Mark Bennett: 'I'm here because of them' -- historical marker to celebrate Terre Haute's Hungarian community

Oct. 29—Small slices of life in the tiny Hungarian village of Radostyan blended into Terre Haute culture a century ago.

Signs of that heritage came here with Hungarian immigrants Frank and Julia Koos. Family and friends saw it expressed in multiple ways.

Frank playing Hungarian melodies on his violin for his kids and grandkids.

Julia cooking her delicate homemade noodles, known as tésztás csirkeleves in Hungarian.

Frank brewing homemade wine (palinka) from his homegrown Concord grapes, or using his coal-mining and bricklaying skills — learned as a 13-year-old in Hungary — to find jobs.

A work ethic that helped Frank and Julia run Koos Grocery & Meats at the corner of 24th Street and Maple Avenue in Terre Haute on the edge of a blue-collar community of Hungarian immigrants that grew from 40 families to nearly 80 in the early 20th century.

A century after the Kooses moved to Terre Haute, this city's Hungarian community will be commemorated with an Indiana Historical Marker near the site of Koos Grocery. The sign is one of 16 markers approved this year and will be installed in 2023, said Casey Pfeiffer, Indiana Historical Marker Program director.

Laura Loudermilk, the Kooses' granddaughter, said it symbolizes the contributions of hundreds of Hungarian immigrants that settled in Terre Haute, including Frank and Julia.

Their story "is probably so representative of everybody else's experience," Loudermilk said Thursday by phone from the northern California town of Chico, where she now lives and works as a nurse practitioner.

Loudermilk was born in Union Hospital and spent her infancy in Terre Haute. She and her family moved to northern Indiana when she was 2 years old and then Syracuse, N.Y., when she was 5. She graduated from Keuka College in New York, and then moved to the West Coast for more schooling and her career.

Her roots in Terre Haute, via the Hungarian community, remain, though. "Terre Haute's the homestead, obviously," said Loudermilk, now 70.

Those ties led Loudermilk to pursue a historical marker for Terre Haute's Hungarian community. That process takes some time and extensive research, including a perusal last summer of the historical records at Terre Haute's Hungarian Hall at 2409 N. 22nd St., home of the First Hungarian Working Men's Sick and Death Benevolence Society, founded 113 years ago.

A total of 452 Hungarian immigrants lived in Vigo County in 1910, including 287 in the city of Terre Haute, according to Loudermilk's research of U.S. Census records. There were approximately 1 million native Hungarians in the U.S. then, including 14,370 in Indiana.

"They had come to America to make money and have a better life," said Joe Kosarko, a second-generation Hungarian American and a historian for the Terre Haute community.

Those newcomers left a homeland in central Europe where the land was owned by less than 20% of the population.

Kosarko's immigrant grandparents helped found the society in 1909 to give Hungarian immigrants and their multi-ethnic neighbors a gathering place, but also to provide funds and a space for funeral wakes and burials of uninsured, needy residents. More than a century later, the hall still hosts spring and fall dances, monthly meals, and summer and Christmas rummage sales. The Hall serves as a vestige of the old Hungarian neighborhood, which generally extended from Maple Avenue south to Beech Street, and 19th Street east to 25th.

Kosarko, now 74 and retired, is also an artist and created a 3-dimensional map of the neighborhood, which hangs in the hall.

"The Hungarian Hall is a story of immigration in this nation," Kosarko said Friday.

Frank Koos left an unsettled youth in Radostyan for America in his early teens, joined by boyhood friend Steven Sobonya, who also eventually made a home in Terre Haute's Hungarian community and ran a tavern. Both men took coal mining jobs in Ohio, then moved to Indiana.

Julia (Juliana Majoros) left Hungary at 15, spending three weeks in the steerage section of a ship crossing the Atlantic, as Loudermilk, their granddaughter, learned.

Frank and Julia both came through Ellis Island. Their names are now engraved on the Wall of Immigrants at Ellis Island, which Loudermilk and her late mother, Elizabeth Loudermilk visited once. Frank and Julia met in the U.S. after his search for a Hungarian wife led him to an enclave of immigrants in Passaic, New Jersey, where she first lived.

Decades later, Loudermilk transcribed a recording of her grandfather, and reviewed a translated 11-page memoir he'd handwritten in Hungarian, describing his first glimpse of Julia. "He saw this little girl going up the stairs, with a sway," Loudermilk said, recounting his words with a chuckle. "I think that caught his eye."

They married in 1914, and raised a family of three children — Steven, Julia and Elizabether (Loudermilk's mother, who died in 2020) — in Terre Haute. Frank built three houses in Terre Haute's Hungarian neighborhood, worked in coal mines in nearby Universal, went back to Hungary briefly, returned to Terre Haute, opened Koos Grocery & Meats market, farmed land on Rosedale Road, became a supporter of Terre Haute labor activist Eugene Debs and wore a Socialist Party pin on his lapel, Loudermilk said.

Frank only attended school in Hungary through the early grades, but read literature by Revolutionary War activist Thomas Paine and played the French national anthem. "He was just so self-taught," Loudermilk said.

Neighbors asked Frank to deliver eulogies at funerals, and he taught relatives the traditional Hungarian dance, the csardas, at festivals.

"I also remember how he proudly attempted to teach me the dance in his cool basement on a hot Terre Haute summer day," Loudermilk recalled.

Before Frank died in 1973, he requested church bells be rung back in Radostyan, Hungary, even though he was an atheist. "And it was done," Loudermilk said. He and Julia are buried in Roselawn Memorial Park on Terre Haute's north side.

Their stories and those of hundreds of other Hungarian immigrants in Terre Haute will be commemorated with the new historical marker. "Like other southern European immigrants [in the early 1900s], many came hoping to build a better life for their families and flee political, economic, social and religious upheavals in their home countries," said Pfeiffer, the state Historical Marker Program director.

A date for the marker dedication hasn't been set, Pfeiffer said. It will become the 22nd marker in Vigo County, dating back to the first four in 1947.

Loudermilk feels "starstruck" in seeing the marker project come to fruition. "I just have so much pride," she said, "and every day I realize I'm here because of them."

Mark Bennett can be reached at 812-231-4377 or mark.bennett@tribstar.com.