Melting Pot or Mixing Pot? Mechanicville's Ethnic Heritage
MELTING POT OR MIXING POT?
MECHANICVILLE'S ETHNIC HERITAGE
Look around you for evidence of Mechanicville's rich industrial heritage and you will get only a hint of what was once a classic milltown. Although there are significant signs indicating the roles played by papermaking and railroads, there is hardly anything left to remind us that the city was a major producer of clothing, bricks, and finished lumber products. But, a community is made up of more than its material culture and besides its industrial heritage, Mechanicville has a rich ethnic history which lives on today, most importantly in terms of the close-knit sense of civic pride and community which is so obvious to visitors.
Although much of New York State's early history has the imprint of Dutch colonization on it, Mechanicville's origins have more to do with the migration of New England farm families than of Dutch fur-traders. While documentation is lacking, tradition has it that a couple of families settled here in 1764, most likely an offshoot of the organized migration of Connecticut townspeople who moved en masse to Stillwater at the same time. For well over the next century, the most predominant 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 records as third generation descendants of Yankee forebears from Vermont, Massachusetts, and Connecticut. It was these folk who established the first permanent religious congregations (Methodist and Episcopal) in Mechanicville in the 1820's.
Simultaneous with the westward migration of New England settlers, Irish immigrants were literally digging their way to Mechanicville. The Champlain Canal reached the community in the 1820's, built primarily on the backs of Irish laborers. Actually, many of them came by way of Quebec rather than migrating from Ireland directly, and because of this, they were sometimes misclassified by census enumerators as French Canadians. Many of the Irish females worked as live-in servants, a common practice for immigrants of low socioeconomic status during the second half of the nineteenth century. Another group of the Irish worked at the American Linen Thread Company mills located on the "Devil's Half Acre" near the present site of City Hall. The thread company was a one-of-its-kind operation, the only such mill to display its wares at the Philadelphia Exposition in 1876 where American industry celebrated its progress during the first century of nationhood. Linen thread had limited but important uses, both as fishing line and as the binding that connected upper and lower portions of shoes. The shoe industry was centered in New England and not surprisingly, the local company (on the scene for over thirty years) was purchased by a Massachusetts firm and relocated in the 1880's. While in operation here, the mill hired entire Irish immigrant families, including children as young as six years of age. Their wages were pathetically low, even by the standards of the time, and it is a wonder that families could survive on such meager subsistence. The plight of the Irish was commented upon often, and unsympathetically, by local lawyer, J. Frank Terry, who doubled as an editor of a weekly newspaper in the 1870's. He seemed to take special delight in recounting the foibles of the residents of what he referred to pejoratively as "Dublin Row," but it is a safe bet that he did not exaggerate the precarious hold these immigrants had on life in general while finding themselves on the bottom of the economic totem pole.
One Irish immigrant who did establish himself early on was John Short, a tavern-keeper who slaked the thirst of canal boat travelers at the current site of the B & D Tavern on William Street. Until the Barge Canal system was expanded in the early 1900's, the man-made waterway coursed through town in what is now Central Avenue, so Short was ideally situated to benefit from travelers who often found food and lodging at villages along their route. The degree of success achieved by Short may be implied by his efforts to establish a permanent Catholic Church in Mechanicville.
As early as 1839, the Augustinians had made Mechanicville a "station," designating it as a place frequently visited by traveling priests but lacking a permanent church and official congregation status. By 1852, the size of the Irish immigrant community justified making the area the home of a regular parish and Short took a leading role in seeing that this event took place. He raised the $5000 building fund himself, purchased the bricks, and hired three masons to build St. Paul's Church, still in use on William Street. Almost literally as well as figuratively, Short had become a "pillar of the church," and this monument to his generosity has been in almost continuous use for nearly 150 years.
