Polish Settlers of White Deer

The colony these families came from had a founder who never saw its Panhandle offshoot. Father Leopold Moczygemba, a Franciscan who reached Texas in 1852 to serve German parishes, wrote home urging Poles to leave Prussian-ruled Upper Silesia, and four of his brothers were in the first party of 1854. Hardship turned the settlers against him, and he left Texas and died in Michigan. In 1974 Panna Maria reburied him under the live oak where he had said the first Christmas Mass, honoring him as the Patriarch of American Polonia.

What the plaque says

Polish Settlers of White Deer In 1854, 100 Polish families (800 persons) came to America in one small sailing ship--a voyage of 9 weeks. None spoke English. From Galveston they walked 200 miles to Panna Maria in South Texas, arriving for Christmas Eve Mass. There they toiled at manual labor. In 1909, in response to White Deer Land Co. offers, they migrated here. Later the colony had additions from Washington State, Nebraska, Wisconsin. Their first Catholic church, completed May 13, 1913, was on this site. Today their descendants include some of the most outstanding citizens of Texas. (1966)

Where it stands

Worth the stop nearby

• Carson County Square House Museum — 13 mi
  The 1880s ranch cottage that is the oldest house in the town of Panhandle, at the heart of a twenty-one-building museum of the plains from mammoth hunters to the oil boom.
• White Deer Land Museum — 14 mi
  The 1916 Pampa office of the land company that sold a foreclosed British ranch to wheat farmers, with an annex holding one of the Panhandle's largest Red River War collections.
• Woody Guthrie Folk Music Center — 14 mi
  The old Harris Drug Store in Pampa, where a young Woody Guthrie jerked sodas and found his first guitar, now a folk music center with Friday night jam sessions.
• Hutchinson County Museum — 20 mi
  Borger's museum on the three-mile Main Street of a 1926 oil boom town that drew 45,000 people in ninety days and was put under martial law in 1929.

More markers nearby

• Jackson General Store — 0.4 mi
• White Deer — 0.4 mi
• First Presbyterian Church — 0.6 mi
• White Deer United Methodist Church — 0.8 mi