They called it Slovenian Row. Not on any city map, but on the near-north side of Joliet, Illinois, where Chicago Street climbs past the limestone bluffs, you could hear it before you saw it. A button-box accordion through an open window. A polka on a Saturday night at the parish hall. The bells of St. Joseph’s calling the second shift home from the steel works. For most of a century, this was the second-largest Slovenian-American community in the United States, second only to Cleveland.
The Place
Joliet sits about forty miles southwest of downtown Chicago, where the Des Plaines River cuts through dolomite bluffs that gave the city its first industry. The Slovenian quarter took shape on the near-north side, anchored on Chicago Street between Cass and Clay, within walking distance of the old Illinois Steel works to the south and the quarries to the north.
It is a flat grid of brick two-flats, frame cottages, and shopfronts. The Metra Heritage Corridor line still threads through it. St. Joseph’s twin steeples remain the tallest thing on the skyline for blocks.
How It Became Slovenian
Before the Slovenians
Joliet was a canal town before it was a steel town. The Illinois and Michigan Canal opened in 1848, and the first wave of labour came from Ireland and Germany. By the 1860s, the limestone quarries along the Des Plaines were running hard, supplying stone for Chicago, for the canal locks, and eventually for the rebuilding after the 1871 fire.
The Joliet Iron and Steel Works fired up in 1869. It would run, in one form or another, for the next sixty years, and at its peak it employed thousands of men, twelve hours a day, six days a week.
The Slovenians Arrive
The first Slovenians reached Joliet in 1873, part of a settlement that pre-dated even the much larger Cleveland community by eight years. They came for the mills and the quarries. Word travelled back to the villages of Carniola and Styria that there was steady work in Joliet for a man who could swing a hammer.
By the 1880s the trickle had become a stream. By the 1890s, the streets around Chicago and Clay had a name in Slovenian: Slovenska vas, the Slovenian village. Mary Setina, who arrived in 1903 and ran a store in the heart of it, was one of thousands who made the same crossing.
Joliet at Its Peak
Two institutions, both founded in the same decade, made Joliet the organisational heart of Slovenian America.
St. Joseph’s Slovenian Catholic Church was established in 1891, when the Rev. F. S. Sustersic arrived to serve the new parish. The cornerstone was blessed that July by Abbot Nepomuk Jaeger of Lisle. The twin-steepled church that still stands at 416 N. Chicago Street was built in 1904, and from the day it opened it was the centre of the community’s life.
Three years after the parish was founded, in 1894, a group of Joliet Slovenes founded the Kranjsko-slovenska katoliška jednota, the Carniolan Slovene Catholic Union. The name was later anglicised to the American Slovenian Catholic Union, KSKJ, and it remains the oldest Slovenian fraternal organisation in the United States. It was founded in Joliet.
By the 1920s the community had a parochial school, a convent, a credit union, two singing societies, a brass band, and a Slovenian-language press. The newspaper Amerikanski Slovenec, the official organ of the KSKJ, was published from Joliet for stretches of its long run between 1925 and the 1990s.
In 1926, a group of women led by Marie Prisland founded the Slovenian Women’s Union of America in Chicago. The organisation eventually moved its home office to Joliet in 1976, and it has been there ever since. Its magazine Zarja, “The Dawn,” is still published from the same Chicago Street block as the parish.
The Change
The mills slowed in the 1930s and never fully recovered. The Joliet Iron and Steel Works closed for good in 1936, leaving a vast ruin along the river that is now a forest preserve. The 1924 Immigration Act, which slashed quotas from southern and eastern Europe, had already cut off the chain.
The next generations went to college on the GI Bill. They moved out to Crest Hill, to Plainfield, to Naperville. The houses on Chicago Street were sold, or kept by ageing parents, and slowly the Slovenian language gave way to English at the kitchen table.
The Landmarks
St. Joseph Slovenian Catholic Church, 416 N. Chicago Street. Founded 1891, twin-steepled limestone-and-brick church built 1904. Still independent after a 2024 Vatican appeal saved it from a diocesan restructuring. Polka Masses, button-box concerts, and the annual Slovenian Heritage Festival still draw descendants from across the Midwest.
Slovenian Heritage Museum, 431 N. Chicago Street. Founded in 1978 by Irene M. Odorizzi and dedicated in 1983, housed in the historic Stonich Building that the Slovenian Women’s Union bought when it moved its head office from Chicago to Joliet in 1976. Free admission, run by volunteers, full of ancestral keepsakes carried over from Carniola in steamer trunks.
Slovenian Union of America headquarters, 431 N. Chicago Street. The organisation, founded in 1926 as the Slovenian Women’s Union of America, became the gender-neutral Slovenian Union of America in 2011. It has been continuously headquartered on Chicago Street for half a century.
KSKJ Life, the modern successor to the Kranjsko-slovenska katoliška jednota founded in Joliet in 1894. Still a Catholic fraternal benefit society, still active, now licensed in more than thirty states.
