Polonia, WI

Polonia is an unincorporated Portage County place in the Town of Sharon, two miles east of Ellis on Wisconsin Highway 66. In 1858, five Polish immigrant families joined the German farming community at Ellis; they are considered the beginning of what became one of Wisconsin’s early Polish agricultural settlements. A church school began at Polonia in 1874, staffed by Felician Sisters sent from Kraków. The place still reads as a crossroads of farm, language, and church history, with no municipal center. Polonia is a central Wisconsin community whose name says exactly where the first settlers came from, while its school story reaches back to Poland.