hen Stanislaus Pytlewski died a premature death due to pneumonia in August of 1916, the events thereafter concluded a life full of struggle. Unrest was growing in the Pytlewski household at 608 Oak Street. The $500 for his gravestone vanished from his brother Joseph’s coat pocket. The culprit remained to be charged. In the meantime, a prominent member of the Polish community lied in Lake View Cemetery in Calumet without a gravestone. The theft of the money was the last disturbance in his life even though it had been two months since Stanislaus Pytlewski passed. Stanislaus’s last economic struggle was not his only one. Throughout his life, Stanislaus and his family were driven by economic forces and arose to a substantial role in the community through their saloon despite their economic, social, and family pressures.

Around 1875, Stanislaus, then a 24-year-old peasant laborer, made the decision to immigrate to America. It is unknown why he specifically made the decision to move to America or what his intent of destination was, but some speculation is possible using the patterns of other Polish migrants. Stanislaus lived in the province of Poznan, in either the villages of Wlociewski or Shroda, which at the time was within the boundaries of Prussia. Prussia ended serfdom in its Polish territories in the early nineteenth century. Emancipation released peasants from their serfdom duties, but also left them landless. Concurrently, it also produced an expansion of large estates and swelled the ranks of the unemployed landless peasant laborer (Bukowczyk 7). Because of the large numbers of unemployment and the desire to “Germanize” their land holdings in Poland, Prussia encouraged Polish emigration. There is no doubt that Stanislaus was probably escaping these conditions, but it is also possible that he could have been avoiding the military draft like many of the young male Poles and Germans were doing at that time. Because of these possible reasons, Stanislaus set sail on an ocean liner in late May or early July of 1975.

Stanislaus probably departed from Bremen or Hamburg (Bukowczyk 17) on the S.S. Main[1] apparently by himself in steerage.[2] Before Stanislaus would have immigrated, he would have to garner up the necessary funds to buy his passage from Poland to America. He might have had to sell his livestock or other personal belongings, or borrow from a moneylender. Stanislaus most likely bought his passenger ticket from a local agent, but then again, if he knew someone in the United States he might have received a ticket from that person. He could have waited several weeks at Bremen or Hamburg in a boarding house waiting for the next ship to arrive. Once on the ship, traveling by steerage to New York City, Stanislaus probably faced similar conditions other steerage transcontinental passengers faced. Joseph Wytrawl vividly describes the conditions that many Poles faced when crossing the ocean by ship in steerage:

The steerage quarters contained enough fleas for all… In addition, the steerage quarters were often cold, dirty, disease-ridden, and rat infested. No separate cabins were available for third-class or steerage passengers; the steerage quarters five feet, high, often had two tiers of beds… the space allotted to the passengers was never adequate and ventilation was poor. The only fresh air available came through hatches, and these had to be closed when the air was most needed-namely during a storm (Wytrawl 114).
Stanislaus survived storage, passed through U.S. immigration at Castle Garden in New York, and what he did next is unclear until 1880.

Between 1875 and 1880[3], Stanislaus arrived in a thriving mining area in Northern Michigan’s Keweenaw Peninsula commonly known as the Copper Country. In 1880, Calumet was a bustling mining community with many ethnicities; Finnish, Germans, Polish, Swedish, French, and Cornish. It consisted of ethnic neighborhoods similar to those of New York, Chicago, and Las Angeles. The French primarily resided in Lake Linden, the Poles n Raymbaultown, and the Swedish in Swedetown. All of these groups were attracted to the Calumet area namely by one thing, good paying jobs (Duckworth 10). The copper mining industry financially supported most of the community directly or indirectly. As a result, in 1892, the average Polish immigrant earned an average of $33.63 more per month in Michigan than in Poland (Duckworth 10). Stanislaus probably recognized it from the Polish community in New York, through correspondence of friends or family living in the Calumet area, or through mining recruiters that often recruited poor Europeans for hard jobs and cheap unskilled labor. Regardless of the means, Stanislaus moved to the Copper Country and most likely corresponded with his brothers by mail to come with him to Calumet.

Stanislaus’s brothers, John Joseph, and Josef[4] arrived around the same time in Calumet. There is no documentation to neither support nor disprove whether Stanislaus and John Joseph arrived collectively. However, it is likely that they did not come together to Calumet. John Joseph immigrated to the United States via New York in 1880[5], and Josef immigrated nine years later.[6] The Pytlewski brothers practiced a pattern of chain migration, common in many Polish communities. It is probable that Stanislaus wrote to his village and his family when he settled in Calumet encouraging his family and other villagers to migrate to the upper peninsula of Michigan. Stanislaus most likely sent them tickets when he earned enough money to afford their passage. The same probably occurred any time a new person from the village migrated including Josef, Stanislaus’s wife Antonia, and his Monkowski relatives.

