Mechanicville's Ethnic Heritage

MECHANICVILLE’S ETHNIC HERITAGE

Dr. Paul Loatman, Jr., Mechanicville City Historian
First printed in 2006 Family Day Journal

Look around for evidence of Mechanicville’s rich industrial history and you will find only a faint glimmer of what was once a classic milltown. Although there are significant signs indicating the roles played by the papermaking and railroad industries, there is hardly a trace left to remind us that the city was once a major producer of clothing, bricks, and finished lumber products. But a community is made up of more than its material culture, and in addition to its industrial heritage, Mechanicville has a rich ethnic history that lives on today, most importantly as evidenced by the civic pride inspired by the close-knit sense of community that is so obvious to outsiders.

Although much of New York’s early history has been imprinted with signs of Dutch colonization on it, Mechanicville’s origins have more to do with the migration of New England farm families than to the wanderings of early fur traders. While documentation is hard to come by, tradition holds that four families settled here in 1764, most likely an offshoot of the migration of Connecticut townspeople who arrived en masse in Stillwater the previous year. Over the course of the next century, the dominant elements in Mechanicville’s population were the offspring of these Yankee migrants, and as late as 1880, a preponderance of local residents were listed in the federal census as third generation descendants of Yankee forebears from Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. Besides creating a millrace on the Tenendehowa Creek to grind grain and mill lumber, these folk established the first permanent religious congregations, Episcopal and Methodist, here in the 1820s and 1830s.

In 1815, the U.S. Post Office began canceling mail sent from here with a “Mechanicville” postmark. The name’s origins are obscure, but a letter written by a woman in her 90s to Editor Farrington Mead of The Mechanicville Mercury in 1887 suggests that local denizens were dismissed as “lowly mechanics” by the prominent slave-owners who populated the area at the beginning of the 19^th century.[1]  Turning the insult aside, these local residents preferred to wear the disparaging term as a badge of honor.

Simultaneous with the westward migration of Yankees, Irish immigrants were literally digging their way to Mechanicville. The Champlain Canal reached the community in the 1820s, built primarily on the backs of Gaelic workmen. Actually, many of them had come by way of Quebec rather than from Ireland itself, leading many to mistakenly identify them as French-Canadians.

There is little evidence in the historical record to tell us much about those who actually were French-Canadians. But a suggestive note in the May 13,1887 issue of The Mercury tells us that “George Perry placed an invoice of French-Canadians, seventy strong, at work in his brick yard.” Were these “imports”regarded by the editor and Perry as “goods” or “services”? We will never know, but congregating together as they did near the brickyards on the lands of the Hudson River Water Power & Paper Co. north of the village apparently gave rise to that area being dubbed “Frog Island.” The distaste the name provoked might have been captured in Mead’s note on August 31, 1894, that “Henceforth, we will call the area north of the paper mill as ‘Riverside.’ Residents have asked us to use this name.” Which residents asked? Their motivation for asking? There is so much more we wish the historical record would reveal.

Again, young Irish females worked as domestic servants, a common position for immigrants of such low status in the 19^th century. Other newcomers in their ranks were employed at the American Linen Thread Company located on “The Devil’s Half Acre” near the present site of City Hall. The company ran a one-of-a-kind operation that  displayed its wares at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition in 1876 convened to celebrate the achievements made by American industry since the nation’s founding. Linen thread had limited but important uses as fishing line and netting, and as thread to join the uppers and soles of shoes. Given this fact, it is not surprising that the local company was purchased by a Massachusetts firm and relocated to the Bay State, the center of the shoe industry, in the early 1880s, thus ending three decades of production here.

The thread mill had employed entire Irish immigrant families, including children as young as six years of age. Wage rates were pathetically low, even by the standards of the day, and it is a wonder that these families could survive on such a meager subsistence. Their plight often drew the attention of local lawyer, veteran state legislator, and sometime newspaperman, J. Frank Terry, who edited The Mechanicville Times in the 1870s. An unsympathetic observer, he seemed to delight in reporting the foibles of the residents of the area he dubbed “Dublin Row,” especially when recounting “marriages under ‘difficulties’” that led to “unexpected births” among them. Antipathy aside, Terry hardly exaggerated the tenuous hold these immigrants had on life in general while finding themselves on the bottom of the socio-economic totem pole.

