this region led to many churches being built, even faster than priests from Europe could come to serve them.
Also, the first Rusyn-language newspapers were founded in NEPA, in Shenandoah, then Wilkes-Barre, and Olyphant… and the first fraternal organizations were founded:
- in Wilkes-Barre: the Greek Catholic Union;
- Shamokin: the Russian National Union, later Ukrainian National Association;
- Wilkes-Barre: the Russian Orthodox Catholic Mutual Aid Society; and
- Mahanoy City: the Russian Brotherhood Organization.
[omitting slides here, but many of the images are from this older presentation]
Fraternal benefit societies, originally called burial societies, or more generally, fraternal organizations, were usually the first community institution established in the Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant settlements, in most cases preceding even a church. These were built on the model of similar organizations in the United States. They were in part a replacement for the American insurance that was not usually available to working-class Slavic immigrants, to pay benefits to the survivors of men who were often victims of the hazardous work in the coal mines and factories, and out of a need for an organization to support their community on an ethnic basis. And for the vast majority of the first immigrants, the absence of their extended family as a social safety net required they seek support among their fellow villagers who arrived through chain migration, their co-ethnics from the same homeland region, and their co-religionists, drawn together not only by a common language or similar dialects, but by their Eastern Christian faith that placed them outside even the marginalized immigrant Slav mainstream that was overwhelmingly Roman Catholic.
The brotherhoods, as they were originally constituted, provided one of the two primary means of ethnic community development and cohesion in the Carpatho-Rusyn immigrant settlements. And as informal and formal associations of these brotherhoods started to develop, the strength and unity of Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants, spread across substantial distances, increased rapidly.
Most of them would establish their own newspapers, written in some variant of Rusyn language or perhaps in Russian or Ukrainian as the ethnonational perspective of the organization dictated.
The first truly national network of these brotherhoods was founded in Wilkes-Barre in 1892, the Union of Greek Catholic Russian Brotherhoods, later known simply as the Greek Catholic Union. Note that the use of the term Russian in English was primarily because the word Rusyn was not really known in English, and did not necessarily signify that this organization argued that Carpatho-Rusyns are really Russians. (Although their perspective on that varied through the earlier decades of its existence.)
Many other viewpoints, religious affiliations (or emphasis on national identity rather than religion) led to other nationwide or regional fraternal organizations being founded among Carpatho-Rusyns, but the Greek Catholic Union was the largest. And its newspaper, the Amerikansky Russky Viestnik or GCU Messenger, was the most widely read periodical among the entire Carpatho-Rusyn American community. Which is not to say those other fraternals didn’t also represent a powerful force among Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants and their children.
The fraternal benefit societies alongside the churches were a powerful force and in their rivalries for loyalty among Carpatho-Rusyn immigrants they took on very different perspectives on who Carpatho-Rusyns are: are they a distinct ethnic group, or are they a regional group of Ukrainians or Russians, or a sort-of-Russian, but not exactly, called Carpatho-Russians?
And of course the community had its entrepreneurs (male and female) who opened bars, hotels, groceries and butcher shops, ran boarding houses, sold steamship tickets, and even became undertakers.
In many cases, the business owners were also lay leaders in the local Rusyn church and in the fraternal lodges. This would often set them up for conflict with the other Rusyn community leader, the parish priest.
It’s religious conflicts that made Northeastern PA “ground zero” for a fracturing of the Carpatho-Rusyn community that persists to this day. The arrival in Wilkes-Barre—on North Main Street, just a few blocks from here—in 1893 of Father Alexis Toth, a Carpatho-Rusyn Greek Catholic priest hired to serve as pastor of St. Mary’s Greek Catholic Church, set off a firestorm of court battles, Russian cultural and religious influences, and splits even across families as to the identity and proper religious affiliation of Carpatho-Rusyns.
You see, Father Toth came here from Minneapolis, Minnesota, where he and his Rusyn Greek Catholic congregation severed their ties with the Greek Catholic Church and entered the Russian Orthodox Church. When this became known to his new parish in Wilkes-Barre, a faction eagerly followed Fr. Toth into the Orthodox Church while others resisted. Ultimately the courts decided the original church was intended at its founding to be in union with Rome and Fr. Toth and his flock built a new church a block away.
From there, Fr. Toth would travel to many other towns throughout this region and encouraged thousands of other Carpatho-Rusyns to leave the Greek Catholic Church for Orthodoxy. He met with great success in Old Forge, Sheppton, McAdoo, Mayfield, Catasauqua, Simpson, Berwick, St. Clair, and elsewhere. And today he is venerated as a saint in the Orthodox Church, having been canonized in 1994 at St. Tikhon’s Orthodox Monastery in South Canaan, which was established as an outgrowth of the success of his ministry in this region.
But where Russian Orthodoxy was planted in this way, so too were Russian culture and a Russian national identity, or strengthened as the case may be, so that many of those Rusyns who became Orthodox came to think of themselves as Russians and their descendants generally continue to do so.
