Tag:

Catholic history

Sister Corita Kent Paints Boston a Rainbow and Gets the World’s Biggest Copyright

Corita Kent created two wildly successful works of art: a tiny collectible and a major Boston landmark.

The U.S. Postal Service sold more than 700 million of her 1985 ‘Love’ postage stamps. The bright, optimistic design typified her work.

And her rainbow swash on the 150-foot-high LNG storage tanks in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood is not only a visible landmark, it is the largest copyrighted work of art in the world.

Sister Corita Kent

Corita Kent was born Frances Elizabeth Kent Nov. 20, 1918 in Fort Dodge, Iowa, to devout Catholic parents. Just after graduating from high school, she followed her older sister and joined the Roman Catholic order of Sisters of the Immaculate Heart of Mary in Los Angeles. As Sister Mary Corita, she taught art at Immaculate Heart College from 1938 to 1968, eventually heading the department.

At the college she created bold, colorful silkscreen works. She incorporated spiritual themes and literary and political writings with product slogans, street signs, and Beatles lyrics. She won national recognition, and in 1967 Newsweek put her on the cover. Her wide circle of friends included Alfred Hitchcock, John Cage, Saul Bass and Buckminster Fuller.

we care by Corita Kent, 1966

Sister Mary Corita embraced the reforms of Vatican II, which tried to make Catholicism more accessible. She also grew more political with the social unrest of the 1960s and 1970s. Her work began to convey messages of peace and love.

Leaving the Sisterhood

She fought cancer and insomnia, as well as the archbishop of Los Angeles, who criticized her liberal views.

In 1968, Kent took a sabbatical on Cape Cod, during which she decided to leave the sisterhood. She then moved to Boston, where she pursued her art career and designed the rainbow swash.

A controversy then erupted over the blue swash, said to contain the profile of Ho Chi Minh. Though Kent worked for peace, she denied painting the Vietnamese leader. In 1992 the Rainbow Swash tank was torn down and the Swash was reproduced on the adjacent tank – over the objections of veterans’ groups.

In 1985, the year before she died, Corita Kent designed the famous Love stamp. Since then, critics and curators have elevated her work to that of such Pop artists as Andy Warhol and Robert Rauschenberg. Several recent exhibits celebrate her work.

Images: Photo of Corita Kent: By Source, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34748779. we care By Thomas Hawk – photographer. Corita Kent – artist. – https://www.flickr.com/photos/thomashawk/40671776194/in/photolist-24Y2u5A-22pP9hY-Rmh68Y-24rPcLr-vTccXT-RmK3yN-61osen-281W3Xf-61sDf1-7qDcpr-BgfEnn-7gZWbC-61osoi-8yYPQD-84h8xB-61sDbY-84h4V8-84h5q8-84h6Ug-KJnCK-84k6Mq-HdsZFR-vAAFDq-N1Mzzm-23yufJz-23yujR2-23yuhvR-2cM5LYH-QpCE9i-23yuhTK-2e6iZn5-2e6iQDJ-2d4Vg8A-2d4Vh55-2d4ViQQ-S2T7PG-2cM5AJK-QpC7ki-S2SPnh-2e6iudy-23yutL6-23yuiyT-23yudMt-2d4Vjto-2cM5KyD-2e6ivgL-S2SFdm-23yus9D-2e6j5K9-23yumgM, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=83371179. This story was updated in 2023.

1 comment 1.8k views

Benjamin Franklin Keith Bans the Word ‘Pants,’ Builds a Theatrical Empire

Back in the heyday of vaudeville, Benjamin Franklin Keith promised the Roman Catholic archdiocese of Boston that he would only stage “clean” entertainment.

For an otherwise plodding businessman, it was a very smart move.

Keith and his partners – including his devoutly Catholic wife – built a vaudeville empire with the early financial backing of the Roman Catholic Church. At a time when vaudeville dominated popular culture, the Keith enterprise dominated vaudeville.

