Introduction Thaddeus Janeczko was born in the village of Grebów in the Russian Empire on December 12, 1880. In 1906, he married Maryanna Gonsior, the daughter of a wealthy family in Goscieradów. The following year, he emigrated through the port of Antwerp, arriving at Ellis Island on March 15, 1907. His wife and daughter Helen joined him two years later. By 1910, the family had relocated to Wheeling, West Virginia, where Janeczko found work at the Benwood tube works in the lap pipe finishing department. The family, which grew to include eleven children, lived at 2619 Locust Street near the heart of the Wheeling factory district. The house was modest with front and middle rooms, a long kitchen area, three upstairs bedrooms, and a dirt basement where the family stored coal to heat the furnace. By 1930 it was valued at four thousand dollars.

Thaddeus, whom his grandson later recalled "always building or fixing something" about the house, instilled in his children a strong work ethic. Several of his daughters worked at the Warwick China Company as teenagers stamping decals on finished ware. Another worked for the Wheeling Tile Company while his son Edward worked at Wheeling Machine Products. The family did their grocery shopping almost daily at Visnic''s Grocery Store, owned by a Serbian family, on Twenty-Sixth and Market Streets. For the Janeczko''s children and grandchildren, the streets nearby served as a place of pickup games and general socializing for years among a mixed community of Germans, Italians, Greeks, Serbians, Lebanese, and African Americans.[i] The Janeczko family lived closer to St. Alphonsus Catholic Church but attended Catholic mass at St. Ladislaus at Forty-Fifth and Eoff Streets.

Ethnic celebrations and religious sacraments were significant events. In 1922, Edward and Stella Janeczko were part of the confirmation class, while sister Martha was in one of the largest confirmation classes in May 1928 of 249 Polish American children.[ii] Marriages were also grand events in the life of St. Ladislaus. Helen Janeczko married Matthew Borgacz on August 27, 1927, and her sister Martha married Henry Baranowski on June 11, 1938.[iii] The majority of Poles living in the multiethnic city of Wheeling, West Virginia, would have agreed with Wheeling novelist Keith Maillard''s fictional hero, who said of his South Wheeling childhood community, "We just called it Polish Town, but the old folks called it Stanislawówo, you know after the church, and they got that right because St. Stanislaus was pretty much the center of everything."[iv] The description conjures up much of the ethnic solidarity that Polish South Wheeling experienced on a daily basis in the early twentieth century.

Ed Gorczyka recalled how from Fortieth Street south to Benwood there were over fifty small businesses that catered to the specific needs of the ethnic Poles of the area.[v] At the same time, they shared urban space with a multiethnic working class. Here they saw the birth of the state''s Socialist movement and, in the 1930s, the Congress of Industrial Organization''s industrial union drive. Following the late eighteenth century, settlers and early industrialists looked to Wheeling as a transportation hub on the Ohio River for commerce moving west as well as a source of early innovations in iron, glass, tobacco, and brewing production. Transportation improvements funded by the federal government and outside capital led to the building of the National Road, the Wheeling Suspension Bridge, and the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad. By the time of the Civil War, Wheeling was already a thriving industrial hub with the most diverse immigrant population in Virginia. Once the war was over, the region''s industries continued to expand along the Ohio River and east along the National Road, but topography placed limits on that growth. From 1850 to 1880, Wheeling''s population rose from 11,435 to 30,737 as the city became the center of cut nail production and the capital of West Virginia.

After 1885, the city lost the state capital, and the cut nail industry fell into decline; however, the city''s investment capital and manufacturing infrastructure enabled businesses to diversify and adapt, making Wheeling and the surrounding region leaders in steel production. Beginning in the 1890s, the city attracted a wide array of southern and eastern European immigrants to labor in the factories, mines, and other industrial plants. This helped make Wheeling the center of the state''s Catholic population. In addition, its long industrial history made it the center of the state''s oldest central labor council.[vi] These "new immigrants," especially the Poles, left a world where it was becoming difficult to persist on the land. Poles began looking across the continent for higher wages. Making seasonal labor trips to the industrial core of western Germany and the factories around growing cities like Warsaw and Lublin, Polish peasants also embarked more permanently to the United States. While settling in many of the largest cities in the United States, a sizable number arrived in Wheeling.

