In 1880, the first immigrant Poles, mainly young impoverished single men, arrived in Chicopee looking for work in the city’s two giant cotton mills. By the early 1900s, their families had joined them and more Poles were leaving their homeland to work in the factories and mills of neighboring cities such as Springfield and Ludlow. They were enticed by advertisements such as one promoting working in the Ludlow Mills  and the sophisticated organizational methods employed by shipping companies such as F. Missler in Bremen, Germany. Many immigrant families carried their belongings in trunks, something that indicated their migration would be permanent. Those trunks would have contained articles of clothing, such as women’s boots and a woman’s black-beaded vest, and religious items such as a bible and rosary beads, each of which indicate what those immigrants valued. Documents held by the Polish Center tell the stories of some of those immigrants such as Karolina and Jan Wrzesien.