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Then
Cornishtown reunion draws
former residents
For the fourth year, former residents of Negaunee’s Cornishtown
will reunite during Pioneer Days.
Pioneer Days celebrates Negaunee’s heritage with events ranging
from a softball tournament to a fireworks display. Fireworks will
be at dusk on July 11 this year.
The Cornishtown reunion will be held at the Negaunee Senior Center,
starting at 1:00 p.m. on July 8.
This is the fourth year Donna and Robert “Nob” Rogers
have spearheaded the Cornishtown reunion.
“Four years ago, we had it at Jackson Park,” Robert
Rogers said. “It was nice, but there’s no bathroom facilities.
So the next year, we had it [in the Roger’s home, near Jackson
park]. We had a good turnout the first two years.”
With more former Cornishtown residents attending, the third reunion
was moved to the Negaunee Senior Center.
“It’s very nice there and they provide coffee and tea,”
Robert Rogers said. “They put out a good will cup for donations.
No one minds putting in a little.”
This year the reunion will be held once again at the Negaunee
Senior Center.
“It’s a nice event,” Donna Rogers said. “People
are always thanking us for putting this together.”
Cornishtown was a neighborhood in Negaunee’s Old Towne, just
south of North Jackson Pit. The neighborhood was mainly made up
of houses on Michigan Street, which runs from County Road toward
the North Jackson Pit and circles a small stand of young trees,
which is the original location of the First Discovery of Lake
Superior Iron Ore Monument. The pyramid-shaped monument is now
in Miner’s Park on US-41.
Robert Rogers was born and raised in Cornishtown. His parents,
Melvin and Hilda, bought the first house built in Cornishtown
for $600 in 1931. The house was more than 100 years old when it
was torn down in 1973.
Cornishtown was evacuated in the 1960s. Many houses were moved,
but others were torn down.
“There was a house on the end of Main Street in Negaunee,
the Maas House—a big, beautiful house,” Nob said. “They
had a swimming pool and everything. They had little decks up on
the top on each side of the house. They were big-wheels from the
mine. They couldn’t move it because it was too big, so they
tore it down. It should still be there yet.”
Looking through one of his many photo albums, in one dedicated
to Cornishtown, Rogers points out Pearl Brailey.
“She used to make delicious pasties,” Nob said. “And
she took in troubled kids. She did a good job with them.”
Brailey lived much of her life in Cornishtown within sight of
Michigan’s first iron mine, the Jackson. Brailey was a Cousin
Jenny, the female version of a Cousin Jack, or a person of Cornish
descent. Cornwall is at the southern tip of England.
Some 170,000 Cornish immigrated to the United States between 1850
and 1891. These immigrants brought highly prized mining skills,
as Cornwall was known for its extensive underground mining history.
Brailey’s father was a miner and she married Bill Brailey,
who started working in a tin mine in Devonshire when he was fourteen.
Bill came to America at age nineteen; Pearl and Bill had no children
of their own, but raised ten and adopted two.
The Cornish brought experience and a good work ethic to Upper
Peninsula mining. They also brought the pasty. And Pearl Brailey
was, according to David Mac Frimodig, naturalist and author, a
champion pasty maker.
Between their contributions to the Upper Peninsula’s mining
industry and introducing the pasty, it’s hard to overemphasize
the Cornish contribution to Upper Peninsula life.
Nob’s grandfather was a railroad man who passed the job on
to his son; Nob’s uncle, Russell Rogers, was Negaunee’s
first motorcycle cop.
Marquette County is rich in minerals with dark two-billion-year-old
rock outcroppings, which are among the oldest formations on Earth.
The hills in Marquette County are the eroded remnants of mountains
which once stood higher than the Rockies. From tailing piles to
pits, these natural formations are marked with the reminders of
the Upper Peninsula’s mining history.
Miners extracted a million tons of high-grade iron ore a year
during the nineteenth century. The Marquette Range was home to
the first of the Lake Superior mines, which were instrumental
to America’s industrial revolution and helped create wealth
in cities from Milwaukee to Buffalo. Up to the mid-1870s, the
Marquette Range was the primary source of Upper Peninsula iron
ore. By the end of the 1870s, surface deposits were becoming scarce
and the Menominee and Gogebic ranges were being explored, although
they had softer and somewhat less desirable ores.
Negaunee’s Old Towne is rugged and hilly. Robert Rogers lived
south of the North Jackson Mine, which was less than half a mile
uphill from his house. As a youngster, Nob enjoyed the rocky,
hilly terrain. He points to a Cornishtown hill in the background
of a picture of a nine- or ten-year-old child.