By the end of the Civil War, St. Paul's boasted the largest religious congregation locally, while Irish immigrants and their children made up about 45% of the total population of around 1,100 residents. As the century progressed, census records indicate rising social mobility for the Irish as they and their offspring were listed in virtually every trade and profession practiced in the community, while the number of Irish servant girls declined to a trickle by 1900. By this time, papermaking and railroading had become well-established and a large number of Irish families had relocated here from Holyoke and other Massachusetts towns. Ethnic group identity was solidified by the formation of a local Ancient Order of Hibernian chapter in 1884, and by the establishment of the Knights of Columbus in the 1890's. The weekly Saturday Mercury regularly recorded annual St. Patrick's Day parades and festivals and the best indication of the political coming of age of the Irish might be found in the 1923 boast by St, Paul's pastor, Father Valiquette, that "our city (government) is made up of Catholic men from the mayor down." Waspish Mercury editor Farrington L. Mead was less enamored of Irish dominance of his own Democratic party and more than once he decried immigrant control of patronage as a poor example of "the Hog in local politics." The greatest visible sign of the maturation of this ethnic group was represented by the erection of the expansive new St. Paul's Church on North Main Street, completed in 1916, and the opening of a parochial school in the following decade. At this time, the number of first and second generation Irish appeared to decline as a proportion of the local population, but what this actually represented was the coming of age of the third generation of this ethnic group.
Another group which played an important role in the life of the community, but gains little notice because of some confusion about how they were identified when entering the United States, are the Lithuanians. Because Lithuania did not exist as a separate nation before 1918 (later to disappear in 1941 when the Soviet Union absorbed it), and because they spoke Polish, Lithuanians were often misidentified by immigration and census officials a "Polish." Like many other so-called "new immigrants," these people began migrating to America in the 1890's. The local contingent were employed almost exclusively by the local paper mill. Interesting enough, no two Lithuanian families came from the same village in the homeland, according to naturalization papers filed with the County Clerk between 1896 and 1946, suggesting that they immigrated elsewhere in the U. S. before arriving in Mechanicville. By the outbreak of the Great War in 1914, 10% of the local population of 8700 were first or second generation Lithuanians, most of whom lived on Frog Island. They had organized a St. John's Society ethnic benevolent society, celebrated special feast days publicly, and were numerous enough that the local Catholic parish was visited annually by a Polish-speaking priest who administered the sacraments in the native tongue. Never prominent enough to form their own national parish, their ethnic society built a St. John's Hall on Frog Island, a building which was designated as a temporary hospital during the "Spanish flu" epidemic which swept the U. S. in 1918.
The Great War had an immediate and negative impact on the Lithuanian community, since a significant number of its members returned home to fight in the war. The number of Lithuanians leveled off and began to decline from that point onward, a decline further exacerbated by the passage of anti-immigrant laws during the xenophobic 1920's. The effects of these laws brought a stop to the immigration of southern and eastern Europeans, a fact brought home locally by a report in 1924 from the local Superintendent of Schools that both the size and character of Mechanicville's student body would change drastically because of these laws. Recognizing the challenge presented by the presence of non-English speaking children whose attendance was regulated by recently-passed compulsory school attendance laws, the School Board offered a significant financial bonus to any teacher who could commit to a full-year of continuous service in the elementary schools on Saratoga and Frog Islands, the areas with
the largest concentrations of immigrant children. The bonus was motivated largely by the fact that no local teachers spoke either of the native languages, Polish and Italian, of their students in an era predating the advent of "English as a Second Language" programs.
Although an Italian Catholic priest was assigned to Mechanicville in the 1870's, the first significant number of immigrants from southern Italy began to arrive as members of track gangs who were laying rail to connect the Boston, Hoosac Tunncl, and Western Railway with the Delaware and Hudson yards in Rotterdam. Most of these railroad workers moved on with the progress of the rails, but by the end of the nineteenth century, Mechanicville had become a stopping point for many immigrants. Like their Irish predecessors, the Italians engaged mostly in "pick and shovel" labor, building street railways, laying track, digging sewer and water systems, or rebuilding and expanding the Champlain Canal. So many of them were in demand for working on the canal that the "Utica Supply Company" opened offices here for a number of months, engaged in the business of supplying Italian laborers to work the waterway.
Unlike their Irish predecessors, the vast majority (80%) of Italian migrants were males between 18 and 45 years of age who worked here part of the year, returning to Italy during the winter months. These annual migrations became so routine that local banks regularly booked round-trip passages to Naples from Mechanicville, earning the ticket-purchasers the title of "birds of passage." The large number of brickyards in the area during the World War I era catered to such temporary work patterns because they closed their lime pits when the frost set in the Fall, reopening in the Spring. Almost all of the immigrants came from southern Italy, areas outside of Naples like Caserta, Benevento, and Campobasso. Such a large number of them came from the villages (paesi) of Coreno and Ausonia that they formed their own mutual aid society, the Fratellenza, which will celebrate its centennial anniversary next year. This was just one of many ethnic organizations which the immigrants formed while creating their own subculture which intersected with that of the larger society on a limited basis. In fact, the American lack of familiarity with immigrant customs and backgrounds was so pronounced that local press reports of industrial accidents would refer to the victims as "Italian number 486" or as "a Neapolitan" rather than by name during the first two decades of this century.
