Panna Maria is a Polish word for the Virgin Mary and it was named by the Polish immigrants who settled in this small unincorporated community in Karnes County, Texas. Considered as the oldest Polish settlement in the United States, a Polish missionary, Reverend Leopold Moczygemba O.F.M., led the first immigrants here in Christmas Eve, 1854. They purchased 238 acres of the land originally owned by an Irishman, John Twohig, who sold it at an inflated price to the newcomers. Later on, snakes, malaria, grasshoppers, droughts, floods, and marauders plagued them. The settlers turned against Father Moczygemba who left Texas and spent most of the remainder of his life in the northern United States, dying in Michigan and was buried in Detroit. In 1974, Panna Marians had him reinterred under the same live oak tree where he had said Christmas Mass in 1854 where they also erected a monument honoring him as the "Patriarch of American Polonia." In 1977, Panna Maria Uranium Operations, a nuclear waste dump operated by Chevron opened near Panna Maria resulting in several health hazard litigations in the 1980s. In 1976, Panna Maria was established as a National Register of Historic Places site with 25 historic structures. It reached a population of 96 in 2000.
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