Why Did Slovaks Come to Whiting?
John Hmurovic
October 2026
In the 1920s, Whiting could claim a distinction no other American city held: although other cities had larger Slovak communities, none had a higher share of residents who had been born in Slovakia.
Why did they leave their homes for Whiting? The easy answer is that America promised opportunities they could not find in Europe. While that’s true, it doesn’t fully explain why they left, what obstacles they faced, and what it was like to move across the ocean.
The peak years of Slovak migration to Whiting was roughly from 1895 to 1935. The motivation for moving to the city was jobs at the Standard Oil Refinery. Built in 1889, and then the world’s largest oil refinery, it required a substantial workforce. Refinery work was difficult and dangerous, but the first Slovaks to arrive in Whiting were already in America working in coal mines. As hard the work might be at a refinery, it was better than coal mining.
The Slovaks who came to Whiting in the 1890s came mostly from coal mining regions in western Pennsylvania and from Streator, Illinois, about 100 miles southwest of Whiting. They were attracted to the Standard Oil refinery because it paid better.
Augustus Sherman took this photo at Ellis Island, the immigration entry point in New York City for ship passengers arriving in the United States. It is called “Slovak Woman and Child,” and was taken in 1905.