Anyone who trod the boards in one of Keith’s many theatres had to abide by a code of conduct. Performers who later used risqué material – such as Mae West, W. C. Fields, the Marx Brothers and Fanny Brice – would be blacklisted if they broke Keith’s rules. A sign posted backstage in his theatres made that clear:

Don’t say ‘slob’ or ‘son of a gun’ or ‘hully gee’ on the stage unless you want to be canceled peremptorily. Do not address anyone in the audience in any manner. If you do not have the ability to entertain Mr. Keith’s audience without risk of offending them, do the best you can… if you are guilty of uttering anything sacrilegious or even suggestive you will be immediately closed and will never again be allowed in a theatre where Mr. Keith is in authority.

Another word that could end a career: ‘Pants.’ ‘Trousers’ was the preferred term.

Benjamin Franklin Keith

Benjamin Franklin Keith was born in Hillsboro Bridge, N.H., on Jan 26, 1846, the youngest of eight children. He left home to join the circus, exactly when is unclear. After he rose to fame and fortune, his biographies obscured his early years in circus sideshows and dime museums.

Sometime in the 1860s he got a job with Bunnell’s Museum in New York City, worked for a while with P.T. Barnum and then joined the Forepaugh Circus.

He moved to Providence and married Mary Catherine Branley in 1873. He made a living selling brooms. In the winter he took small traveling shows on the road and came home dead broke.

In 1883 came the turning point in Benjamin Franklin Keith’s life. Vaudeville historian Frank Cullen writes

B.F. Keith was a huckster who mostly worked circus sideshows and dime museums until, at age 37, he decided to settle in Boston and open a dime museum of his own.

He opened “The Gayety Museum” on Washington Street. For a dime you could see ‘Baby Alice,’ a 3-month-old infant said to weigh 1.5 lbs. Baby Alice grew healthier and fatter, so Keith had to replace her with new freak shows: Bornean ‘savages’, Siamese twins, pygmies, sword swallowers, a stuffed mermaid, a tattooed man, a chicken with a human face.

He also hired Edward Franklin Albee, who became general manager in 1886. Albee, born in Machias, Maine, had also run away to the circus, to the dismay of his well-to-do family.

Continuous Vaudeville

Edward Franklin Albee

In May 1885 Keith and Albee put a piano and some chairs on the second floor of his ‘Gayety Museum.’ He introduced acts like Jerry and Helen Cohan (parents of George M. Cohan) and comedians Weber & Fields (you can see their act here). Mrs. Tom Thumb performed, and animal trainer Fred Kyle brought his dog, cat, baby and bird shows.

On July 6, 1885, he introduced continuous vaudeville performances. The curtain rose at 10:00 am and fell at 11 p.m. Audiences could come and go as they pleased, making vaudeville a cheap and attractive way to kill time. It exhausted the performers, though, and the stage acts were tired and dispirited.

By 1886, Albee, grandfather of the playwright (by adoption), convinced Keith to dress up his shabby dime museum and move to better theatres. They leased the magnificent Bijou Theatre right next door to the dime museum and staged stripped-down, pirated versions of Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas.

The shows were a success, and Mary Keith’s connections to Boston’s archdiocese proved fruitful. In exchange for his pledge to keep his shows clean, the Catholic Church arranged for the financing of Benjamin Franklin Keith’s early expansion.

Don’t Be Blue

Keith’s Theatre, Tremont Street entrance in Boston, 1906. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Keith’s theater managers sometimes sent blue envelopes to performers, telling them to leave out suggestive song lyrics and jokes. Performers who disobeyed were blacklisted, never again allowed to work on the Keith circuit. Those blue envelopes inspired the expression ‘blue’ to describe off-color jokes.

Keith’s ‘pants’-free shows were mocked as ‘the Sunday school circuit,’ but the formula worked. Keith expanded to Providence, then to Philadelphia and New York. The business became known as Keith-Albee and opened theatres in the South — Savannah, Birmingham and New Orleans. They moved into Canada, to Toronto and Ottawa, and to the Midwest, to Grand Rapids and Indianapolis and every major city east and south of them. They owned some 30 theatres, but controlled many more through their booking agency, United Booking Office.

