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"Romanians in America"
Pages 26 and 27 from
History of the United Romanian Society
text © copyright 1995, 1997 by Eugene S. Raica and Alexandru T.
Nemoinu,
HTML coding and web publishing © copyright 1997 by FEEFHS, all rights
reserved
Latest Updates: 4 June 1997(A few corrections)
The 1990 Census of the United States listed 365,544 individuals who declared themselves of
Romanian ancestry. They reside in every state of the union and are the twentieth largest of
the seventy one European ethnic groups recognized in America.
The first Romanian recorded in America was Father Samuil Damian, a Romanian Orthodox
priest from Transylvania who travelled in Maryland, North Carolina and Virginia in 1748
and corresponded with Benjamin Franklin regarding electricity, before settling in Charleston,
South Carolina.
During the American Civil War, several Romanians fought valiently on the Union side.
George Pomutz, 15th Iowa Regiment, was elevated to the rank of Brigadier General and
captain Nicholas Dunca, 18th Volunteers of New York was killed in action at the Battle of
Cross Keys, Virginia. Seaman Constantin Theodorescu was killed while serving aboard the
battleship "Maine" when it sunk in Havana Harbor on February 15, 1898.
A gradual immigration of Romanians commenced in 1880 and increased at the turn of the
twentieth century, totaling a hundred thouand by the beginning of World War I. The
majority of immigrants came from Transylvania, Banat, and Bucovina, territories under
Austro-Hungarian rule, where political ethnic and religious persecution, combined with
precarious social and economic conditions, forced Romanians to leave their homes in search
of relief in the new world. Spread throughout the continent, the highest concentrations were
in New York, New Jersey, and the cities of the Midwest, where the immigrants found
employment in the factories, the mines and on the railroads.
Through the decades, they founded and supported more than one hundred churches, over
three hundred benefical and cultural societies, qs well as over one hundred and twenty
newspapers and periodicals. "The American Newspaper", the official organ of the Union
and League of Romanian Societies of America, founded in 1906, has the longest continuous
appearance in the Romanian community. Over 15,000 Romanians served in the American
and Canadian Armies during both world wars, in Korea and Vietnam, where hundreds died
and many distinguished themselves in battle.
The second wave of Romanian immigrants, numbering approximately ten thousand, arrived
between 1948 and 1953, as a consequence of the "Displaced Persons Act" and settled in the
same areas as the first immigrants. The third group, consisting mainly of political refugees,
arrived after the signing of the Helsinki Agreement in 1974, and settled in the cities of the
west, southwest and south.
Approximately eighty percent of Michigan's 24,823 Romanian-Americans reside in
Metropolitan Detroit, where they have established churches and fraternal societies which
sponsor a variety of ethno-cultural and folklore activities.
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