Serbian Orthodox Church in North and South America

One only needs to read the life stories of Michael Pupin and Nikola Tesla and the lesser-known personalities such as Rado Radosavljević to understand the impact of immigration period of the time.

Stories abound about Slavonians marrying daughters of Spanish Dons in California and even a Hawaiian princess.

Other Serbian sailors who came by sailing ships to the Gulf of Mexico decided to make their home in New Orleans, Louisiana.

Names like Russian Turchin and Serb-Montenegrin Cognevich (Konjević) of New Orleans who organized his own company and became its captain are now part of American Civil War history.

Among emigrants, there were several Serbian Orthodox priests, and by the end of the 19th-century first parish communities were established and churches built.

Wrote Fern A. Wallace in his 1974 book, "The Flame and the Candle", that the city of Douglas (since merged with Juneau, Alaska) was a very rich mining town at the turn of the century.

During this time, large groups of Serbs from Montenegro came to Douglas to work in the gold mines of the Treadwell Company.

There are documents showing that there were attempts to enlist a Serbian Orthodox priest from Kotor to serve a community as early as the 1870s.

Somehow more is known of the activities of American-born Father Sebastian Dabovich and the Archimandrite Firmilijan, who came from Serbia to serve the Serbs in Chicago in 1892.

In 1923, the administration of the Diocese was entrusted to archimandrite Mardarije Uskoković, who was elected and consecrated as Serbian Orthodox bishop of America and Canada in 1926.

After his death in 1935, the diocese was administered until the election of a new bishop Dionisije Milivojević in 1939 who arrived in the U.S. in 1940 to assume the position.

[7] The reorganization was strongly opposed by bishop Dionisije, who was supported by several fractions of Serbian political emigration in the USA.