By the time Benjamin Franklin Keith retired in 1909, United Booking Office had become the clearing house for all the top vaudeville acts. He and Albee were both multimillionaires.

Postscript

Boston Opera House

Mary Keith died in 1910. Three years later at the age of 67 he married Ethel Chase, 26. On December 1 of that year, vaudeville theatres across the country began a week of celebrating the 30^th anniversary of the Baby Alice act.

Benjamin Franklin Keith died in 1914. His only son, Andrew Paul Keith, died four years later in the influenza epidemic.

In 1928, the Keith-Albee business merged with a western rival, the Orpheum Circuit, and became KAO. Joseph P. Kennedy took over KAO in a hostile takeover. He merged KAO with his own small movie studio and RCA to become RKO.

That same year, Kennedy opened the lavish B.F. Keith Memorial Theatre to show motion pictures. After falling into disrepair, it is now the Boston Opera House.

This story was updated in 2022.

3 comments 416 views

Pass the Tourtiere, C’est Le Reveillon!

For many, many years, le reveillon was the way Franco-Americans ushered in New Year’s Day in New England’s Little Canadas.

Berlin, N.H., millworkers’ homes. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

The reveillon is a long, late dinner preceding a holiday. Tourtiere is central to the meal. The celebrated meat pie, cooked and eaten during the shortest days of winter, often accompanies traditional Franco-American foods such as peas or pea soup, head cheese, croquignoles and ragout.

During the first half of the 19^th century, when the first wave of immigrants arrived, New Year’s Day exceeded Christmas in importance. On January 1, Franco-Americans exchanged small gifts, and children found presents under the tree or near the manger in the parlor. Sometimes their parents told them the presents came from le Pere Noel (a skinny version of Santa Claus) or l’Enfant Jesus.

Family and friends visited each other over the holidays, which stretched from Christmas Eve to January 6, the Feast of the Epiphany or la Fete des Rois. Franco-Americans would go to house parties in their neighborhoods in Nashua, Berlin and on the west side of Manchester, N.H. Other cities with vibrant Franco-American neighborhoods included Lewiston and Biddeford, Maine; Warwick and Woonsocket, R.I.; Fall River and Lowell, Mass.; St. Albans and Burlington, Vt.; and Bristol and Waterbury, Conn.

Historian Yves Roby noted that New Year’s was often a sad day for the Quebecois newcomers who worked in the mills. Because it wasn’t a federal holiday, the reveillon was replaced by a regular work day. Sometime before World War II, a Franco-American millworker complained,

Next Monday (January 1st), while our brothers and other relatives in Canada are celebrating New Year’s Day, we shall be going about our daily occupations.

Holy Day of Obligation

The Roman Catholic parish was central to life in New England’s Little Canadas, and New Year’s Mass was central to the holiday.

On the last Sunday of the year, the local church auctioned off unrented pews and parishioners elected new churchwardens, known as marguilliers.

St. Ann’s Church in Woonsocket, R.I.

Catholics celebrate the ‘Solemnity of Mary, the Mother of God’ as a Holy Day of Obligation on New Year’s Day. At the end of the New Year’s Mass, the outgoing officer, along with an altar boy or the sexton holding a lighted candle, led his successor to the marguilliers’ pew.

Sometimes parishioners made a special door-to-door collection for the poor on New Year’s Day.

Many Franco-American families gathered before the reveillon for a solemn and emotional moment. They came to the home of the grandparents or parents, and the oldest son asked for the blessing. In The French-Canadian Heritage in New England, Gerard Breault wrote in 1986,

Everyone knelt before the grandfather who gave a benediction similar to that of the priest at the end of mass. As he made the sign of the cross over everyone, or each individual, he said: “Que Dieu vous benisse au nom du Pere et du Fils et du Saint Esprit. Amen.”

Always the tourtiere.

Then, wrote Breault, the blessing was followed by the classic Franco-American New Year’s wish: Je vous souhaite une bonne et heureuse annee, une bonne sante, et le paradis a la fin de vos jours! , or

I wish you a prosperous and happy New Year, good health, and eternal bliss when you pass on.

After the blessing, everyone stood up, kissed or shook hands and wished each other good fortune.

