As the eminent Kashubian scholar, Professor Józef Borzyszkowski of Gdańsk University has observed, Kashubs were more or less comfortable with Prussian governance at the time.
[4] Rather, smallholders of all ethnicities were disadvantaged because the greater part of arable Pomeranian land already belonged to estate owners, and what remained was not particularly fertile.
By this time, too, the first wave of Kashubian emigrants had formed viable communities in towns such as Wilno (Ontario), Winona (Minnesota), Cedar (Michigan) and Stevens Point and Pine Creek (Wisconsin).
As the Kashubian community within Germany became more self-aware (thanks to figures such as Florian Ceynowa and Aleksander Majkowski) it became more resilient in contending with the Germans; another result of the Kulturkampf was that Kashubs were more likely to make common cause with Poles.
[10] The group of emigrants that came to Winona had trouble finding farmland in the immediate vicinity; consequently in 1862 the satellite hamlet of Pine Creek was founded about 10 miles away, across the Mississippi River in Trempealeau County, Wisconsin.
The two communities remain closely tied to this day, leading to Winona's status as the "Kashubian capital of America.
[12] In the middle 1880s, a Kashubian enclave formed in the Chicago neighborhood of Lincoln Park, and the parish of Saint Josaphat was established there in 1884.
In Winona, the Kashubian community attained such a size that in 1894 the Roman Catholic parish of Saint Stanislaus Kostka had to level its old sanctuary and build a new one seating 1800 worshipers.
Toward the turn of the century, minor Kashubian settlements were established in western North Dakota and eastern Montana.