The Names They Brought With Them: Złote Góry, Warszawa, Krakówo, Bogdarka

1877–1910 · the Polish west side's naming lore

The tale-stock: South Bend's Polish west side named itself the way emigrants name a new world after the old, and the names are the neighborhood's folklore in its purest form — stories compressed into single words, told every time the word is used. Around St. Stanislaus, built in 1900, the blocks were Złote Góry, Golden Hills, for the subdivision the Studebaker and Oliver works built for their immigrant workers; around St. Casimir (1898) was Warszawa, Warsaw; around St. Adalbert (1910) was Krakówo, Kraków; and the settlement that preceded the parishes was called Bogdarka — “God's Gift.” St. Hedwig's, the mother parish of 1877, anchors the series. The parishes, their dates and their builders are documented in this history's Communities section, where the National Register nomination for St. Adalbert's is the record's own carrier of the names; what stands here is the naming itself, as the city's inherited tale-stock.

The honest limit: of the four names, only Bogdarka carries its meaning on its face, and no explanatory legend for the Golden Hills — no hill of gold, no promised fortune, no founder's flourish — survives in any source this section could reach: not in the nominations, not in the parish histories, not in the city's telling. The names are printed as they stand, with the gap stated rather than filled: a neighborhood called its blocks Golden Hills and Warsaw and Kraków, and the reasons — homesickness, hope, a builder's advertising line, a joke at the flat Indiana ground — went unrecorded, or went into a Polish-language telling that this record, in English, did not catch. Either way the names outlasted the explanations, which is the ordinary fate of naming tales, and exactly why the record keeps the names verbatim.

Sources:

1. This history, Communities section — the Polish west side: St. Hedwig (1877), St. Casimir (1898) and Warszawa, St. Stanislaus (1900) and Złote Góry, “Golden Hills,” the subdivision built by the Studebaker and Oliver works, St. Adalbert (1910) and Krakówo, and the earlier settlement called Bogdarka, “God's Gift”; the National Register nomination for St. Adalbert Church as the names' record carrier.