The Reveillon

Not quite a reveillon: Franco-American potato farmer and his family eat dinner in Wallagrass, Maine. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Le reveillon, translated, means ‘the awakening.’ For some, that signifies a religious awakening. For others it means staying up all night for neighborhood house parties during the holiday season.

In the early 20^th century, Franco-American families in Winooski, Vt.., celebrated New Year’s with le reveillon. They ate tourtiere, head cheese, pea soup, pickled beets, roast beef and dumplings boiled in maple syrup. For dessert, they had pies and fudge. But always the tourtiere.

“Reveillon had to have tourtiere. That was a must,” Claire Chase, 91, told the Burlington Free Press in 2011.

Then came the late-night parties, called veillees.

There were sets carres – traditional dances — often accompanied by a fiddler, an accordionist, or maybe a piano, a mandolin, or a mouth organ. Family and friends would sing traditional songs like Minuit Chretien and Alouette. Maybe they’d have a glass of dandelion wine.

The traditional reveillon began to vanish after World War II. Today, even the last vestiges are disappearing.

With thanks to The French-Canadian Heritage in New England by Gerard J. Brault and Franco-Americans of New England: Dreams and Realities by Yves Roby. Tourtiere by Mack Male. This story was updated in 2022.

Images: Franco-American flag By Robert Couturier (image JPG), Ec.Domnowall (modifications & vectorisation SVG) – francoamericanarchives.org, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15705488. St. Ann’s By John Phelan – Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=18819427

12 comments 968 views

The Little Canadas of New England

Dozens of Little Canadas have contributed a significant but often ignored part of the character and history of New England since the 19^th century.

Young millworkers from Manchester’s Little Canada, 1909. Photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, courtesy Library of Congress.

They’ve given us magnificent churches, Catholic hospitals and sports heroes like Springfield’s Leo Durocher and Woonsocket’s Nap LaJoie. They’ve produced writers like Annie Proulx, who comes from Norwich, Conn., and chefs like Emeril LaGasse, a native of Fall River.

People from the Little Canadas have toiled in textile and paper mills, defense factories and logging camps. They’ve sent politicians like Norm D’Amours from New Hampshire and Fernand St. Germain from Rhode Island to Congress.

Even today, New England’s Little Canadas celebrate midnight Mass at Christmas with pancakes afterward and serve poutine – French fries, gravy and cheese curds – in restaurants and social clubs.

Leo Durocher

Creating Little Canadas

By 1990, Massachusetts had the highest number of Franco-Americans in the United States, with 310,636 – and nearly half of all Franco-Americans in New England. New Hampshire ranked fifth, with 118,857, Connecticut sixth with 110,426 and Maine eighth with 110,209. French speakers comprise at least 14 percent of the residents of Coos County in New Hampshire and Androscoggin and Aroostook counties in Maine.

They didn’t all come at once. Some were expelled by the British in the Great Roundup of 1755. Some fled the fighting between the French and British in the Patriots Rebellion of 1837.

In the 19^th century, most French Canadians who left for New England’s Little Canadas were young adults fleeing poverty, unemployment and backbreaking toil on subsistence farms.

Between 1840 and 1930, about 900,000 French-speaking Canadians left Québec to work in New England’s factories, mills, potato fields and logging camps. The mythical figure Paul Bunyan was a Franco-American ( ‘Bunyan’ is similar to the Québécois phrase “bon yenne!“).

By 1850, most Franco-Americans lived in Vermont, named from the French words vert mont, or green mountain. The state’s most famous Franco-American export was the wildly popular singer and actor, Rudy Vallee, born in Island Pond. Even today, 26 percent of the residents of Canaan, Vt., speak French.

Work

By 1860, another 18,000 Canadian immigrants moved to New Hampshire, Massachusetts and Rhode Island. This time, the economic boom after the Civil War attracted waves of French Canadians. They came to the huge textile mills in Lewiston, Maine, in Woonsocket, R.I., in Berlin and Manchester, N.H., and in Lowell, Worcester, Holyoke, New Bedford and Fall River, Mass. They were the only major ethnic group to arrive in the United States by train.