One Irishman who came here in 1830, John Short, was able to establish himself as a successful tavern-keeper by slaking the thirst of canal boat travelers in his William St. establishment standing on the current site of the B&D tavern. Before the Champlain Canal was expanded in the early 20^th century, the man-made waterway coursed its way through town along the path of what is now Central Ave., so Short had ideally situated himself  to benefit from the needs of travelers looking for food and lodging along the route.

As early as 1839, Catholic missionaries had designated Mechanicville as a “station,” a status that warranted frequent visits from traveling priests who would say Mass in John Short’s barn at the south end of Grove St. Then, with the onset of the 1850s,  a sudden influx of “famine Irish” justified the need to erect a church and organize a Catholic parish, in the eyes of Short and others. The tavern owner took the lead role in raising a $5000.00 building fund, purchased bricks and mortar to build it, and hired the Irish masons who erected St. Paul’s Church on William St. Literally and figuratively, Short had earned the well-deserved sobriquet, “Pillar of the Church.” The product of his handiwork continues to serve Mechanicville’s Catholic community over 150 years after it was completed.

By the end of the Civil War, St. Paul’s boasted the largest church congregation in the local area, and first and second-generation Irish immigrants were now making up about 45% of the village’s population of 1,100. Later census records reveal a pattern of increasingly upward Irish social mobility. Every laboring, craft, and professional position in the community included Irish representatives by the end of the century. At the same time, few young Irish girls were listed on the census rolls as “domestic servants.” Papermaking and railroading had become so well-established that large numbers of Irish families decided to relocate here from Holyoke and other New England industrial centers.

Ethnic group identity was solidified by the formation of a local chapter of the Ancient Order of Hibernians in 1884, and within a decade, a Knights of Columbus council began meeting here. The columns of The Mechanicville Saturday Mercury regularly recorded notices of annual St. Patrick’s Day Parades and festivals.[2]  These activities were a regular part of Mechanicville’s social calendar until the post World War II era.

The best indication of the political coming of age of the Irish is revealed in Fr. Alfred Valiquette’s boast the pastor made to Bishop Edmund Gibbons in 1923 that “our City [government] is made up of Catholic men from the mayor down.” He might have added that this was the same group of elected officials who had passed a resolution that urged President Warren G. Harding to protest English interference in Ireland two years earlier. Thus, in little more than three generations, Irish immigrants had gone from being considered social outcasts who were “blackballed” by the local volunteer fire department to having become the dominant religious, social, and economic force in the community. The greatest visible signs of the group’s maturation were seen in the erection of the massive Gothic Revival St. Paul’s Church on North Main St. in 1916, and the opening of a parish hall and school ten years later. In a word, the Irish had “arrived.”

Among others, Lithuanians also played an important role in life of the community, but sometimes their role was obscured because they were mistakenly identified as “Polish” upon entering the United States. Lithuania did not exist as a separate country until 1918 (it was fated to disappear again when Russia absorbed it in 1941), and immigration officials as well as census-takers often grouped people together by their language group rather than by their nationality. First arriving here in the 1890s, almost all of them worked at the paper mill. Naturalization records filed by Lithuanians who became citizens between 1896 and 1946 fail to reveal a single instance of two families having migrated from the same village. This strongly suggests that they came here after first settling elsewhere in the United States, and the fact of their bring employed almost exclusively by the paper mill suggests that they were recruited as a group by that company.

When World War I broke out in 1914, almost 10% of the local population of 8.700 residents were categorized as first or second-generation Lithuanians, most of them residing in Riverside.[3] They readily formed an ethnic benevolent society named in honor of St. John, celebrated special feast days publicly, and had become so numerous that the pastor of St. Paul’s regularly recruited Polish-speaking priests to visit the parish to administer the sacraments in their native tongue. Never large enough in number to organize their own national parish, the group did build St. John’s Hall on “the island” to promote ethnic group cohesion. The fact that the building was converted into a temporary hospital during the “Spanish influenza” outbreak in 1918 suggests the possibility that this part of the community was harder-hit by this devastating pandemic than other neighborhoods.[4]

World War I had a profoundly negative impact on the Lithuanian community because a significant contingent of them returned home to join the fight. The size of the ethnic group began to decline, and the downward trend was exacerbated thereafter by the passage of xenophobic anti-immigrant laws in the 1920s. These laws stopped emigration from eastern and southern European nations, prompting an observation made by the local Superintendant of Schools that a drastic shift in the composition of Mechanicville’s student body would result. Recognizing the challenge raised by the need to educate students who were from non-English speaking families, the School Board offered to pay significant financial bonuses to those teachers with the fortitude to persist for a full academic year in either School 4 on Saratoga Ave. or School 3 in Riverside. These schools included the largest concentrations of Italian and Polish-language students respectively.

