This site, the former Whitridge Hall, served as the launching pad for a memorable show business career. In the 1950s, a summer theater troupe called this building home. The troupe hired an 18-year-old actor named Charles Nelson Reilly, who made his professional debut here as the detective in a play called “Broken Dishes.” Reilly became a show business star who regularly appeared on TV in the 1960s and 70s, but he never forgot his acting debut at Whitridge Hall.
In the 1870s, a group of Tiverton residents chartered Whitridge Hall “for the purposes of religious, charitable and literary culture, and the promotion of liberal religious thought.” According to an anonymous writer in 1884, “The hall is of unusual beauty and capacity for the purpose for which it is intended and used, viz., lectures, concerts, social parties, &c., and has a fine piano.”
The hall drew its name from philanthropist Thomas Whitridge, who grew up in the William Whitridge Estate, a 1770s house that still stands on Stone Church Road in Tiverton.
Whitridge’s father served as town doctor, and three of his brothers followed their father into medicine. Thomas moved to Baltimore, where he built a fleet of ships and became one of the nation’s largest importers of coffee, amassing the fortune that he used to endow Whitridge Hall in his hometown.
Three denominations used the hall’s Bowen Chapel for services. Episcopalians and Catholics used it as temporary space while building nearby churches, and Unitarians regularly held services here into the early 1900s.
Two famous New Englanders delivered sermons here: Julia Ward Howe and Edward Everett Hale. Howe, on a visit to Washington, D.C., woke on a gray November morning in 1861 and quickly scratched out the words that were forming in her head, and earned instant fame as the lyricist for the Civil War standard, “Battle Hymn of the Republic.”
Hale, a prominent Unitarian minister and theologian, is best known today for his 1863 short story, “The Man Without a Country,” whose protagonist is sentenced to lifetime exile aboard U.S. naval vessels for shouting, "Damn the United States! I wish I may never hear of the United States again!" during the treason trial of Aaron Burr. Hale’s story was adapted to film several times, most recently as a 1973 made-for-TV movie. Hale’s Matunuck, Rhode Island, home is now a museum.
The town’s first public library blossomed inside Whitridge Hall, growing in just 20 years from a few donated books in 1881 to 4,000 volumes. Local service groups such as the Grange and the nascent Tiverton Historical Society met often in Whitridge Hall, and the building briefly became a dance hall in the 1960s.
Eventually, many of the groups and churches Whitridge Hall once hosted found space of their own. The library moved to a fieldstone building on Highland Avenue bequeathed by a former school teacher, Lydia Essex; and the Historical Society moved its headquarters to the 1730s Chase-Cory House, freeing Whitridge Hall for conversion into the apartment house you see today.
The pulse of Tiverton beat through this building for nearly 90 years, and the town still struggles to replace its function as a center for the community.
]]>More than 100 years after its founding, the Feast still begins and ends at Our Lady of Immaculate Conception Church. Though in recent years the religious aspects of the Feast have taken a backseat to its many secular offerings, the Feast’s four Madeiran founders held the first event at the church in 1915.
The Diocese of Fall River founded Our Lady of Immaculate Conception Church in 1909 to serve New Bedford’s growing Portuguese community in the North End of the city. The ethnic church offers Portuguese and English masses, and parishioners relish its Portuguese traditions. Immaculate Conception Church was the third of the city’s three Portuguese churches. It followed Saint John the Baptist Church, the oldest Portuguese Church in North America, established in 1871 in the center of the city, and Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church, established in 1902 on Bonney Street in the South End. The first Festas were simple gatherings on the church grounds that took place on a Sunday afternoon. Families gathered around temporary barraccas, or stands, to eat and socialize. Religious and cultural traditions from the Portuguese island of Madeira were at the heart of their celebrations. In recent years the Feast has grown into a four-day event. On its first day, a Thursday, feast organizers, or Festeiros, venerate, or worship, the Blessed Sacrament displayed in an elaborate monstrance (pedestaled case) on the altar. The Blessed Sacrament is the consecrated communion host that Catholics believe to be the real body of Jesus Christ. Afterwards, the congregation moves to the Feast grounds on nearby Madeira Field for the Benediction, or blessing, that officially opens the event. On Sunday, the final day of the Feast, the Festeiros, their wives, and the other Club Madeirense S. S. Sacramento members gather at the Feast Grounds to march in formation to the church for a special High Mass at 10:00 AM. There the celebrant blesses them for their efforts on behalf of the Feast and for their respect for the Feast’s religious traditions. Father Daniel Reis regrets the Feast’s change in focus over the years from religious to secular, according to the Anchor, a newspaper of the Diocese of Fall River. What was once a religious procession is now just a parade without the statues of saints and other reminders of the feast’s origins. Father Reis still marches in the parade and enjoys the traditional foods the Feast has to offer, but he hopes for more. 2014 marked the 100th anniversary of the Feast. There was talk of bringing back the traditional religious procession, but it did not happen. Immaculate Conception Church’s congregation is shrinking, like many Catholic churches in America. The recent closures of other churches in New Bedford is alarming, and parishioners of Immaculate Conception Church hope and pray the same does not happen to them. They are proud that they celebrate other Portuguese religious feasts in traditional ways including the Feast of Senhor da Pedra (Jesus of the Rock) and the Holy Ghost Feast, and hope to continue for many years to come.
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