The Village at Winona

Polish Americans are Americans who have total or partial Polish ancestry. There are an estimated 9.5 million self-identified Polish Americans, representing about 3% of the U.S. population.Polish Americans are the largest Slavic ethnic group in the United States, second largest Central European group and the eighth largest immigrant group overall. The first Polish settlers arrived at Walter Raleigh's failed Roanoke Colony in 1585. In 1608 Polish settlers came to the Virginia Colony as skilled craftsmen. Two early immigrants, Casimir Pulaski and Tadeusz Kościuszko, led armies in the Revolutionary War and are remembered as national heroes. Overall, more than one million Poles and Polish subjects have immigrated to the United States, primarily during the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Exact immigration numbers are unknown. Many immigrants were classified as Russian, German, and Austrian by the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service as the Polish state did not exist from 1795 to 1918, and thus the former territories of Poland at this time were under Prussian, Austrian-Hungarian and Russian control. Complicating the U.S. Census figures further are the high proportion of Polish Americans who marry outside their ethnicity; in 1940, about 50 percent married other American ethnics, and a study in 1988 found that 54 percent of Polish Americans three generations or higher had been of mixed ancestry. The Polish American Cultural Center places a figure of Americans who have some Polish ancestry at 19-20 million. In 2000, 667,414 Americans over 5 years old reported Polish as the language spoken at home, which is about 1.4% of the census groups who speak a language other than English or 0.25% of the U.S. population.
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