And in many cases, the Ukrainian churches in this region were founded by Lemko Rusyns and other Carpatho-Rusyns but either had an influx of Galician Ukrainians who changed the character of the parish to a more Ukrainian orientation, or were led by a nationally-conscious Ukrainian priest to think of themselves not as Rusyns but as Ukrainians. This in part explains why if you investigate the ancestry of the members of the large Ukrainian Catholic churches in towns like Olyphant, Shamokin, Minersville, and McAdoo, you would find that their roots are not in Ukraine but in the Lemko Region in southeastern Poland and/or in eastern Slovakia.
In fact, Lemkos in northeastern Pennsylvania are quite a study unto themselves. They probably represent half of the Carpatho-Rusyns in the region and were involved in founding nearly all the earliest churches and other institutions, and held important leadership roles in each of these. But they became quite divided in terms of national identity and religious affiliation, which generally means Lemkos who joined the Russian Orthodox Church would identify themselves as Russians, whether that means they felt they were the same as Russians from Russia, or a regional branch of Russian or “Little Russians” or “Soft Russians.”
Most Lemkos who formed the majority in a Greek Catholic parish would then find themselves under a Ukrainian bishop and oftentimes with a Ukrainian priest, a Ukrainian cantor or choir director (and thus parish school teacher), and probably were members of a Ukrainian-oriented fraternal benefit society. And so it’s no wonder that they would identify themselves as Ukrainians—but not always.
Here's an overview of the major Lemko colonies in NEPA and their resulting identity in that place.
What was the practical outcome of all of these factors pulling and pushing our immigrants to identify themselves as something more than “from here,” “from my village”?
Using a number of sources, I gathered all the names of what are probably Carpatho-Rusyn founded institutions in eastern PA and their approximate dates of founding, as long as they have “Rus-something” in their name, as well as how our immigrants named their churches on the cornerstone or in their civil incorporation.
As you will see in these tables, the vast majority simply used the term Russian. Note that “Carpatho-“ didn’t make an appearance until the 1920s, or with church names, until the latter 1930s. Likewise, Rusin in English wasn’t really found until the 1930s, and not at all with church names.
These next few slides are the names of local/regional or national membership organizations.
The term Rusyn / Carpatho-Rusyn in the name of organizations wasn’t really known in English until at least the 1930s, but here’s a wonderful example from right here in the Wyoming Valley: the Associated American Rusin Clubs of Luzerne County.
This was evidently mostly a social organization, and they were based at Greek Catholic churches, the Ruthenian Byzantine ones, but at least it helped promote a sense of common heritage and very importantly, the name Rusyn.
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| 75th Anniversary booklet (1962) of St. Mary's Byzantine Catholic Church in Kingston showing American Rusin Club activities. |
These last two table slides show what Rus- term was used in secular press coverage of the Carpatho-Rusyn community.
Something I found particularly interesting that we never hear about anymore is a bunch of civic associations that tried to unite several Slavic peoples: Russians, Rusyns, Ukrainians, and even Slovaks. These existed in Northumberland County, Schuylkill County, Luzerne County, and Lackawanna County. Some of the names:
- Americans of Slovakian, Ukrainian, and Russian Descent (ASUR)
- American-Russian-Ukrainian Society (ARUS)
- Russian-American Citizens’ League
- United American Russian League of Lackawanna County
But if you look at the names of the members, you can see almost everyone was Carpatho-Rusyn.
And some of them had Greek Catholic AND Orthodox members! They were kind of ahead of their time, kind of how the Carpatho-Rusyn Society bridged that gap in the 1990s and since.
Summertime public gatherings by different ethnic groups were common in the industrial U.S., and among Carpatho-Rusyns, by the 1930s there were many of these. Some were called Rusin Day, which was the first time the American public in these areas was exposed to the term "Rusin," the events being commonly advertised in local newspapers. In NEPA, these were held primarily in Wilkes-Barre, Hazleton, and the largest, in Lakewood Park between Pottsville and Tamaqua.
Other segments of the Carpatho-Rusyn populace had their own ethnic days under other names: Russian Day and Ukrainian Day, both of which were also held at Lakewood Park, among other places. It should be said that Rusin Day was mainly a Greek Catholic event, while Russian Day was organized by the local Russian Orthodox parishes. Ukrainian Day was also primarily Greek Catholic, although organized by Ukrainian parishes.
What are the Carpatho-Rusyn institutions in NEPA, or across the United States for that matter, i.e., what can we point to and say "This is Carpatho-Rusyn"? We can legitimately say that of the following:
If we point to these things that have been called Russian, we can usually justify that and not generate too much controversy. (A word of caution: there are a few Russian Orthodox churches around the state that were not founded by Carpatho-Rusyns, but in this region, you probably can't come up with a single one of them that still exists.) If we do that with these things called Ukrainian, we can expect pushback and perhaps hurt feelings and resentment, even today in 2025. So for the moment, let’s make sure we resolve to at least look at these "Russian" things in NEPA as generally Carpatho-Rusyn in origin and usually character. The first among these can be the few "citizens clubs" that remain in a few towns.
Unfortunately, the ones noted above are defunct, but a few still exist, such as the Russian Citizens Club of Coaldale:
Continue to Part 3: What's the Answer to My Question?
Original material is © by the author, Richard D. Custer; all rights reserved.
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