![[Bogacki picture]](Bogacki_02.JPG)
Bogacki, Rev. Anthony
(May 10, 1848 -- April 1, 1902)
Pioneer priest
Looking for priests to fill the pastorates of Polish parishes in the Diocese of Detroit was a task that Bishop Casper Borgess hated. In 1871, shortly after coming to Detroit, he turned down four priests who wanted to shepherd the St. Albertus parish in Detroit because they spoke only Polish. For a short time, he used Father Simon Wieczorek, C. R., who came to Detroit after a forest fire burned down the first Polish church in Michigan at Parisville, also in the same diocese, to seek more Polish priests and oversee the construction of the first Polish church in Detroit. Without the bishop's approval, Father Wieczorek began to build a Polish school, as hundreds of families in St. Albertus parish wanted to educate their children to grow up with their deeply held beliefs. The bishop wasted no time in getting rid of the disobedient priest.
It was not the same in other parts of Michigan. With the bishop's approval, Father Francis X. Szulak, a Jesuit missionary, trudged in June of 1872 through forests twenty miles north of Alpena, Michigan, to celebrate Mass in the homestead of Walenty (Valentine) Losinski, who, like 42 other Polish homesteaders in the first two years of the 1870s, cultivated public land now known as Posen in Pulaski Township. Two years later, when he returned to the Polish settlement, which he named after an historic Polish landmark, he picked out a point on a map and asked the clerk of Presque Isle County, Fred Denny Larke, who owned thousands of acres of land in the county, to transfer forty acres of his land to Bishop Borgess for religious purposes. After the transaction, the bishop would not allow the Polish homesteaders to build a church and leave it with a debt. Slowly, in their spare time, the Poles chopped down and trimmed tall pine trees to make a notched ends log church. Lumber mills donated planks and other parts. The carpenters were supposedly Lawrence Woloszyk and John Losinski.
When the log church was completed in 1875, Bishop Borgess did nothing for more than three years to send a Polish priest to it. The Jesuit missionary who visited the Polish homesteaders twice a year, whom the bishop liked, was responsible for the appointment of Father Anthony Bogacki to St. Casimir's parish. Before the new priest arrived, Father Szulak escorted Bishop Borgess from Rogers City to Posen to dedicate the church on August 22, 1878. Actually, when the bishop and his secretary left Rogers City in a carriage with springs, the road to Posen was so full of holes that the bishop, who dldn't want to put up with the rocking motion, up and down like a roller coaster, got out of the carriage and went on foot the last five miles of the way. Father Szulak, too, got out of his wagon and walked with the bishop to Posen.
According to the Jesuit archives at Krakow, Poland, the first pastor of St. Casimir's church was born and schooled at Srem, on the west bank of the Warta River 30 miles south of Poznan, dismembered Poland. He was educated by the Jesuits at Stara Wies, Krakow and Srem from October 7, 1863, to August 24, 1873, when he was ordained by Bishop Anthony Galecki in Krakow. From 1869 to 1871, he was a teacher and rector of a Jesuit boarding school at Tarnopol, and after ordination spent two years on probation in Belgium and France. He was dismissed on October 30, 1875, from the Jesuit Order.
The ex-Jesuit boarded the 3,256-ton SS Frisia in Hamburg, Germany, and arrived in New York on May 16, 1876. The four-year old steamship, built in Scotland for the Hamburg-America Line, made the Atlantic crossing in about 12 days. Evidently he went straight to Milwaukee, Wisconsin, where Archbishop John Martin Henni, a German-speaking Swiss, deprived him of a chance to learn the English language. The first bishop and archbishop of the Archdiocese of Milwaukee sent him to begin his priestly labors among the Polish families at Stevens Point in central Wisconsin. Within two months he organized a new Polish parish and collected $800 to start work on St. Peter's church. He remained in Stevens Point until April 15, 1877, and Archbishop Henni, then in his seventies, did not fill the vacancy until the following September.
The history of Two Rivers, Wisconsin, where the Mishicot and Neshoto rivers empty into Lake Michigan and fishermen created a village in 1830, reveals that Father Bogacki arrived there on April 19, 1877, and became pastor of St. Luke's Catholic Church. In the same year, according to his own census, the church, completed in 1853, included 103 German families, 63 French and 45 Polish and only the first story of a school. It meant that Father Bogacki preached in German, French, and Polish, and when the second story of the school was completed in 1878, he gave Franz Stoffel, who conducted the school, played the organ, directed the choir, and cleaned the church, an assistant to teach the children on the second floor. The Germans, French and Poles each had their own collector and took care of the financial needs of the parish. The salary of the pastor varied from two to three dollars a month.
Comparing Father Bogacki with Father John Zawistowski, who was pastor St. Luke's in the same decade, he performed more marriages, deemed Polish for the most part, than the older Polish priest in one of the oldest Catholic churches in Manitowic County. The numbers for Father Zawistowski, 122 baptisms and 10 marriages; Father Bogacki, 141 baptisms, 72 marriages.