Wife and children of a poor French-Canadian potato farmer in the St. John Valley, 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Wife and children of a poor Franco-American potato farmer in the St. John Valley, 1940. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

By 1875, Quebec started luring its young people back by offering them free land. As many as half returned. They were called Canucks and resented by the Irish, who had arrived earlier and viewed them as interlopers willing to work for lower wages and take their mill jobs, tedious though they might be.

By 1900 they were still clustered in crowded Little Canadas like Woonsocket and Biddeford, Maine, both 60 percent Franco-American. The densest Little Canadas, not surprisingly, are along the Maine-Canada border in the St. John Valley. There, 79 percent of Frenchville residents speak French.

20th-Century

In the first decade of the 20^th century, the population of Salem, Mass., was more than one-fifth Quebecois and their children. In South Salem’s Little Canada, children attended French schools like Sainte-Chrétienne. They built French churches like Église Sainte-Anne and they started French businesses like St. Pierre’s Garage, Ouellette Construction and Soucy Insurance.

St. Ann’s Church complex, Woonsocket.

Franco-Americans were almost all Roman Catholic, and strict ones at that. They believed that abandoning the French language meant abandoning their religion, and they clung to their language and customs longer than many other immigrant communities. They called it la survivance. Battles often erupted between French parishes and the Irish-dominated parishes over their desire to hire French-speaking priests.

Life in Little Canadas

Life in the Little Canadas revolved around the neighborhood parish and the home, where families were often large. By the 1920s, Little Canadas supported thriving French-language newspapers, Catholic schools, social clubs and fraternal organizations. They established Rivier College in Nashua and Assumption College in Worcester. They built the first Catholic hospital in Maine, St. Mary’s in Lewiston, and started the first credit union in the United States, also named St. Mary’s, in Manchester, N.H.

St. Ann Roman Catholic Church was built with nickels and dimes from Franco-American millworkers and painted with such magnificent frescoes it earned the nickname ‘the Sistine Chapel of Woonsocket.’

Manchester, N.H., had perhaps the most well-known of the Little Canadas on its west side, where Peyton Place author Grace Metalious and Revlon founder Charles Revson grew up. West Sider Rene Gagnon participated in the most celebrated flag raising in history, on Iwo Jima during World War II.

Jack Kerouac

The most famous Franco-American author, Jean-Louis Lebris de Kérouac or Jack Kerouac, was born in Lowell’s Little Canada.

Tensions with the Irish continued into the 1920s, as well as with the Ku Klux Klan. Anti-Catholicism fueled the resurgence of the Klan in New England, especially Maine, and Franco-Americans stayed in their houses when the Klan roamed through Little Canadas looking for trouble.

By then, New England’s mills were in decline, and Quebec’s economy was booming. Franco-Americans began to drift back to Canada, emptying out some of New England’s Little Canadas. Finally, World War II ended their cultural isolation.

This story about New England’s Little Canadas was updated in 2022.

42 comments 1.7k views

Fanny Allen, Daughter of Ethan Allen, Becomes New England’s First Catholic Nun

It was probably a good thing Ethan Allen died before his daughter Fanny converted to Catholicism and became a nun.

Fanny Allen

Not only was Catholicism a despised and persecuted religion in 18^th-century Vermont, but Ethan Allen was a firm rationalist who published a book attacking organized religion, Reason, The Only Oracle of Man.

A friend was astonished she joined a religious order, saying,

She certainly believes in the Catholic religion with all her heart, though how a person with her extensive information and splendid talents can receive such absurdities is a puzzle to common sense.

Fanny Allen

She was born in Sunderland, Vt., on Nov. 13, 1784, the oldest child of Ethan Allen and his second wife, Frances Montresor Brush Buchanan Allen. As a girl, she was a religious skeptic like her father. And according to Julia Smalley, a woman who knew them both, she inherited much of the energy and decision of his character.

Smalley described her as uncommonly beautiful, with fair skin and deep blue eyes, and ‘the dignity and ease of her manners gave quiet evidence to the refinement and loveliness of her character.’

