America's Melting Pot Lives on in Scranton's Pizza and Kielbasa

(Bloomberg) -- Scranton’s miners are gone but their descendants live on.

The old Pennsylvania coal town ranks No. 1 in the concentration the descendants of immigrants from Poland, Wales and Lithuania living in a U.S. city, according to a Bloomberg study of ancestral data. It also ranks No. 2 for its concentration of Russians and No. 3 for Italians, Slovaks, Austrians and Ukrainians.

If you take a stroll around Scranton, where immigrants once dug for anthracite coal, you are seven times more likely to run into a person of Polish descent, eight times more likely to meet someone with Welsh roots and 12 times more likely to bump elbows with someone of Lithuanian blood, than anywhere else in the U.S.

Experienced miners from Germany and Wales were the first to arrive followed by the unskilled, said Bode Morin, site administrator for the Anthracite Heritage Museum. Today, the Scranton area boasts a diversified economy, yet legacies remain -- Orthodox church domes, shops stocking kielbasa and Italian eateries. “You can’t throw a rock and not hit an Italian restaurant or pizzeria,” Morin said.

The greatest concentration of an ethnic group in the continental U.S. is in Duluth, Minnesota -- on the shores of Lake Superior -- where you would be 50 times more likely to meet a person whose descendants immigrated from Finland than in other parts of the country. Finnish homesteaders were drawn to northern Minnesota by its vast pine forests and mining, according to the St. Louis County Historical Society in Duluth. Scandinavian immigrants -- from Sweden, Norway, and Denmark -- tended to settle in the upper Midwest.

In California, Chinese immigration can be traced to the building of the Transcontinental railroad. The fortunes of the Central Pacific Railroad, which linked up with the Union Pacific in Utah in 1869, rested largely on the shoulders Chinese laborers. As a result, San Francisco and San Jose rank No. 2 and No. 3 in terms of Chinese ethnic concentration. Urban Honolulu, Hawaii, takes No. 1.

Three Texas border towns -- Laredo, McAllen and Brownsville -- have the greatest concentration of people of Mexican heritage. To the north, French Canadians top the list in three New England cities -- Lewiston, Maine; Manchester, New Hampshire; Burlington Vermont.

Among other U.S. cities with the highest ancestral representation, it’s German in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin; Irish in Ocean City, New Jersey; Italian in New Haven, Connecticut; Puerto Rican in Vineland, New Jersey; Norwegian in Grand Forks, North Dakota; Dutch in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Bloomberg calculated the top three metro areas with the highest concentration of population with each ancestral origin. The Census Bureau broadly defines ancestry as “a person’s ethnic origin or descent, ‘roots’, or heritage, or the place of birth of the person or the person’s parents or ancestors before their arrival in the United States.” Also included were home-grown identities such as Natives (American Indians and Alaskan Natives) and the Pennsylvania German. Ancestry affiliations were self-identified and specific; for example, the following identities were not grouped: Spaniard/Spanish/Spanish American, Czech/Czechoslovakian, French/French Canadian/French Basque, English/British.

To contact the reporters on this story: Vincent Del Giudice in Denver at vdelgiudice@bloomberg.net, Wei Lu in New York at wlu30@bloomberg.net.

To contact the editors responsible for this story: Alex Tanzi at atanzi@bloomberg.net, Catarina Saraiva

©2018 Bloomberg L.P.