Joliet Iron Works Historic Site, on the river just south of downtown. The skeletal limestone ruins of the works that drew the first Slovenian quarrymen and millhands are now a public park threaded with interpretive trails.
St. Joseph Park, the parish picnic ground east of town, where generations of Joliet Slovenes held weddings, name-day parties, and the harvest dances called veselice. The button-box players still gather there.
Where They Came From
The Joliet Slovenes came almost entirely from the western half of what was then the Habsburg Empire, from the lands that would not exist as a country called Slovenia until 1991. Three regions sent the bulk of them.
Carniola, in Slovenian Kranjska, was the homeland of the largest share. It is the country around Ljubljana, a green basin of small farms, market towns, and pilgrim churches, ringed by the Julian Alps and the Karst plateau. The very name of the KSKJ, the Carniolan Slovene Catholic Union, names this region of origin.
Styria, in Slovenian Štajerska, sent the next-largest contingent, mostly from the wine-growing south around Maribor and Ptuj. From the Slovenian Littoral, the karst country running down to the Adriatic, came a smaller wave, especially after 1918 when the region was annexed to Italy and Slovenes there faced forced Italianisation.
A few came from Carinthia, Koroška, and a handful from the Prekmurje region east of the Mura. But for every ten people who stepped off a train at Joliet’s Union Station between 1880 and 1914, six or seven would have called Carniola home.
Joliet Today
The Slovenian community in Joliet has aged. The parish school closed decades ago. Sunday Mass at St. Joseph’s still draws a faithful crowd, but most of them drive in from the suburbs.
The institutions, though, have held. The church is still independent, the museum is still open, the Slovenian Union still publishes Zarja from Chicago Street, the polka Mass is still celebrated, and the Heritage Festival in September still pulls descendants back from Plainfield and Naperville and Chicago and farther afield. In 2023 the Union marked its 95th anniversary with a Mass at St. Joseph’s and an open house at the museum.
The neighbourhood around the church has thinned and layered. The near-north side of Joliet is now home to Mexican, Croatian, and Polish families alongside the remaining Slovenian descendants. Chicago Street itself has the worn elegance of a once-grand main street that is slowly being rediscovered.
The button-box still plays on the second Sunday of September. The polka Masses still happen. And a hundred and thirty years after Father Sustersic stepped off the train, the bells of St. Joseph’s still ring out over the limestone bluffs.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Slovenians settle in Joliet, Illinois?
Slovenians began arriving in Joliet in 1873 for work in the limestone quarries along the Des Plaines River and at the Joliet Iron and Steel Works, which opened in 1869. Chain migration from the villages of Carniola and Styria followed, and by the 1890s a recognisable Slovenian quarter had formed on the near-north side around Chicago Street.
Is Joliet still Slovenian today?
The Slovenian community in Joliet has aged and dispersed to suburbs like Plainfield, Crest Hill, and Naperville, but the institutional core remains on Chicago Street. St. Joseph’s Slovenian Catholic Church is still active, the Slovenian Heritage Museum is still open, and the Slovenian Union of America still publishes the magazine Zarja from its Joliet headquarters.
What are the most famous Slovenian landmarks in Joliet?
The two anchor landmarks sit side by side on Chicago Street: St. Joseph Slovenian Catholic Church at 416 N. Chicago Street, founded in 1891, and the Slovenian Heritage Museum and Slovenian Union of America headquarters at 431 N. Chicago Street. The Joliet Iron Works Historic Site, where many early Slovenian immigrants worked, is now a public park along the river.
Where in Slovenia did the Joliet Slovenians come from?
The majority came from Carniola (Kranjska in Slovenian), the country around Ljubljana, with sizeable groups from Styria (Štajerska) and smaller numbers from the Littoral, Carinthia, and Prekmurje. All these regions were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire when emigration began, and only became part of an independent Slovenia in 1991.
When did Slovenians first arrive in Joliet?
The first Slovenian settlement in Joliet dates to 1873, making it one of the earliest Slovenian-American communities in the country, predating even the much larger Cleveland community by eight years. Mass migration peaked between the 1880s and 1914, and was effectively halted by the 1924 Immigration Act.
What is the KSKJ and why does it matter for Joliet?
The Kranjsko-slovenska katoliška jednota, today known as KSKJ Life, was founded in Joliet in 1894 as the Carniolan Slovene Catholic Union. It is the oldest Slovenian fraternal benefit society in the United States and is one of the reasons Joliet has long been considered the second-largest centre of Slovenian-American life after Cleveland.
Your family’s story
If your family’s story passed through Joliet, or through any of the Carniolan villages that sent their sons and daughters to the quarries and mills along the Des Plaines, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the Habsburg parish registers to the steamer trunk to Chicago Street, and to wherever you are reading this now.