Although two Italian priests had been assigned here as early as the 1870s, the first significant number of other Italian immigrants did not appear until a decade later when a track gang making connections between the Boston, Hoosac Tunnel & Western Railway and the Delaware and Hudson yards in Rotterdam took up temporary residence here. However, most of this original group moved on with the westward march of the rails. Yet, by the end of the 19^th century, Mechanicville had become a regular destination for Italian workmen.

Like their Irish predecessors, the Italians performed “pick and shovel” labor while building street railways, laying track, digging sewer and water systems, or rebuilding  the Champlain Canal. Indeed, this last venture required more than five years to complete, encouraging the aptly-named “Italian Supply Co.” of Utica to open an office here. As its name implied, the firm “supplied Italians” to labor-hungry businesses, apparently, along the same lines that had led George Perry to “import” an “invoice of French-Canadian brick makers” twenty-seven years earlier.

Unlike their Irish predecessors, over 80% of Italian migrants were males between the ages of 18 and 45 who worked here nine months a year and returned to Italy during the winter months. Their annual migrations became so routine that local banks regularly booked round-trip passages to Naples from Mechanicville for these “birds of passage. Local brickyards catered to these temporary work patterns by closing their lime pits when the first hard frost set in, and reopened in the spring each year.

Almost all of these immigrants came from southern Italy in areas surrounding Naples in Caserta, Benevento, and Campobasso. A group from Coreno and Ausonia  was numerous enough at first to organize a mutual aid society in 1899 that limited membership to sojourners from these two paesi. The Fratellenza turned out to be just the first of many other ethnic organizations formed by immigrants who created a subculture that intersected with that of the larger society on a limited basis. In fact, American unfamiliarity with Italian customs and backgrounds was so pronounced that local press reports of industrial accidents might refer to the victims merely as “Italian number 486” or as “a Neapolitan.” Italians were the only ethnic group who were described in this manner in the newspapers.

As early as 1906, the Augustinian provincial began assigning a priest to the local Catholic parish who could offer one Italian-language Mass each week. Coming from a different religious ethos and feeling unwelcome in the “Irish church,” few immigrants participated in local parish life. Prior to World War I, Fr. Daniel Scalabrella hoped to change this situation by organizing an Italian ethnic parish and building a church on Saratoga Ave. Before he could bring his plan to fruition, however, he died in the “Spanish influenza” epidemic in October, 1918. In 1919, Fr. Serafino Aurigemma, who had served here twice before, agreed to return a third time if he was permitted to use the now-abandoned original church on William St. as the base of a newly-created Italian Catholic national parish. Taking the name of the Church of the Assumption, the parish catered to the spiritual needs of a group that now made up 25% of the community’s growing population of nearly 10,000 residents.

The growth of the Italian immigrant community here was made evident in a number of other ways. Many of the men who had previously commuted annually between Mechanicville and Naples began to settle here permanently, especially following the post-war collapse of the political economy of southern Italy. The Fratellenza expanded its activities beyond those of a mutual aid insurance society and sponsored the three-day feste associated with the Feast of the Assumption, a tradition that has been interrupted briefly a couple of times, but which continues to be observed more than a century after the first street band began marching through the ethnic neighborhood. During the 1930s, the society had difficulty maintaining an active membership because of the cutoff of immigration resulting from the discriminatory quota system imposed by Congress. However, it resurrected itself by modifying its rules and began admitting “young American born Italians.” The increased membership permitted the society to erect new headquarters in 1939 on Viall Ave., and it purchased twelve acres of land on Hulin Heights where it held its annual August 15^th  fireworks extravaganza for more than four decades.

In 1918, partly in response to the “Americanization hysteria” which swept the country following American entry into the world war, the second chapter in the U.S. of the Young Men’s Italian Association was founded, coinciding with the organization of a Sons of Italy Lodge here. Beyond promoting citizenship and ethnic social and athletic activities, the Sons sponsored visits by an Italian doctor to households that could not afford regular medical attention. This physician located his practice here, and in 1938, Dr. Anthony Mauro became the first Italian to hold public office when he was elected to the Mechanicville Board of Education. Carmine DeCrescente later became the first member of his group to take a seat on the City Council, winning election in 1950.