Father Szulak recommended the popular priest of Two Rivers to
the Bishop of Detroit. Bishop Borgess wrote on November 20, 1878,
to the Jesuit missionary, because Father Bogacki didn't understand
English, and said that if Father Bogacki was willing to take
charge of St. Casimir's mission at Posen and was permitted to
leave the Diocese of Green Bay by Bishop Fr. X. Krautbauer, he
would "appoint him for that mission as soon as he has forwarded to
us unexceptional testimonial letters," none of which turned up.
While he was waiting for a reply from Detroit, Father Bogacki
sailed to Manitowoc, also on the western shore of Lake Michigan,
either to meet his intermediary or to serve the religious needs of
many Polish families. Whatever it was, the time he spent at St.
Mary's Polish church -- January 6 to 15, 1879 -- was recorded. It
varies from the records of St. Luke's. Father Bogacki was
succeeded at Two Rivers by Rev. George Veith in February 1879.
As is known, the Polish people of Manitowoc were without a pastor
the entire year. The Polish families in St. Luke's broke away in
1889 and formed their own parish.
On February 25, 1879, Bishop Borgess gave Father Bogacki pastoral charge of the missions at Rogers City and Posen and all the Catholics living in Presque Isle County. The ex-Jesuit held Mass daily at St. Casimir's church in Posen and devoted the last Sunday of April to St. Ignatius church at Rogers City, where no services were held the first year in the winter months.
Hundreds of copies of the Presque Isle County Advance, which Larke started in 1878 primarily to sell land in the county of the same name, were passed out every week at Castle Garden, America's first immigrant receiving station at the southern tip of Manhattan in New York City. Castle Garden received more than eight million immigrants before it was closed in 1890. Thus, by letters, newspapers, and word of mouth, the news that there was a Polish priest in Posen, Michigan, spread far and wide. The Polish colony grew rapidly after March 5, 1870, when John Kowalski, William Rzeppa, and August Kowalski were the first persons from Poland to acquire land in Posen Township under the Homestead Act of 1862.
Not all settlers came directly from the ports on the Atlantic coast. For example, the family of Paul and Mary (nee Nowak) Czolgosz, including their son, Leon, who would later assassinate President Mc Kinley, moved from Detroit, where they had lived since 1873, to a 66-acre farm in Krakow township, one of three that made up the Polish settlement. When Mary Czolgosz died during childbirth in the middle 1880s, Father Bogacki buried the remains in a cemetery consecrated in 1872, one mile east of St. Casimir's church, and about a year and a half later married Paul Czolgosz and his second wife, Katrina Matzfalter (also spelled Macfalda), who was born in Germany about 1854. The original cemetery was abandoned after the Czolgosz family moved away. The parish then buried their dead next to the church. No records of the graves in the first cemetery remain. Two other branches of the Czolgosz family were buried in the newer cemetery.
Whether Leon Czolgosz learned Polish in Posen from Felician Sisters, a teacher named Kolinski, or Father Bogacki is still unanswered. He was the prototype of Julian West, a fictional character in Edward Bellamy's popular novel, Looking Backwood. The young Czolgosz carried with him from place to place a Polish translation of Bellamy's novel and was an avid reader of radical literature in the Polish language. When Leon Czolgosz shot McKinley, Father Bogacki, who was still living, remembered that he gave his family "no end of trouble."
Father Bogacki left a lasting imprint on the famous village of Polish homesteaders in Michigan. The 12-foot wooden cross on top of St. Casimir's steeple, visible from a distance of ten miles on a clear day, was part of his legacy and well known to all who saw it from 1895 to 1972 when the parish built a new house of worship. Over the years, four houses of worship were burned down, dismantled, or changed to other uses. On July 19, 1883, four months after the log church went up in flames, when the Rt. Rev. Henryk J. Richter, who became the first bishop of the Diocese of Grand Rapids in 1882, to bless a large frame building for church services, Father Bogacki began to change the course of his life. For the first time, in 1886, worshippers could come by train from Rogers City, Alpena and other places to hear his eloquent sermons. Few houses, if any, were erected before 1869. When Father Bogacki was pastor of St. Cssimir's, more than 800 Polish homesteaders produced not only the most peas, potatoes, and other crops in the farm belt, but also cedar posts and railroad ties. Most of the small farms have diaappeared. Many of the descendants still visit the graves to revive their memories of the pioneers.
The longer St. Casimir's Church lasts, the less attention the congregation pays to the stormy years of Father Boganski's pastorate. The names of those who were excommunicated on paper only are little known, and now are hardly ever brought up, but they drew the interest a long time ago of Harry Milostan, a Macomb County, Michigan, attorney and a descendant of the Polish homesteaders. Few read his efforts, and much less cared, to know about the sordid past in their backyards. Whatever he found in his research, he stuck in a book, Gniezniks, and published it himself in 1984.
