The oldest rural settlement in the state grew up in the area around Great Meadows (originally called “Danville”). Great Meadows is an unincorporated community located within Independence Township in Warren County. It is well known for its truck farms, and, especially, for growing celery and onion crops. The soil is unique in the area and is composed of a rich, fertile black soil known locally as “black muck”.
In 1906, the brothers Roman and Ivan Kovalik arrived here from Radekhov (Radekhiv) Galicia (now in Lviv Oblast, Ukraine) and became local wage workers.Jubilee Book of the Ukrainian National Association in Commemoration of the Fortieth Anniversary of Its Existence. Svoboda Press, Jersey City, N.J., 1936. p. 599. Soon others from their village followed, as well as from Zalishchyky (now in Ternopil Oblast, Ukraine). The immigrants worked hard, saved their money, and eventually bought out some of the local farmers for whom they worked to acquire land of their own. The size of their farms ranged from 25 to 600 acres. They were joined by other Ukrainian immigrants who came via the Ukrainian community in Elizabeth, N.J. The Ukrainian community grew so much that by 1934 almost all the children at the Alafeno school were of either of Ukrainian or Polish descent.Halich, Wasil. Ukrainians in the United States. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1937. p. 49.
A search of the 1930 Federal Census on Ancestry.com shows there were 88 residents of Independence Township (where Great Meadows is located) whose primary language was Ukrainian, out of a total population of 964. The oldest Ukrainian immigrant resident was Michael Sedlar (age 65), who arrived in the U.S. in 1886. The number of residents whose primary language was Polish in the same period was 59. By 1936, there was a total of 80 Ukrainian families in the area.Jubilee Book of the Ukrainian National Association in Commemoration of the Fortieth Anniversary of Its Existence. Svoboda Press, Jersey City, N.J., 1936. p. 599.
The Ukrainian community of Great Meadows was able to complete the building of St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Church in the spring of 1923 after a few years of planning, and it still stands today. Land for the church was donated for the church by Andrew and Mamie Nykun and ground was broken and the cornerstone laid in 1922. It was not until July 1936 that a parish hall was built on Route 46. The parish did not have a full-time resident pastor until 1949, when Rev. Marko Gill arrived. He would serve the parish until his death in 1965.