Before Fall River: How Portuguese Immigrants Built Communities in Massachusetts by 1880

On April 6, 1874, Portuguese men marched through the streets of Boston behind flags and a band. Two associations took part, the União Lusitania Benevolent Society and the Portuguese Benevolent Association of Massachusetts. A Portuguese brass band accompanied them, and the chief marshal was John Louis d’Almeida. Newspapers described it as the first time Portuguese citizens, as the press called them, had paraded through Boston in organized bodies.

The men attended Mass at the Church of St. John the Baptist, passed Boston City Hall and moved through some of the principal streets of the city before returning to Lusitania Hall. Banners represented Portugal and America, and municipal officials reviewed the procession.¹

The scene is difficult to reconcile with the idea that Portuguese New England began only when great numbers of Azoreans entered the textile cities. By 1874, Portuguese residents of Massachusetts already had societies, officers, banners, a hall, a band and a public presence. Their community was no longer confined to the waterfront, the boarding house or the church basement. It occupied the street.

And the record goes further back.

The Sea Came First

Portuguese settlement in Massachusetts grew out of the maritime economy, above all the recruitment of Azorean and Madeiran men by American vessels. New Bedford was the great port of that connection. The larger history, including what happened to Portuguese surnames in the United States, is examined in The Portuguese Who Became Americans.²

In American records of the period, “Portuguese” could describe a man from mainland Portugal, the Azores, Madeira or Cape Verde. The documents do not always preserve that distinction, but for a descendant it decides where the family’s earlier history must be sought.

The sea also carried Portuguese residents to smaller communities. In 1865, a New Bedford newspaper reported that an “enterprising Portuguese citizen of Nantucket” had acquired a grist mill in South Yarmouth and moved it to the island.³

A Portuguese Resident of Nantucket

A report from December 1866 gives a name. John Murray, described by the newspaper as an enterprising Portuguese citizen of Nantucket, was to command a schooner being fitted for the Atlantic whaling trade.⁴ The notices do not say whether he was the same man who moved the mill.

The name itself deserves investigation. John Murray may have been the form under which he lived in the United States, an anglicized Portuguese name, or a surname that reached him through some other family circumstance. The newspaper alone does not resolve the question. What it does establish is that a Portuguese resident appears in the record not as an anonymous sailor but as a man entrusted with command in the local maritime economy.

A Benevolent Association in Boston by 1866

In January 1877, the Boston Daily Globe reported that the Portuguese Benevolent Association had been organized eleven years earlier, which places its origin around 1866. Over those years, 543 members had been connected with the association, and approximately 300 belonged to it at the time of the report. The newspaper described dues, receipts, payments of sick benefits and general expenses.⁵

The association was not simply cultural. It provided mutual aid. Before modern public social protection, immigrant communities often created their own means of facing sickness, disability, funeral costs and household crises. Portuguese immigrants in Boston were doing so in the 1860s, a decade before a Portuguese mission existed in Fall River.

Seven Hundred Portuguese in New Bedford

In April 1872, the Fall River Weekly News estimated approximately seven hundred Portuguese residents in New Bedford. It reported that they were building a church for services in their own language, after years of worshipping in an Irish Catholic church.⁶

The sequence matters. At first, immigrants entered the institutions available to them. Once the community grew large enough, it created institutions of its own. The same pattern would soon appear in Fall River.

Fall River Entered an Existing Portuguese Massachusetts

In March 1875, the Fall River Weekly News reported mission services for the city’s Portuguese residents.⁷ A year later, on March 10, 1876, Father António de Matos Freitas, a native of São Jorge in the Azores and pastor of the Portuguese parish in New Bedford, founded a Catholic mission for the Portuguese of Fall River.⁸ Portuguese Catholic life in Fall River was organized by a priest from a Portuguese parish that already existed a few miles away.

Fall River was not inventing Portuguese community life from nothing. Nantucket had a Portuguese resident commanding a whaling schooner in the 1860s. A benevolent association had been operating in Boston since about 1866. New Bedford had some seven hundred Portuguese residents and a church under construction by 1872. Boston’s Portuguese societies had marched publicly by 1874. How that small mission grew into one of the great Portuguese communities of America is told in Fall River, America’s Portuguese City.

A Parish and a Literary Club

Boston, meanwhile, kept building. By February 1879, the Boston Daily Globe described St. John the Baptist as the parish of the city’s Portuguese residents, with religious instruction and a Sunday school. The paper also named Portuguese children who took part in a parish entertainment.⁹

In March 1880, the Portuguese Literary and Social Club of Massachusetts was meeting at Lusitania Hall, the same hall to which the marchers had returned six years earlier. Its president was Antonio L. S. Brown, described by the press as one of the prominent and accomplished Portuguese residents of Boston. The officers included Manuel R. Serpa, J. R. Carvalho, M. J. Avellar and Antonio J. Correia.¹⁰

Mutual aid remained important, and so did religion. But literary and social life had become part of the community as well. The Portuguese of Boston had begun to build a culture around themselves.

Silva, Neves, Barcellos, Freitas and Enos

The children named at the 1879 parish entertainment carried the surnames Silva, Neves, Barcellos, Freitas, Enos, Brown, Rogers, Williams and Wilson.⁹ Some look immediately Portuguese. Others do not, and that is what makes the list so useful.

The early Portuguese community was already producing American-looking surnames and English-language identities. A child called Enos could descend from an Inácio family. A Brown family could carry a Portuguese history invisible in the surname itself. Other names may have arrived through marriage or earlier adaptation.

The community’s leaders show the same movement in both directions. The chief marshal of 1874 appears in the press as John Louis d’Almeida, with English given names and a Portuguese surname. The president of the literary club of 1880 appears as Antonio L. S. Brown, with a Portuguese given name and an English surname.

That documentary instability matters for descendants. A family searching only for a modern spelling can miss an earlier generation entirely, and a Portuguese ancestor may be hiding behind an English form adopted long before 1900. The name could change while the family remained the same.

One Migration, Several Massachusetts Communities

Portuguese settlement in Massachusetts was never one simple movement. Nantucket belonged to the maritime world. New Bedford grew through the deep connection between American shipping and the Atlantic islands. Boston developed religious, benevolent and cultural institutions. Fall River would eventually turn Portuguese immigration into one of the most concentrated industrial communities in the United States.

The places were connected by people. A priest from New Bedford’s Portuguese parish founded the mission in Fall River. A young man from São Miguel could arrive in Fall River in 1884 and, within ten years, be selling other Portuguese passage back across the Atlantic, as Joseph M. Chaves did. That is why Portuguese genealogy in New England rarely respects municipal boundaries. Families moved, names changed and institutions overlapped, but the documentary trail survived.

At Consultoria Mnésis, following that trail means reconstructing the movement of people rather than assuming that the city where a family eventually settled was where its American history began. For a descendant named Silva, Freitas, Carvalho, Correia, Almeida, Enos, Pereira, Amaral, Pacheco or another name rooted in this migration, Massachusetts may preserve several chapters written before the family ever reached the place remembered today.