Early in 1880 Bishop Borgess of Detroit sent a panel of theologians to Alpena, twenty miles from Posen, to investigate violations of the sixth and ninth commandments by Father Bogacki and Annie Eschke, a 37-year-old widow who was his housekeeper. No depositions were taken. The housekeeper did not attend any hearing to tell her side of the story, if any, and dropped out of sight. Assuming the allegations were made up to get rid of Father Bogacki, Bishop Borgess excommunicated the complainants, and set the stage for a religious war in the North woods of Michigan.
When three or four supporters of Father Bogacki threatened to murder John Stosik and burn down his saloon in 1881, the county sheriff and his deputies went out to the snow-covered Polish settlement to arrest the would-be murderers. The officers waited until the persons came out of church to arrest them. But other church goers went to the rescue of their members. They took three handcuffed men and a woman out of the hands of the officers and freed them.
The infuriated mob then went to John Stosik's saloon, where they overpowered the sheriff and his deputies, and chased the owner, his wife, and an infant out of the building. They wrecked the saloon with axes. Without enough deputies to restore peace, the sheriff pulled out of the Polish settlement. He returned to the scene of the trouble two days later with 220 men, whom he deputized on the streets of Rogers City, and arrested the persons who threatened to kill the saloon keeper, demolished his saloon, and others who resisted arrest, No details were reported.
Charged with demolishing Stosik's saloon were John Idalski, Baltazer Rommel, and Valentine Losinski. The defendants posted bond and were released to await trial. In 1872, five years after moving to Bay City, Michigan, to practice law, Sanford M. Green became Circuit Court Judge in Michigan's 18th District, and on August 3, 1881, he heard the case in a makeshift courtroom at the Union School in Rogers City, Due to lack of prosecution, Judge Green dropped the charges.
On the same day, Phillip S. Inglesby, prosecuting attorney of Presque Isle County, who summoned Father Bogacki to testify against four members of his parish -- Roche Laybushanski, Anna Jerzewski, Jacob Durecki, and Frank Chappa, who were charged with assault and intent to murder John Stosik -- was unable to send the homesteaders to jail. The priest was not present. He would not testify against his parishioners.
.In addition to these seven defendants, others charged with resisting arrest were Frank Chrzan, Jacob and Michael Dojas, Anthony Feder. Albert Idac, Thomas Jaracz, Joseph Jarzeytski, Anthony Kieliszewski, Frank Kierzek, Jacob Koss, Simon Kufel, Isadore Machyk, Bartholomew and Joseph Pilarski, Stephen Piotrowicz, Anthony Rembowski, Joseph Smith. Joseph Smolenski, Jacob Strzelecki, Joseph Szczepaniak, Paul Sztyma, Mathias Szymanski, Lawrence Wiloszyk, Albert Wozniak, and Peter Zabcynski. They pleaded not guilty and were released. It is worth noting that Rembowski on this list sold his 66-acre farm to Paul Czolgosz for $650 and left the parish.
From all accounts, Father Bogacki adjusted extremely well to St. Casimir's parishioners. They did not always agree in church affairs, but he was always communicative. He behaved exactly like a fisherman who jerks his line from time to time to see whether he needs to change the bait. He remained at St. Casimir's church until two Krawczak brothers, who changed his last name to Crawford, built a saloon near the church.and sold liquor on Sundays. It created disturbances.
The rest of the story is a little murky. As I understand it, because the Rev. Bogacki was appointed pastor of St. Stanislaus Kostka parish in Bay City, Michigan, on October 3, 1896, and two months later, in order to avoid fresh trouble with two factions in the parish, made no attempt to hold services in that church. On January 5, 1897, when he refused to turn over the church records and funds to the opponets of Father Maryan Matkowski, who had closed the church earlier in the year and gone to Europe, there were gunshots and fighting in front of the rectory for two hours. "Shots were fired both out of and into the rectory, " Father Kruszka wrote. "Those inside the rectory gave up." The Rev. Bogacki went into hiding to quiet the rebellious Poles of Bay City. St. Stanislaus Kostka remained closed until June 12, 1898.
On April 7, 1897, he returned to the church where he had been pastor for 18 years. The priest in his absence was Rev. Joseph Lewandowski. The title of either priest was in limbo. Father Bogacki did not try to hold services. The Alpena Record reported he was still the pastor of Posen. The saloon keeper, however, would not let him rest from his ordeal in Bay City. He sent a gang of beer guzzlers to chase him out of the village.
No one took better care of the evicted priest than Father Leopold Oprychalski, pastor of Holy Mary in Alpena from 1888 to 1900 and St. Joseph in Manistee, where Father Bogacki died in the first part of April in 1902. Father Oprychakski buried him on the banks of Lake Michigan.
From: Edward Pinkowski -- [email protected] (2010)