The Basin from coal troughs

The name Dąbrowa Basin has two parts, and each has its own history. The first refers to coal. The word "zagłębie" (basin) alludes to the sunken position of the hard coal seams, which lay in characteristic troughs. Coal was mined here from the second half of the 18th century, and on a larger scale from the first half of the 19th century. The name used for these deposits was in time transferred to the whole area in which they occurred.

According to the accepted version, the author of the term is Józef Cieszkowski, who supposedly coined it around 1850, when he was chief superintendent of the state mines of the Western Coal District in Dąbrowa. This version is repeated by the regional press as well, but it is not a fact documented in primary sources.

Where the second part comes from: Dąbrowa

The adjective "Dąbrowa" was added at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. It comes from the industrial centre of the time, Dąbrowa Górnicza. Earlier, in German technical literature, the region was most often called Polnische Kohlebecken, that is, the Polish Basin. The term was meant to distinguish it from the basin on the Upper Silesian side of the border.

The extent of the region is understood in different ways. Four approaches are distinguished: from the narrowest, covering the former urban and mining core with Sosnowiec, Dąbrowa Górnicza, Będzin, Czeladź and Wojkowice, to the widest, based on the historical and ethnographic area and reaching as far as Olkusz and Zawiercie. Anyone asking where the Basin ends will therefore get an answer that depends on the approach adopted.

The year 1815 and a river as a border

After the Third Partition of Poland, this area belonged briefly, in 1795-1807, to Prussia as part of the province of New Silesia. It then passed to the Duchy of Warsaw, and from 1815, after the Congress of Vienna, to the Congress Kingdom, that is, the Kingdom of Poland tied to the Russian Empire. It remained so until 1914. First these were lands of the Kraków Voivodeship, later of the Radom Governorate, and after the January Uprising of the Piotrków Governorate.

This arrangement produced the border that shaped the region. The Basin took shape as a separate region in the 19th century, when a state border between the Kingdom of Prussia and the Russian Empire was drawn along the Brynica river. On one side Upper Silesian industry developed, on the other that of the Basin, and the two centres competed economically. The cultural and social differences that grew out of this gave the inhabitants a sense of distinctness, and only from then on can one speak of the Basin as a separate region.

There was, moreover, more than one border here. In the fork of the White and Black Przemsza rivers the frontiers of three empires met, and this place has its own article on the Three Emperors' Corner. Here it is enough to remember that, from the Basin's point of view, the most important border was the one with Prussia and Austria, because goods and railways passed across it.

Railway and customs: how the border built a town

In the 19th century the border was a source of work and trade. The Warsaw-Vienna Railway reached the station then called Granica ("Border"), today Sosnowiec Maczki, in 1848. The White Przemsza river marked the boundary with the Austrian Empire there, and a customs house and barracks were built by the station. In 1859 this line was connected to the Upper Silesian Railway, and a large border station was opened in Sosnowice.

That station is today Sosnowiec Główny. As the site's entry states, after the connection opened most of the freight traffic between Prussia and the Kingdom of Poland went through Sosnowiec rather than Maczki, and banks, hotels and shops grew up around the station. The entry on Sosnowiec adds that the building of the cross-border railway and the Russian-Prussian customs war of the 1870s gave an impulse to the development of a settlement in which mining had been developing since 1806 and zinc smelting since 1822.

In the second half of the 19th century the Lamprecht, Schön and Dietel families came to the Basin from Saxony, and the Renard family from Silesia. Their investments contributed to the rapid development of industry and population growth. The village of Sosnowice was declared a town by a decree of Tsar Nicholas II of 10 June 1902, on the initiative of local industrialists. At its founding the town had nearly 60,000 inhabitants.

When the Russian border ended

At the beginning of August 1914 the German army occupied the Basin, and in January 1915 the district was divided into German and Austrian occupation zones. The Russian border, which for a hundred years had helped to shape this region, ceased to exist. After independence was regained, the Basin became part of the Kielce Voivodeship. Sosnowiec lost its former advantageous border location when the frontiers of independent Poland took shape in 1921.

After 1945 the Basin was integrated with the Upper Silesian area, and in the 1950s both became part of the Upper Silesian Industrial District. In historical and cultural terms, however, Sosnowiec lies in Lesser Poland, in the former Kraków land. The Basin is therefore sometimes described as the western edge of Lesser Poland that ended up in the Silesian Voivodeship.