Ethan Allen died when she was five years old, and her mother remarried a doctor, Jabez Penniman. Her family moved around Vermont, and she grew up in Burlington, Westminster and Swanton.

A Vision

When she was 12, she had an experience that eventually led to her conversion to Catholicism.

When I was twelve years old, I was walking one day on the banks of the river which flowed not very far from our house. The water, although very clear, rolled by in torrents. Suddenly I beheld emerging from the river an animal more resembling a monster than a fish, for it was of extraordinary size and horrid shape. It was coming directly toward me and sent a chill of terror through me. What aggravated my peril was that I could not turn away from this monster. I seemed paralyzed and rooted to the ground. While I was in this torturing situation, I saw advancing toward me a man with a venerable and striking countenance, wearing a brown cloak and carrying a staff in his hand. He took hold of my arm gently and gave me strength to move while he said most kindly to me: “My child, what are you doing here? Hasten away.” I then ran as fast as I could. When I was some distance off, I turned to look at this venerable man, but I could see him nowhere.

Her mother sent a servant to find the man and thank him, but he had disappeared. Though Fanny Allen persistently looked for him over the years, she didn’t find him.

Frances Montresor, by John Singleton Copley.

When she was 21, she asked her mother and stepfather for permission to study French in Montreal. She was also interested in learning about Catholicism, though she wasn’t sure why.

Montreal

Her mother and stepfather agreed to let her go, but insisted she be baptized as an Anglican beforehand.

“I was at this time an infidel,” she later said. “I had read only novels and the writings of rationalists, and had heard nothing but evil spoken of the Catholic church.”

She was such an infidel she laughed during the baptismal ceremony. The minister scolded her for it.

In 1807 she went to Montreal to study with the Congregation de Notre Dame, a community of nuns who didn’t live in convents but among the poor and needy. She decided to convert to Catholicism.

When she received her first communion, she decided to become a nun. Her family strongly objected. Her mother and stepfather forced her to return home, and plied her with handsome suitors and big parties to persuade her to change her mind. She didn’t. After a year her parents allowed her to go back to Montreal.

Hotel Dieu de Montreal 2006

However, Fanny Allen hadn’t decided which religious community to join. She returned to Montreal with her mother, who accompanied her as she visited various churches. She made her decision in the chapel of the Hotel Dieu de Montreal, the city’s oldest hospital. Fanny stopped in amazement at the painting of Jesus, Mary and Joseph above the altar. She pointed to the figure of Joseph and told her mother he was the man who saved her from the monster she saw as a girl.

“It is right here mother,” she said. “It is with the sisters of St. Joseph that I wish to spend the rest of my life.”

She took her vows on May 18, 1811, in a chapel filled with American friends coming to see the strange sight of Ethan Allen’s daughter becoming a Catholic nun.

Legacy

Fanny Allen spent the rest of her life working as a nurse in the hospital’s apothecary. She cared for American soldiers wounded during the War of 1812 and interpreted for English-speaking patients.

Fanny Allen died of tuberculosis on Sept. 10, 1819 at the age of 34. In 1894, five sisters from her order moved from Montreal to Colchester and opened a hospital, which they named in her honor. After a series of mergers, it became the University of Vermont Medical Center with a Fanny Allen campus in Colchester.

Rose Hawthorne, daughter of Nathaniel Hawthorne, also converted to Catholicism and became a nun. She is a candidate for sainthood. Read about her here.

This story was updated in 2022. Images: Hotel Dieu By No machine-readable author provided. Gene.arboit assumed (based on copyright claims). – No machine-readable source provided. Own work assumed (based on copyright claims)., CC BY-SA 3.0 , https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=819857. Statue of Jeanne Mance By Stéphane Batigne – Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=11523205.

5 comments 1.1k views

How Portuguese Immigrants Came to New England

In 1915, four Madeiran men organized a feast at the Church of the Immaculate Conception in New Bedford, Mass. They did it to celebrate the safe arrival of Portuguese immigrants after a stormy journey.