“When I was a kid, I broke my arm and they wired it back
together, but the wire broke, so every day the doctor would come
and force my arm back into position,” he said. “Finally,
when I saw his car coming, I’d go up that hill and my mom
would call ‘Bobby,’ but I’d hide until he left.
That was my hiding place.”
The place served as a playground, too.
“One day a big truck went by and a big cardboard box fell
off the back of the truck,” Nob said. “So me and my
buddy we brought it up to the top of the hill. It was our clubhouse,
you know. So a few days later we went up there and it was flat.
It had rained. It was cardboard—we never thought of covering
it.”
Since Old Towne has been reopened for public use, mountain bikers,
cross-country skiers and hikers play on that same hill.
In one picture, the snow is up to Rogers’ father’s waste.
Rogers recalled the blizzard of 1938.
“You couldn’t get out of your house, because there was
so much snow,” he said.
According to meteorologist and author, Karl Bohnak, measurements
were sketchy at the time, but he believes the thirty-hour storm
dumped about thirty-two-inches of snow on the area and blew it
around with gale-force winds, building drifts that brought transportation
to a halt.
“My dad worked at the Blueberry Mine,” Nob said. “He
had to leave his car right in the middle of the road, because
you couldn’t go any farther, the snow was so deep. It was
quite a storm.”
One of Nob’s pictures is of two teens climbing the iron ore
monument.
“That was the hangout for everybody in Cornishtown,”
he said. “All the kids, every night we use to play baseball;
there was a backstop on one side. We always congregated there.
Then when most people came from Ishpeming, they’d all come
though Cornishtown, and they’d hit the main drag.”
Of the Jackson mine pit, Rogers said, there was a nice lookout
tower there at one time.
“You could get up and you could really look down into the
pit,” he said.
Nob said as kids, the pits were their playground.
“Our swimming hole was across from the lookout tower,”
he said. “We used to swim there, skinny dip, you know, but
we had to be careful because there was iron ore all around. When
you put your shorts on you made sure there was no iron ore, ’cuz
if you did, you’re gonna get hell from Ma.”
Swimming in the mine pits always was risky. Rogers told of one
young boy who was at a pit with his little brother; his brother
must have been three or four and the boy was slightly older. Neither
boy could swim, but the older boy jumped in and never came back
up. Rogers said the younger boy didn’t even understand something
was wrong until he got home and his mother asked about his brother.
Another six-year-old boy fell into a pit at the west end of Iron
Street and drowned. It took almost a week to find the boy’s
body. Rogers said a diver from Chicago, Roy Winters, was finally
able to find him among the tangle of wood 130 feet down at the
bottom of the pit.
“The pits are no place to monkey around,” Rogers said.
The Rogers’ original home site is marked by a plaque that
Nob made. It’s the first house on the left if you enter Old
Towne from County Road. The other lots on Michigan Street also
are marked with the names of the families who lived there. Rogers
helped mark the sites of other homes, and he put a plaque up at
his uncle Russ Rogers’ home site up the block.
Now, the Rogers family prepares for the reunion.
“I don’t know how many times they thanked Donna and
I for starting this up,” Nob said. “They can’t
wait for the next year.”
Nob, who drove a school bus and was a volunteer firefighter for
more than twenty years, has chronicled much of his own and Negaunee’s
history in the many photo albums he has amassed over the years.
He brings many of these albums to the Cornishtown reunions and
continues to record Negaunee history by adding memories from the
Cornishtown reunions to his albums.
Robert Rogers also works as a volunteer at the Negaunee Historical
Society Museum and is happy to share his albums with the general
public.
“They love the albums,” Donna Rogers said.
—Larry Alexander
Escape to America
“I still think of my homeland, but I’m as American as
I can be.” So says Maria Sossi of Marquette, whose life began
5,700 miles away in Slovenia and who survived two repressive dictatorships
before finding refuge in the United States. Maria was one of untold
millions uprooted in Europe by World War II. With cities and farms
destroyed, they were homeless; many gathered in sad refugee camps
until placed by a United Nations agency set up by the Allied countries.
Three years after war’s end, there were still 515 camps in
Europe, and America had not yet taken any of the stateless. In
1948, Congress voted to accept 200,000 refugees if sponsors would
guarantee jobs and housing (the quota later was increased). President
Harry Truman reluctantly signed the bill, claiming it was “flagrantly
discriminatory” in favor of some ethnic groups over others.
By early 1953, America had welcomed 136,300 displaced persons
(DPs)—three-quarters of them sponsored by Catholic dioceses.
The U.P. program directed by Monsignor David Spelgatti had found
homes and jobs for 148 people, but there were more to come, including
Maria Sossi and her husband Victor.
Maria and her eight siblings were born in Slovenia, across the
border from Trieste in northeast Italy. Freed from Nazi occupation
after the war, unlucky Slovenia fell under communist control.