As early as 1906, the Augustinian provincial assigned an Italian priest to the local Catholic parish and one Italian language Mass was offered weekly. Coming from a different religious ethos and feeling unwelcome in the "Irish church," few immigrants participated actively in the local church. Prior to World War 1, missionary priest Father Daniel Scalabrella hoped to change things by forming an Italian ethnic parish with a church to be built on Saratoga Avenue. Before his plans came to fruition, however, the priest was one of many local victims of the "Spanish flu" epidemic of 1918. The following year, Father Serafino Aurigemma, who had previously done missionary work here, agreed to return to Mechanicville if the now empty church on William Street could be converted into the home of an Italian national Catholic parish catering to the religious needs of the group which now accounted for more than 25% of the area's population of nearly 10,000. The original St. Paul's congregation sold the church building which they no longer needed, having built the new, larger church on North Main Street.
The growth of the Italian immigrant community locally was evident in a number of other ways. Many of the men who commuted annually between Naples and Mechanicville began to settle their families here, especially after World War I but prior to the passage of anti-immigrant legislation in the 1920's. The Fratellenza expanded its activities beyond being a mutual aid insurance society and sponsored the three-day feste associated with the Feast of the Assumption, a tradition which has been interrupted twice but which continues today almost a century after its inaugural.
In 1918, partly in response to the "Americanization hysteria" which swept the U. S. following our entry into the Great War, the second chapter in the country of the Young Men's Italian Association was founded in Mechanicville, as was a local Sons of Italy lodge. The Sons secured a permanent home in 1922 and the YNHA was absorbed by the older brotherhood. Women's auxiliaries, Senior and Junior Dante Clubs, were also founded in association with the Sons. Another important function the lodge performed was to sponsor house calls by an Italian doctor for those who could not afford one. This physician, Dr. Anthony Mauro, later established his practice here and he was also elected to the Mechanicville School Board in 1938.
Another local ethnic institution which thrived for a time was the "Banco della Vigna." Like other immigrant banks throughout the country, the local institution sold round-trip passages to Naples, converted American dollars into Italian lire to be sent home to support immigrant workers' families, and invested in local businesses. The bank also housed the "Venetian Theater" upstairs at its building on William Street and Saratoga Avenue and became the performance center of many immigrant entertainment touring companies, Possibly because of the decline in "new immigration" following the passage of restrictive laws and the souring of the local economy in the early Twenties, the bank's assets were liquidated by the State Banking Commissioner in 1929. Thereafter, the facility housed the Sons of Italy Lodge until it was tom down in the 1970's to make way for the railroad overpass. Located nearby in a newer facility is the Peters-Purcell Italian-American War Veterans Post, a local chapter of which has been active since the World War 11 era. Along with the Fratellenza, the Italian-American organization provides the greatest continuity of ethnic institutionalism in the community. The Assumption Italian National parish was merged with St. Paul's in 1976, and although the Assumption Building continues to be used for services, all vestiges of its ethnic identity were removed in a "modernization" program shortly after the merger.
The wane of "new immigrants" which washed across American shores was ended over seventy years ago by Congressional legislation based upon discriminatory ethnic prejudices and stereotypes long since discredited by Congress and the public alike, However, the lack of a strong industrial base to attract workers ceased to exist decades ago and a revival of any major immigration here is unlikely. In the interim, Mechanicville has evolved from being a self-contained milltown with a plentiful supply of jobs in brickmaking, textiles, railroads, paper-making and construction to become a bedroom community whose labor force migrates to jobs outside of town. That labor force also happens to be about one-half the size it was at the height of the immigration era. Yet, what continues to make Mechanicville a vibrant community is the dynamic interplay of the heritages of its various ethnic groups. Over the course of this century, immigrants came for all over Europe and New England, settled and worked in Mechanicville, intermarried, and exchanged folklore and recipes, all the while building a community with a unique sense of warmth and friendliness as well as a strong sense of place and community pride. In no small way, this ethnic-immigrant settlement has been a microcosm of the American "mixing pot" where diverse traditions, identities, and values peaceably coexist in harmony while complementing each other. This is as much of a "success story" on a human level as would be the revival of heavy industry on an economic level.