By MICHAEL F. DWYER
Kasimir Porębski’s journey to the United States began on July 4, 1911 in Hamburg, Germany, when the twenty-eight-year-old laborer, along with almost 3,000 steerage passengers, boarded the S.S. Grant, a ship of the Hamburg-America Line. Born in Bochnia, Austrian Poland, on March 1, 1883, eldest son of Adalbert and Marianna Jagla Porebski, he received a primary-school education there. [Note that the spelling went from Porębski i to Poremski, because the ę character is pronounced in Polish with a slight m or n sound, thus adding the m to the name made it easier to pronounce in English. No names were changed at Ellis lsland!]. As a means of earning money to pay for his passage, he left his native village and moved to the city of Oskrow, then under the jurisdiction of Germany. Kasimir’s grandson Alphonse “Sonny” Poremski recalls that his grandfather worked on the estate of a German nobleman, doing a variety of jobs and eventually becoming a horse trainer, and chauffeur to the family. Married only a year before his emigration, he may not have known as he left Hamburg that his wife Rozalia Blachowicz was pregnant with their first child. Like so many other immigrants, he would never again see his parents and siblings.
A mistake in the spelling of Kasimir’s last name on the ship’s manifest caused him to be detained at Ellis Island for three days after landing. The record indicated his sponsor was a cousin in West Rutland, Wladyslav Firlet. Wladyslav did not stay in West Rutland, but his brother Jan and his wife Maria served as godparents to Kasimir’s firstborn son. The Firlit [spelled later as Firliet] family came from the adjoining village in Poland—how exactly the two families were related has not been learned. Once Kasimir arrived in West Rutland, he immediately went to work at the Vermont Marble Company, where he toiled for the next twenty-five years. He worked 60 hours a week for a wage of six dollars.
In the meantime, Rozalia Porebska [feminine version of the surname] and their eight-month-old daughter Jagwiega [anglicized to Hedwig] departed from Hamburg on March 6,1913 aboard the Kaiserin Augusta Victoia, and after stops in Cherbourg, France and Southampton, England arrived in New York on March 15. Tragedy stalked the family during those early years in Vermont. Baby Hedwig died in May 1913, age one-and-a-half. The parents would suffer the loss of two other infants: Bronislava “Bernice” in May 1916, and Valentine, age eight months, a casualty of the influenza epidemic in October 1918. That left two surviving sons, Bernard “Red” Poremski (1914–2002) and Alphonse “Al” Poremski (1916–2003). An aunt from Poland, only remembered as “Coicia” lived with the family until her death.
As the Vermont Marble Company strikes ripped apart West Rutland and Proctor, Kasimir and Rozalia transacted a mortgage of $4,000 to purchase initially six parcels of land along Whipple Hollow Road in Florence. At their largest extent, the family owned 365 acres and raised dairy cattle. Kasimir had two teams of draft horses. His two favorites, massive strawberry roans, were named King and Queen—so well trained that Sonny Poremeski and his sisters used to ride them while Kasimir raked the hay. The family settled into a rhythm of farm life that kept them close to home with Sunday trips to St. Stanislaus in West Rutland to attend Polish Mass. Rozalia died suddenly of a heart attack on April 7, 1947, age 64.
Throughout his long life, Kasimir maintained a Polish-language correspondence with his younger brother Frank in Poland. Frank reportedly lived to the age of 102, tending his garden and chickens to the end of his life. We’ll never know what was in those letters, but certainly Kasimir had to have known of the Nazi-inflicted brutality during World War II in his native Bochnia, where they murdered Jews and Poles alike. Indeed, at least four members of the Porębski family perished in the concentration camp Auschwitz [Oświęcim in Polish].
Kasimir’s and Rozalia’s sons ultimately went in different directions. Red initially trained to be a barber in Albany, New York but returned to West Rutland, where he married Valerie Taranovich. After operating a dairy farm for two decades, he and his wife purchased a hotel on Lake Bomoseen which became the Edgewater Resort and Trak-Inn Restaurant.
Al graduated from West Rutland High School and Rutland Business College, no mean feat during the Depression. After marrying Stella Markowski in 1940, he continued to help his father run the farm. [The Markowski family will be the subject of the next Coming to America installment]. Al became the mainstay of his father in his old age. In 1950, he, Stella, and their three children, Louise, Barbara, and Sonny moved from the original farmhouse to the tenant’s cottage. As Sonny worked alongside his grandfather, he learned Polish because Kasimir spoke as little English as possible. Kasimir died in 1966, age 84.
Keeping Vermont farms in the family has been an insurmountable challenge for some, but the Poremskis have persevered. When Sonny Poremski joined the Marines in 1964, his father Al sold the dairy herd. Unable to keep farming because of a lack of help, he went to work as a carpenter for the John Russell Corporation. In February 1971, Sonny married Michele “Shelley” Bird at St. Theresa’s Chapel in Florence, now closed. Their three children— Courtney, Hilary, and Thad—were all my students at Otter Valley. As Sonny’s parents aged, they asked him and Shelley to buy their farmhouse so they could continue to live there, and ultimately, “die in their own beds.” They did indeed live there until their deaths, Al at 84, and Stella, at 94. Today, Sonny continues to hay the meadows with help from his son Thad and grandsons, thus keeping the land open for future generations. 270 acres of the original holdings remain with the family.
Hilary Poremski-Beitzel lives on the farm with her husband Chris and their children, Beau and Grace. She graciously loaned me her Middlebury College Senior Honors Thesis, completed in April 2000. Its title “Land Claims: A Family History of Place” does just that—it presents a kaleidoscope of memories and experiences of her family’s deep connection to the farm in Whipple Hollow. Hilary wrote a series of poems therein titled, “Sugaring Days,” an excerpt of which will conclude this family study:
Reaping the rewards of
Kasimir’s first seeds,
Ritualizing our ties
To one another and
Our vast, shared landscape,
My family harvested trees with
Native patience and fervor
Preserving indigenous ways as
We tended pristine earth.
Drinking maples,
Condensing land into food,
Every day
We drew Florence
Deeper and deeper into our bellies,
Our bodies,
Our land-bound
American histories.
[Acknowledgments: Sonny and Shelley Poremski, Hilary Poremski-Beitzel, and Olivia Boughton]