Maria fled to Trieste, where she applied for displaced person
status in 1951. During her five-year wait for approval, she met
and married Italian citizen Victor Sossi. When permission was
granted in 1956, he came too.
The trek began by train from Trieste to Rome, then a Trans World
Airlines flight to New York, where they transferred to a train
for Chicago and then Negaunee. Knowing no English and wearing
DP tags, they were lost in a sea of signs and public address announcements.
The train conductor used gestures to determine whether they were
hungry and to point them to the dining car.
“We were met at Negaunee at 2:00 in the morning by my aunt
and uncle, Josephine and Joe Stupar of Marquette, who had come
to America many years before,” she said, recalling how fitting
it was that they arrived on June 14, Flag Day.
“It was so beautiful here in the summer, but then winter
came—so much snow,” she said with a laugh. “Then
more snow, and more snow, and I liked it less and less. Now I
can’t stand it.”
She and Victor, at the urging of teacher Mickey Johnson, learned
English at Marquette Senior High School. Maria continued adult
classes until she got her coveted high school diploma. In 1961,
she and Victor became naturalized citizens.
Victor found work at Cliffs Dow and then Lake Shore Engineering
in Marquette. Maria was a seamstress in local shops, worked part-time
for Monsignor Louis Cappo at St. Peter Cathedral before serving
as Bishop Mark Schmitt’s housekeeper for twenty years. When
the bishop retired, she worked eight more years for Monsignor
Cappo before retiring. She volunteered at the Bishop Baraga Association,
translating title information on Slovenian documents (Bishop Baraga
was a fellow Slovenian), and now helps at Jacobetti Veterans Home.
“We owe these veterans so much for defeating Hitler,”
she said.
The First Immigrants
The first DPs arrived several years before the Sossis. On January
29, 1949, the Mining Journal reported seven Polish immigrants
settled in Marquette and Alger counties. Mr. and Mrs. Michael
Holowaty with their children Christine and Martha moved in with
Anthony Kownaki, owner of Tony’s Upholstery Shop at 535 West
Washington Street in Marquette.
Mr. and Mrs. Paul Holowaty and Marie Hoyhorciev (Michael Holowaty’s
mother-in-law), stayed with Stella Maciejeweski of Shingleton.
Some of their relatives died in Nazi death camps.
Michael Holowaty, from the first DP group, began enlightening
Mining Journal readers about Communist Russia. In a July 1949
article, he described Soviet suppression of religion. As the assault
became more aggressive, clergy began disappearing. All but one
of Moscow’s 200 churches were turned into theaters, museums
or warehouses. In 1941, communists tried to fool their American
allies about religious freedom in the Soviet Union. Church buildings
were reopened, the theaters were removed, and services were staged
with “priests” recruited from the ranks of the secret
police. When the sham ended, all evidence of religious freedom
vanished.
Small batches of immigrants filtered in. In September 1949, Monsignor
Spelgatti’s group welcomed another thirty-one, placing them
in jobs ranging from medical specialist to housekeeper. A contingent
of families with children ended up on farms, and one orphan was
available for adoption. Within days, the U.P. had forty-five families
spread across the peninsula, including fifteen in Marquette County.
As the refugees met their hosts, began new jobs and struggled
with the language and customs, the call went out for sponsors.
Another 1949 arrival in Marquette was only twenty-four years old,
but already well-known in his field. Boris Manjasek and his wife
were sponsored by Dr. and Mrs. A.K. Bennett, whose son George,
a Marine pilot, lost his life in the war. The young Manjasek,
a Yugoslavian forced into a German labor camp, had entertained
U.S. troops after the war with horsemanship and show horses.
Boris spoke eight languages, but English wasn’t one of them.
His Estonian wife also was multilingual, but since he didn’t
know Estonian, and she didn’t know Yugoslavian, they conversed
in other languages. Attendance at the English classes at Marquette
High would allow them to chat in their new country’s language.
Although Boris was working at Tonella & Rupp Furniture Store,
he longed to return to showcasing his horsemanship. When he learned
that some of his original show troupe had escaped Europe and settled
in New York and Los Angeles, he had hopes of bringing them together
again.
The DP program was a life-changing experience for everyone involved.
For Maria, it released her from dictatorships and secured her
freedom. Only two sisters remain in the old country. Maria and
Victor visited Slovenia four times, and she returned three more
times after Victor died in 1996. She’s also been to Australia
to visit four siblings who landed there.
Maria has been asked to speak to school groups about her odyssey,
and is thinking it over.
“I know what I would tell them,” she said with the same
strong determination, which got her to America fifty-three years
ago.
“I will say: get down on your knees and thank God you live
in this country.”
—Larry Chabot
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