When the Pytlewski brothers arrived in Calumet, they most likely received help from the small Polish community residing in the area. One such group where they might have received help when they arrived and continuing throughout their lives was the Saint Stanislaus Kostka Benevolent Society. The branch in Calumet served to help the sick, injured, or the families who had just lost any number of family members.[7] When Stanislaus died, another society put a notice in the paper under his obituary stating, “All members of St. Anthony Court No. 7000 C. O. F. are requested to meet at the First National Bank in Laurium at 8:45 Friday morning to attend the funeral of our late Brother Stanislaus Pytlewski.[8]” Even though they probably did this for every member of the Polish community, they had more incentive to attend as Stanislaus served as their treasurer between 1899 and 1904.[9] The support from the society and the Polish community was probably part of Stanislaus’s success in establishing his own business.

Stanislaus’s climb up the entrepreneur ladder was turbulent and slow. When he arrived in Calumet, records indicate that he worked as a miner for one of the mining companies in the region from about 1880 to 1885.[10] In the meantime, he bought his property at 608 Oak Street for a total of $450 on November 27, 1882.[11] After he left the mines in 1885, evidence suggests that he set up a grocery/saloon in the front of his residence. However, this endeavor did not last long. By 1890, he is not listed in the Michigan State Business Directory and is listed as a Clerk in his children’s birth records. When his business folded, he went to work for L. Hennes and Co.[12], a local general store. He then went to work for James Lisa, a prominent local businessman. While working at Lisa’s place of business, he became a partner in an embalming and undertaking business, called “Maurin, Petlewsky, & Richetta” at 329 Hecla Street in nearby Laurium.[13] By 1903, he had set up his own saloon in the front of his residence again.
The Pytlewski residence the area residents commonly knew as Petlewski’s Bar[14] consisted of two floors. The first floor contained a division between the saloon on the street side of the building with storage possibly in the back and in a basement.[15] On the second floor,[16] there was living space for the nine-member family (as of 1903) accessible through the side and the rear via the alleyway next to the building.[17] Jon Kingdale paints a picture of what the saloon could have looked like:

Inside was a counter running almost the length of the room, paralleled by a brass footrail… Across from the bar were perhaps a few tables and chairs backed up by a piano, pool table or rear stalls. Behind the bar and over an assortment of lemons, glasses, and unopened magnums of muscatel, port and champagne hung a large plate-glass mirror.

Stanislaus’s estate file indicates other items in the saloon’s inventory. Among them were 50 bottles of whiskey at $1.00 each, 5,000 ten-cent cigarettes, and 10 gallons of rum priced at $1.75 a gallon.[18]
The Pytlewski family’s life probably revolved around Petlewski’s Bar and Stanislaus’s other business. Not only did the saloon not prevent Stanislaus from having a family, he probably had a family to support his saloon. In 1880, Stanislaus married his first wife, Antonia Sikorski, in Calumet. As Elizabeth Pleck states, “the purpose of marriage was procreation, to produce children who would tend the fields, look after the shop, work around the house, and care for the parents in old age” (Pleck 224). Considering Stanislaus purchased his residence in the business area of Calumet two years after arriving leads one to believe that he must have had a long-range goal to own some sort of retail establishment. His work history supports the notion that Stanislaus married Antonia to raise children to help with his saloon.

Another reason probably contributing to Stanislaus’s decision to marry was his family’s approval. Thomas and Znaniecki contend that “A person who does not marry within a certain time… provokes in the family-group an attitude of unfavorable astonishment; they seem to have stopped in the midst of a continuous movement, and they are passed by and left alone” (Thomas 107). It could also be because he had made the decision not to return to Poland.
Regardless of the reasons for Stanislaus’s first marriage, it resulted in six children, but three of the children did not survive. His first child Wlady, short for Wladyslawa, was born in June of 1881 and most likely died sometime before the 1900 census.[19] The death of his second daughter demonstrates Stanislaus’s resilience in finding a home for his family and his children’s struggles to survive. One-month-old-daughter Octevga died of the measles[20] several days before Stanislaus signed the deed for his residence at 608 Oak Street in November, 1882. His fifth child, Fanna succumbed three months after her birth on May 12, 1887 to scarlet fever.[21] Stanislaus’s children from his second marriage did not fair much better. The second child from that marriage, a daughter named Pygale, contracted and died of diphtheria three years after her birth in 1895.[22] Stanislaus lost his tenth born child, Roman, to pneumonia three months after the child’s birth.[23] The only known stillbirth to occur in the family was Stanislaus’s fourteenth child, Kate, in 1905.[24]