The festival mimicked the traditional religious feast observed in their village on Madeira Island. It included a celebration of the Roman Catholic Mass, a grand procession, traditional food and folk dancing.

Celebrating the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament in the 1910s. Photo courtesy Museum of Madeiran History.

Portuguese immigrants celebrating the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament in the 1960s. Photo courtesy Museum of Madeiran History.

Today, the 104-year-old Feast of the Blessed Sacrament is the largest Portuguese festival in the world. It reflects both the size and the identity of the Portuguese-American population in New England.

Two great waves of Portuguese immigration gave Southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island the densest concentration of people with ancestry from Portugal, including the Azores and Cape Verde.

They made their mark with restaurants and bakeries, with fishing fleets, with Roman Catholic churches and with the Boston Red Sox. Dustin Pedroia, Jonny Gomes and Shane Victorino all have Portuguese ancestry. So do actor Tom Hanks, U.S. Sen. Jack Reed and Aerosmith’s Joe Perry.

Portugal also produced John Philip Sousa, who composed that most American march, Stars and Stripes Forever. And Emma Lazarus, who came from Portugal, wrote the inscription on the Statue of Liberty.

The First Portuguese Immigrants

The first Portuguese sailor, Miguel Corte-Real, may have come to Massachusetts as far back as the early 16^th century. A 40-ton boulder now in Dighton Rock State Park is inscribed with writing that Brown professor Edmund B. Delabarre believed was written by Corte-Real.

In 1912, Delabarre wrote that the inscription on the Dighton Rock said, “I, Miguel Cortereal, 1511. In this place, by the will of God, I became a chief of the Indians.” (Well, maybe.)

Dighton Rock in 1893

During the Colonial period, a small number of Portuguese immigrants came to the islands of Martha’s Vineyard and Nantucket.

Jewish Portuguese immigrants came early to America to escape persecution. Wealthy merchant Aaron Lopez and his associates brought the sperm oil industry to Newport, R.I. They also built the Touro Synagogue in the 18^th century .

Until about 1870, whaling drew Portuguese sailors from the Azores and the Cape Verde Islands. Poverty and military service sent them. They signed on for low-paying, dangerous work on whale ships. Then they settled in whaling communities in New England, California and Hawaii.

Easy To Get In

Portuguese families started to come to the United States in larger numbers around 1870 just as the whaling industry began to decline. They worked in New England’s booming textile mills, in whaling and fishing. And the women worked as seamstresses in garment shops.

In 1914, immigrants from Brava, Cape Verde, looking ashore from the Savoia as the await the disembarkation process to be finished. Photo courtesy New Bedford Standard-Times.

In 1914, immigrants from Brava, Cape Verde, looking ashore from the Savoia as they await the disembarkation process to be finished. Photo courtesy New Bedford Standard-Times.

In the late 19th century, many Portuguese, mainly Azorean and Madeiran, settled in Providence, Bristol and Pawtucket in Rhode Island. They also settled in New Bedford, Taunton, Fall River, Gloucester and Provincetown in Massachusetts. And they moved to Hartford and New Haven in Connecticut.

“It was easy to get into this country in those early days,” wrote Portuguese immigrant Lawrence Oliver in his autobiography. “America was a free port. To get in, all you needed was a little money in your pocket, so that the authorities could be sure you wouldn’t be destitute and on relief right away.”

Portuguese dory fisherman gossiping in the sun, Provincetown 1942. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Opportunity

Even during the Great Depression, Portuguese immigrants found opportunity in America. As Capt. Joseph Captiva, a Provincetown fisherman, told a government interviewer in 1938,

…it’s a good place to live. Good money an’ chances for th’ young people. They say it’s bad times now, but we ain’ never seen bad times here like in ol’ country. (Read the whole interview here.)

The newcomers began to form fraternal benefit societies. They also printed their own newspapers, such as A civilizacao luso-americano in Boston. They maintained strong ties to the Roman Catholic Church, and formed committees of festeiros to stage the religious festivals that survive today. The religious festivals subsequently helped Portuguese immigrants retain their sense of community and identity.