Here they lived in the heart of the city''s factory district and, after 1900, also the center of the vice district. Often neglected and despised by city leaders and the local labor movement, Poles were left to create their own life in Wheeling. Arriving in Wheeling, Polish peasants had to form a self-sustaining ethnic community if they were going to endure. This was difficult since ethnic and regional differences divided them. By 1900, Wheeling''s Polish immigrants formed their community through the grassroots efforts of an active laity and their young, energetic priest Father Emil Musial. They built the parish of St. Ladislaus in the heart of South Wheeling. Through a mixture of religious piety and cultural nationalism, the community''s parish, social halls, and homes helped them to develop a distinct identity and promote a strong family economy while living amidst a diverse immigrant population.

The 1910s and the subsequent decades were critical for the community. The solace provided by the parish was a natural counterweight to the largely negative response working-class Poles received from the local labor movement. While received negatively at first, the Polish working class proved their solidarity by joining in a variety of labor strikes and organizing campaigns. World War I likewise served as another testing ground for the Poles'' loyalty to their new home country. Foreign-born Catholics saw the hyper-patriotic war climate as the best chance to prove their support for their adopted nation at war. Even though German Americans were targeted with suspicion, the Poles were able to thrive. They were widely praised by civic leaders for their support during Liberty bond campaigns, as well as for the large number who served in the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) and the Polish Army in France. Once the war ended, Poles and other new immigrants were vital to the postwar labor strikes, especially those against the Wheeling Steel Corporation.

However, solidarity would fall apart by the early 1920s, leading to much animosity and surveillance of the Polish quarter. In particular, these working-class immigrants would suffer from the selective enforcement of Prohibition. The postwar years also saw growing fears within the community about the relationship of the second generation to those who remained tied to the old Polonia. The 1920s witnessed a golden era of expansion of the institutional aspects of St. Ladislaus Catholic Parish. At the same time, younger Polish Americans increasingly interacted with those from other ethnic communities in the region, forging a distinctive Americanized culture. Through attending similar schools, playing on the same football and basketball teams, and working together in the mills and mines, these interethnic relations helped provide the background for the union organizing drives of the 1930s and 1940s. Polish Immigration and the Medium-Sized City To understand the total lived experiences of Wheeling''s industrial workers, Wheeling''s Polonia investigates the Polish immigrants who settled in Wheeling.

While living in the industrial core of the city, Poles branched out and interacted with other immigrant neighborhoods throughout Wheeling. Poles and their immigrant neighbors did not compartmentalize their ethnic, religious, or class feelings. Core values of cooperation, equality, and mutual assistance were vital. Catholic historian Leslie Tentler has argued persuasively that "ethnic religiosity provided essential resources both for individual and family survival. Religion provided them with perhaps their richest resources for shaping the world of everyday living."[vii] Still the question remained: which way would these working-class ethnic communities go? Would they follow their ethnic Catholic traditions promoted by parish leaders, react to the class animosities promoted by the labor movement, or reach out to the corporate, Americanized culture? In many respects, they chose a little from all three, often balancing a left-leaning view of a moral economic order with a love of their Polish heritage and Catholic religion but all the while enticed by the mass consumer culture in the United States. Wheeling challenges our traditional understanding of immigration during the height of industrialization. Studies of metropolitan areas are common, but I argue it is imperative to view immigration from the perspective of medium-sized industrial centers like Wheeling.

The city had multiple ethnic groups, large-scale mass production (steel), and several medium-sized forms of production (tobacco, canning, tile, meatpacking, tobacco, glass, and brewing)--all of the variables available in a large city but on a manageable scale. Larger studies often focus on a snapshot image and samp.