KOLDROWICZ, EDWARD (Sept. 30, 1872 -- 1940s)Colonizer. Were it not for Edward Koldrowicz, one of the colonizers of Sobieski, Wisconsin, Koldrowicz would have gone virtually unnoticed in Polish records. Evidently the name has died out in Poland, for the government's own data of all inhabitants in 2002 did not find a match for Koldrowicz. Much earlier, in 1990, it found five Koldrowicz names in Radom. It remains to be seen whether anyone is left in the United States to carry on the family name.
After his schooling in the German partition of Poland, Koldrowicz was a clerk in a dry goods store and a bank, and left his native land because he did not want to wear the uniform of a foreign army that occupied his country. Supposedly, with his parents, Frank and Anastasia (nee Werzyszczynski) Koldrowicz, and a sister, he sailed in a German ship to New York, where he landed on November 1, 1891, and then traveled to Webster, Massachusetts, where his father worked as a barber and he was employed in a woolen mill. Soon after, he left his family in Webster and found a job as a colonization agent, as he called himself, with the J. J. Hof Land Company at Milwaukee, Wisconsin.
The owner of the company, who came from Norway in 1865, had already changed his name three times. To begin with, he changed it from Hofhaug to John Johnson, which was, without his knowledge, also the name of more than 700 Norwegians in Wisconsin. Two-thirds of all Norwegians in the United States were in Wisconsin. Then, in 1870, while he was a sailor on the Great Lakes and received his mail at a Norwegian boarding house in Milwaukee, there was -- what a revolting development! -- another John Johnson. Both were sailors by occupation. Imagine the mail addressed with the same name. One wonders whether a love letter of a Danish girl named Maggie, whom Hofhaug married in the 1870s, was ever read by the wrong John Johnson.
Whatever name he went by, the subject of this article turned his attention to real estate about the same time as Maggie entered his life. At first, in 1872, when the railroad was built to the village of Seymour, in in Outagamie County -- roughly speaking, between Oshkosh and Green Bay -- he sold land "choked with old pine stumps" to Norwegians, and was disappointed that instead of developing their tracts of land, they went to work in the paper mills, or whatever new industries cropped up in the cleared sections, and were not as good as Polish immigrants in dealing with him.
The Norwegian land agent deserves more than passing mention for the part he took in the colonizing Polish farmers largely in Shawano, Brown and Oconto counties. The deluge of Polish immigrants in Milwaukee, where he remained until Koldrowicz went to work for him in the 1890s, was the heart and soul of his business. By 1880 he changed his name to J. Hoff Johnson and lived with his first wife, Maggie, at 119 W. Water Street. Rev. Constantine R. Klukowski, O. F. M., who wrote a history in 1958 of the St. Stanislaus Catholic Church, Hofa Park, stated that 117-119 W. Water Street was the address of the land company that employed J. Hoff Johnson. Obviously, the citation was incorrect.
Among the first settlers of Hofa Park in Maple Grove township, Shawana County, were Valentine (Walenty) Peplinski, Valentine Zygmanski, Frank and Michael Lepak. As Father Klukowski learned in interviews with descendants of the first Polish settlers, the Norwegian land agent himself created a Polish colony in the early 1880s when he exchanged land in Hofa Park for their homes in Milwaukee. "Almost every Polish family which was settled in the early years by Hof in this area," wrote Father Klukowski, "served as individual agents for him in his Polish colonization program. The means used was correspondence of the early settlers with their relatives and friends in other parts of the United States and even in Poland."
In addition, with the help of his agents, Hof distributed material on Hofa Park and eventually other farm settlements to Polish newspapers, organizations and interested people. Needless to say, Hof and his agents, many of whom traveling salesmen, sold farm land for the most part at $15 an acre. The pioneers pulled out the stumps on their land and built the first roads, log houses, and prospered. As it turned out, Hof was the godfather of many Polish colonies in Wisconsin. Pulaski, Sobieski, and Krakow were literally carbon copies of Hofa Park.
Between 1885 and 1900, Hof advertised regularly in the Polish newspapers of Milwaukee, Chicago, Pittsburg, New York, Scranton, Philadelphia and other cities. He wrote of his extensive travels, which might account for the trouble with his second wife, and worked for the good and welfare of his colonies.
Six months after Koldrowicz went to work for him, J. J. Hof, as he now called himself, moved from Milwaukee, where he started his real estate business, to Sobieski, where it eventually came to an end. On February 2, 1898, Koldrowicz, who followed Hof to Sobieski years before, married Victoria Slupecki in Milwaukee, where she was born in 1877, and brought her and her mother, whom he called a "capitalist" in 1900, to Sobieski. The village of Sobieski that had humble beginnings in Little Suamico township grew so much that nearly everybody in that enclave was Polish. Koldrowicz, who took the census of Little Suamico Township in 1900, visited the homes of 941 inhabitanrs and spelled their last names better than any other census report of Polish families I have ever seen. At differemt times Koldrowicz was a postmaster, justice of the peace and town clerk in Little Suamico.
Once a picture of Hof and his agents was taken in front of the company's office in Sobieski. It showed a chimney on the far side and the name, which read "J. J. Hof Land Co.," not over the front of a one-and-a-half story building, but on a prominent signboard. One end of it was nailed to a front corner of the building, just under an eave, and the other end was nailed to a post about ten feet high.
According to the 1900 census, Hof lived alone. His name was written in Koldrowicz's splendid handwriting after the name of Frank Peplinski, the owner of a general store. It meant that Hof lived at the same address as his office in Sobieski. Not in the office but in the half-story, otherwise known as an attic, over it. Much to my surprise, the alter ego of Northern Colonization Co. and the godfather of Sobieski lived in an attic the last fifteen years of his life. He was buried in the Polish cemetery at Sobieski among the first Polish settlers.
The older Koldrowicz got, however, the harder it was him to find and hold a job. For example, just before the First World War, when farm tractors were still novelties, he got a job as a press hand in a factory at West Allis, Wisconsin, where the Allis Chalmers Manufacturing Company produced the first ones. Then, in 1920, he was manager of a newspaper in Milwaukee. His wife, still in her fifties, and his mother-in-law, who accompanied the family wherever it rented a house, whether it was in Sobieski, Green Bay, Milwaukee, or West Allis, died in the 1920s. After that he went one way and his three children the other way. His son, Edward, who was born July 12, 1912, was the only one left to pass on their surname. The two died in Chicago, the father in the 1940s, and the son on April 14, 1993. So far I have not found any heirs.
Author: Edward Pinkowski - e-mail: [email protected] - (2011)