Evening recreation of the "Young Holy Ghosters" – Ages 15–25, average is 18 – all mill workers – all Portuguese. Whole House on George Street. Great need of leadership. Location: Fall River, Massachusetts. Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine, 21 June 1916. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Evening recreation of the “Young Holy Ghosters” – Ages 15–25, average is 18 – all mill workers – all Portuguese immigrants. Location: Fall River, Massachusetts. Photograph by Lewis Wickes Hine, 21 June 1916. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Throughout Massachusetts, Rhode Island and Connecticut, Portuguese-Americans hold religious festivals in the summer. They include the Feast of St. Anthony’s in Pawtucket, West Warwick and Portsmouth, R.I.

In Massachusetts, they celebrate the Festa do Divino Espirito Santo in East Taunton, The Feast of the Holy Ghost in Fall River and the Provincetown Portuguese Festival and Blessing of the Fleet.

In Connecticut, a Portuguese Day Festival is held every year in Danbury. Festa De Sao Joao is held in Waterbury. Portuguese-American residents of Stonington, Conn., also hold an annual Feast of the Holy Ghost.

Portuguese immigration peaked between 1910 and 1920, then slowed considerably. Literacy was low in Portugal, and many Portuguese immigrants couldn’t get in after the U.S. government instituted a literacy test in 1917. Then the government followed with a quota system that further reduced the numbers of Portuguese immigrants.

The 2nd Wave of Portuguese Immigrants

A series of volcanic eruptions in the Azores from 1957-58 spurred the second wave of Portuguese immigration to the United States. The Capelinhos volcano, on the coast of the Azorean island of Faial, erupted on Sept. 27, 1957. And it didn’t stop until Oct. 24, 1958.

No one was killed, but the volcanic activity covered the island with ash. It also destroyed homes and forced several thousand residents to leave. As a result, Congress in September 1958 passed the Azorean Refugee Act allowing 4,800 Azoreans to immigrate.

Portuguese-American Girl Scout, New Bedford, 1942. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.

Then seven years later, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the quota system, spurring a new wave of Portuguese immigration. Portuguese then began to enter the United States at the rate of 11,000 to 12,000 per year. Consequently, 44.5 percent of all Portuguese immigration to the United States took place between 1961 and 1990.

By the Numbers

People of Portuguese descent make up only four-tenths of one percent (0.4 percent) of the entire U.S. population. But in Rhode Island, they make up 9.7 percent of the population. As a result, that’s the densest concentration of Portuguese in the country.

Massachusetts has the second densest concentration of Portuguese-Americans, with 6.2 percent. Connecticut ranks fourth, with 1.3 percent, mostly concentrated in the Hartford-West Hartford-Willimantic area.

But the majority of Portuguese-Americans in New England cluster in Southeastern Massachusetts and Rhode Island.

Forty-one percent of East Providence residents claim Portuguese ancestry. So do at least one in five residents of Bristol, Warren and Tiverton.

Though Rhode Island has the densest Portuguese population, it only has the third largest. Massachusetts has more Portuguese residents with ancestry from Portugal than any other state in the country. About 320,000 now live in the Bay State, according to estimates of the 2010 Census. Fall River, Mass., has the densest concentration of Portuguese- Americans in the United States — 43.9 percent. And Portuguese Americans make up at least a third of the population of North and South Dartmouth, New Bedford, Dighton and Somerset.

California also has a large number of residents with ancestry from Portugal.

Madeira Wine

Hence the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament in early August attracts tens of thousands to New Bedford from nearby. They come for folk dancing, pop music, soccer and, most of all, traditional Madeiran food. They’ll feast on carne de espeto, bacalhau, linguica, ceviche, bifana sandwiches and milho frito. (For a description of these foods, click here.)

The beverage of choice? Madeira wine, of course.

The festival then ends with a parade. It follows a route marked by 70 arches of bayberry leaves, illuminated by twinkling lights.

The next festival will begin on Aug, 4, 2022.

You may also enjoy this story about how Portuguese farmers made Falmouth strawberries famous here. This story about Portuguese immigrants was updated in 2022.

28 comments 2.1k views

Newer Posts

Older Posts