The Sons of Italy secured a permanent home in 1922, the same year that the YMIA was absorbed by the older brotherhood. Women’s groups were formed later than these ethnic brotherhoods, possibly a reflection of the limited free time Italian mothers had in raising families. Interestingly, when the Senior and Junior Dante Clubs were founded in 1940, they were independent organizations, not adjuncts or auxiliaries of male-dominated groups as was so often the case with women’s social clubs. Although the Senior branch of the club has become defunct, the Junior Dante Society continues to thrive and maintains a waiting list for new members.

A good deal of ethnic group history can be examined by reviewing the activities of one family in the early 20^th century. In 1907, Guisseppe DellaVigna closed the restaurant he and his father Nunzio had operated since 1901 and opened the Banco DellaVigna in the heart of the ethnic community. Performing services that American bankers were either unwilling or unable to do, the father and son team exchanged currencies; made remittances to the old country on behalf of immigrants working here to support their families in Italy; and arranged travel for the many “birds of passage” who crossed the ocean every year. Despite paying only half the interest rate offered by American banks, the immigrant institution held more than $125,000 in cash deposits in 1924, including a sizable account in the name of the Manufacturer’s National Bank of Mechanicville.

The younger Della Vigna, popularly known as Joe Vett, ingratiated himself in the Italian community in a number of ways beyond the field of banking. He served as President of the Fratellenza, corresponded on behalf of immigrants with family members back in Italy, actively encouraged Italians to seek citizenship and join the Republican party that openly courted them, and invested in local immigrant-owned businesses. His Venetian Theater provided a venue for traveling ethnic entertainers, as well as for local talent. In the early 1920s, he famously took up the cause of Italian workers who were fired by the Westvaco paper company for absenting themselves from work to participate in an August 15^th day-long street procession. As the oft-told story has been recounted by a number of older Italians, Vett descended upon Governor Alfred E. Smith’s office to plead the case of the dismissed workers, refusing to leave until he had presented his case. The Governor, who traveled through Mechanicville each summer on his way to Saratoga Racetrack, is reported to have granted Vett an audience after making him wait all day, but he then intervened with Westvaco management to get the fired workers reinstated.

Vett also served as President of the Mohawk Brick Co., was one of the largest property owners in Mechanicville, and the reputed “Boss” of the Italian faction of the local Republican party. However, at the peak of his influence, he suffered a fall from grace when the State Banking Commissioner closed his institution in 1924. Five years later, depositors were returned 57 cents on the dollar for their holdings in the Banco, a step apparently necessitated by the fact that the institution’s assets were over-invested in what was becoming an increasingly risky venture in the local brick making industry. Coinciding with a decline in immigration, Vett was unable to continue to operate his ventures successfully.

The former bank headquarters later housed the Sons of Italy, and continued to be used by the order until the 1970s when it was torn down to make way for a railroad overpass. The Peters-Purcell Italian-American War Veterans Post is located nearby in a newer facility, and has been active since the end of World War II. Along with the Fratellenza and the Junior Dante Club, the Post provides the greatest continuity of maintaining roots with its ethnic past in the community. The Assumption Italian National Catholic parish was merged with St. Paul’s in 1976, and while it continues to be used for regular church services, almost all symbols of its identity as an ethnic church were removed in a “modernization” program shortly after the merger.

We can relate only small part of the story of Mechanicville’s ethnic heritage here. During its heyday as a booming milltown, the City attracted East European Jewish merchants, Chinese laundrymen, Syrian grocers, Austrian and German cigar makers and store owners, and a potpourri of other peoples of diverse backgrounds. As we reflect briefly on this, we might remind ourselves that their sagas reveal both the positive and negative aspects of human experience. Sometimes, our community protected the ideals of human equality, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness that we are celebrating today. At other times, the historical picture has revealed our ancestors’ shortcomings. As we judge the past generations, let us be mindful that future generations also will measure us by oir own willingness to uphold the high standards proclaimed in the Declaration of Independence 230 years ago. Remembering this, let us as Americans live every day like it is the Fourth of July.

[1] The letter, written by a descendant of the Bradshaw-Fairbanks family, was discussed by Mead in the October 14, 1887, issue. The census of 1790 reveals that almost 20% of the population of the Town of Schaghticoke were listed as slaves.