The 42% infant mortality rate of Stanislaus’s children was not uncommon among Polish immigrants. Polish infant mortality statistics exceed African-American infant mortality statistics for that period (Bukowczyk 24). These high numbers can likely be contributed to poor nutrition and the poor health conditions of the community that often led to disease outbreaks. It is possible the air quality around the copper mines also contributed to the poor health conditions as well.

The fourteen children the two mothers bore is purely remarkable considering the dangers and pain of childbirth in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Even in the presence of a midwife or a physician, childbirth had the potential to be harmful to the mother or child. The birth of the Pytlewski children would have most likely taken place in the second story of 608 Oak Street in the presence of a midwife. The majority of families could not afford physicians (Leavitt 289), and it is suspected the Pytlewski family could not as well. Stanislaus had just reopened his bar when the last child was stillborn, so they most likely did not have the financial resources for a doctor. The midwife did not intervene in the birth much and usually let nature take its course. They were primarily there for comfort and support. If an emergency arose, a doctor may or may not have been called.

The family lost their wife and mother, Antonia, due to her death in 1893.[25] The cause of her death is unknown, but it is suspected that it was due to either childbirth or disease caused from weakness from childbirth. Whatever the cause, the death did not seem to affect Stanislaus much as he married his second wife, Mary Walezak, in the same year in front of witnesses that seem to be Antonia’s relatives.[26] With three children that were all under the age of ten, Stanislaus probably could not and would not have raised three children as a single father. Before her marriage, Mary worked as a “Hired girl.”[27] Polish women, like Mary, often contributed to the family economy doing domestic work in the industrial age before they married. For whom did Mary work? It is possible that Mary Ann may have been Stanislaus’s domestic servant at the time, hired to either replace or supplement Antonia’s place in raising the children and domestic duties. However, without sufficient evidence, one can only speculate.

After marriage, Polish women did not work outside of the home and the same is probably true for both Antonia and Mary. However, once inside the home, the work of the typical Polish woman did not stop. Because Polish family relationships were typically patriarchal in nature, a woman was expected to raise children and do domestic “housework.” In Calumet, it was against the law for a woman to do work in one of the seventy-four saloons. “In Calumet itself the Michigan Bureau of Labor’s annual reports list pages of citations against bar owners employing women as barmaids or allowing them to furnish music or dance” (Duckworth 91). Therefore, it is not likely that Antonia exceeded her role as housewife.

The loss of Antonia seemed to have an effect on her son, Ignatius Nicholas. An interesting article in The Calumet News details his arrest for his 1908 burglaries:

In response to a query as to how old he was, he replied ‘I am just 19.’ ‘Don’t you think you are in a tight place,’ he was asked. Pytlewski vouchanted [sic] no reply, merely shrugging his shoulders. He referred to his home surroundings, stating that he lost his mother by death when he was only 4 years old and added with a touch of irony ‘I never knew my mother.’[28]

Would his mother’s survival really have prevented his incarceration? It will never be known unless some other evidence materializes describing the specific conditions of the family’s life in the saloon. Nonetheless, Ignatius developed into quite an intelligent criminal.

In 1904, Ignatius had his first run in with the law. Another article in The Calumet News describes his criminal intelligence.

He also confessed in Justice Fischer’s court when he was a boy 14 years of age to stealing copper wire from the electric light company. It will be remembered that when the Pytlewski house was searched, at that time it was found that boy had wired the home from basement to [illegible] and had installed a miniature telephone system for his own private use.[29]

In this case, he was released to his Uncle Josef for five hundred dollars, one hundred more than what Stanislaus paid for his property twenty years earlier.[30] After the incident, Ignatius obtained a job at the nearby copper mining company, Calumet & Hecla Mining Co. in March of 1905.[31] Five months later, C & H discharged him for “destroying property and lying.”[32]

The incident that finally put Ignatius behind bars for a year and a half in Ionia Michigan State Reformatory shows his intelligence yet his ability to carry his stories and criminal actions too far. On the news of Ignatius’s capture, The Calumet News reported on January 27, 1908:

The police made an important capture yesterday afternoon in Calumet when Ignatius Pytlewski was placed behind the bars of the Houghton county jail. The youth, who gave his age as 19, is a confessed criminal. He told Under-sheriff Vivian, who arrested him that it was he who sawed his way out of the Red Jacket[33] jail recently after being arrested while in the act of burglarizing the Stukel saloon on Eight street. He also confessed to burglarizing the Keckononen store on Fifth street, and the Richards store on Sixth. The act which finally led to his undoing was the “cracking” of a safe in the order of the Ulseth lumber yards yesterday morning.[34]
The same article then goes on to show the incompetence of the Calumet police force following his escape from the Red Jacket Jail.

He told how he was amused on reading the stories of his escape from the Red Jacket jail recently by sawing his way out, and laughingly reminded those present how he had passed the local officer who arrested him at the time and on several occasions afterward. He stated he secured $30 from the Stuckel saloon and a gold watch, and that the watch was sold by him in Duluth to a man on the street. Pytlewski added he left Calumet for Duluth the day following the escape from the jail.
[35]

Why did Ignatius return to Calumet? Perhaps it was stupidity or arrogance as demonstrated by his confession to the police and his defense. In his previous case, Ignatius pleaded drunkenness and the court released him. In fact, in this case his defense centered on his “drunkenness.” A witness in his case states:

I said the boy was probably on his way home and wandered in there and wanted to sleep off his jag. It was just a notion that I thought he might be drunk by the way he looked and by his actions he was leaning against the desk. I asked him his name and he said his name was John Rowe. He said that he was a Polander and I thought that was a funny name for that nationality.[36]

The fact that the men caught him in the act of theft with 115 keys that could open just about any door in the area[37], his confessions, and his previous record all compounded into his imminent conviction.

In 1916, with Ignatius out of jail, his father Stanislaus succumbed to pneumonia leaving behind his saloon, his wife Mary, his brothers Josef and John Joseph, and his children spread across the country from Illinois to Montana. Conflicting newspaper reports puts his death either at home or at the Calumet Hospital in Laurium. Considering that Stanislaus’s death record lists his death place in the city of Laurium, it is more likely that he died in the hospital. The hospital was located in Laurium and his residence was in Calumet. According to The Evening News-Journal, the funeral was held at St. Anthony’s Polish Roman Catholic Church.[38] It is hard to speculate without further evidence as to whether the Pytlewski family held another ceremony at their home. The period around World War I was a watershed for funerals as funeral directors began to eliminate the home ceremony and replaced it with a service at the funeral home (Pleck 188).

When Stanislaus died, ownership of Petlewski’s Bar passed on to his brother Josef who had been helping run it since its inception. Josef ran into legal problems that previously eluded Stanislaus. In 1917, the State of Michigan charged Josef for opening his saloon on Sunday. The court fined Josef $50[39], but a few months later Josef allegedly was caught again. The Calumet News reported that Petlewski claimed:
…his saloon was open at Betting’s [a U.S. Revenue Officer] request, and while he was waiting for the officer to appear, a Polish friend, who likely will appear as a witness entered the place and demanded a drink. He refused to sell him a drink, Petlewski claims, but gave him one [sic].[40]
The friend did not testify and since the State tried to make its argument that State law trumps federal law, the judge dismissed the case.[41]

In another case a year earlier, Josef was on the opposite side of the law. He alleged in November of 1916 “[Alan] Gunderson and a companion went into the Petlewski saloon some weeks ago, and that Gunderson made away with a bankbook and $550 found in Petlewski’s coat.”[42] Ironically, Gunderson had hundreds of blank keys in his possession that opened many of the area’s doors just like Ignatius when he went on his crime spree. The actions of Stanislaus’s son had returned full circle to haunt Stanislaus in his grave. Gunderson was tried and convicted and the money was returned to Josef for his brother’s gravestone.

When Stanislaus died, the saloon died with him. The saloon remained open for another fourteen years after his death, but it remained open through the departure of many unemployed miners and the Pytlewski family members looking for jobs, through prohibition as a soft drink retailer, and through the beginnings of the Great Depression. However, maintaining Petlewski’s Bar and his family were not easy for Stanislaus. He fought through the emigration from a poverty-stricken land, the deaths of many of his children, the death of his wife, and the crime spree of one of his living children. Nevertheless, to keep things in perspective, he died as a wealthier prominent man in his community and not a landless peasant laborer