In the early 1800s local Baptists established the Christian Baptist Church here at the top of Adamsville Hill; after the church closed, the building was later used as a school. Today, the buried foundation is all that remains of the building that once stood on this site.
The Christian Baptist Church's minister may have been Francisco Veray. He was the first recorded person from Portugal to live in Little Compton, anglicizing his name to "Francis Veray." He, along with his wife, daughter and grandchildren, is buried in the center plot of the cemetery adjacent to the church.
Shortly after Veray's death in 1866, it appears the church closed. The building quickly reopened as the Number Six School. Originally, the school was farther down Adamsville Hill, most likely in the small blue house that still stands on the hill's slopes today. The school had one teacher who taught grades 1-8, and it operated until 1929, when the Wilbur School opened on the Little Compton Commons.
Once it stopped functioning as a school the building housed the Bell Whist Club for a short time. It was eventually auctioned in 1930; the new owners moved it across the border into Darmouth, MA, to serve as an office for a propane business.
]]>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.
]]>This metal archway welcomes 100,000 attendees each year to New Bedford’s Feast of the Blessed Sacrament. It is a year-round reminder of the importance of this annual event in New Bedford’s North End. Positioned on the edge of Madeira Field, the archway also reminds us that the Feast is now a 100+ year-old tradition.
Immigrants from the Portuguese islands of the Azores, Cape Verde, and Madeira first arrived in New Bedford as crew aboard whaling vessels, but their presence in the town was often transitory. By 1905, more than 7,000 immigrants from these islands settled in the city, along with a smaller number from mainland Portugal. Attracted by jobs in the textile industry, Portuguese immigrants made up approximately 25% of the labor force by 1910. Many of the Portuguese immigrants who settled in this part of the city were from Madeira and worked in the mills along Riverside Avenue.
As special as the metal archway may be, there are other archways at the Feast that tie more deeply to its Madeiran roots. Volunteers erect nearly four-dozen bayberry archways each year spanning the city’s streets along the Feast’s parade route from Madeira Avenue to Acushnet Avenue, creating a festive and traditional backdrop for the Portuguese foods and varied entertainments inside the Feast grounds.
The gathering of the bayberry for these archways is an all-day affair and a beloved tradition for the Feast’s volunteer organizers, or festeiros. In 2013, reporters Diana Mendes and David Macomber followed the men who gathered the greens and documented the tradition.
On the Sunday before the Feast the male members of Club Madeirense gather at the Feast grounds for a hearty pre-dawn breakfast before hopping on school buses for the thirty-minute ride to Westport’s Gooseberry Island, singing along the way. Three busloads arrive on the island at 6:30 a.m., and spend much of the day collecting bayberry to decorate the arches. Some use tools their fathers and grandfathers used before them. The bayberry is the American equivalent of the bay leaves and laurel their ancestors collected in Madeira for their Feast of the Blessed Sacrament.
The men call the gathering of the greens festista. Their families join them as the day wears on, and they end the day with a ceremonial dip in the ocean and more music. The volunteers pack the greens in large containers and bring them back to the city. The night before the Feast they weave the greenery into metal arches near Madeira Field and decorate Our Lady of Immaculate Conception Church with additional greenery.
]]>If it’s the first weekend in August, it’s time for “The Feast.”
New Bedford’s Feast of the Blessed Sacrament is the largest Portuguese Feast in the world and attracts 100,000 visitors to its festival grounds on Madeira Field each year. Now more than 100 years old, the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament was founded by four immigrants from the Portuguese island of Madeira in 1915. One popular story explains that they held the Feast in thanksgiving for their safe ocean journey to America. That may be true, but mostly the Feast was their effort to connect with the cultural and religious traditions of their native Madeira and to share those customs with their children in their new home. The Feast has grown exponentially from a simple one-day religious festival hosted by Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception Church on Earle Street into a massive four-day event that successfully blends popular entertainment with cultural and religious traditions. Since 1953, the Feast has been organized and presented by the feisteros (which translates to “party-people”) of the Club Madeirense S. S. Sacramento. These volunteers work throughout the year to plan the food, live music and entertainment, parade, Museum of Madeiran Heritage, and religious celebrations that come together to create the Feast. They consider it an honor to do so. Women and children now play important roles, but traditionally the male members of Club Madeirense were the stars of the show. Four stages of live entertainment feature traditional Portuguese music and dance provided by New Bedford’s Grupo Folclorico, as well as contemporary rock, pop, and country performers. There is no entrance fee, so all the entertainment is free. Nights at the Feast can get a little rowdy, especially in front of the main stage, but the feisteros have taken steps to ensure that there are quiet grottos where families and friends can gather for conversations and the evocative performances of traditional Fado singers. Traditional foods draw large crowds to the Feast. Barraccas (stands) on Madeira Field feature bacalhau (dried salted and spiced codfish), cacoila (marinated pork), favas (beans in spicy sauce), linguica (Portuguese sausage), pops (crusty rolls), and malassadas (deep-fried sweet bread dough coated with sugar). A culinary highlight for many Feast-goers is the opportunity to cook their own carne de espeto, large chunks of beef on six-foot long metal skewers that they turn over a blazing hot charcoal pit. Experienced chefs continually pour beer over their beef and bring zip-top bags of vegetables from home to add to their skewers. Volunteers sell beer in vast quantities at the Feast, but Madeiran wine is the traditional drink of choice. Visitors line up ten deep to buy tiny cups of what has been called “Portuguese crack.” Madeiran wine evolved by accident in the hulls of sixteenth-century ships as a result of the constant movement and sauna-like conditions that gave the vinho a brandy-like quality. The Feast is the only event allowed to purchase Madeiran wine by the cask, which requires a permit from the Madeiran government. 100,000 visitors look forward to the Feast each year, but the event is more meaningful for the hundreds of volunteers, often multiple generations of the same families, who make it happen. At the 100th celebration of the Feast, Father Manuel P. Ferreira, pastor of Immaculate Conception Parish from 1979 to 1992, said, “It’s a renewal of not only their faith, their customs and their culture, but also a renewal of their brotherhood together.”
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]]>Walking into Ponto Um, an unassuming shop on Warren Avenue in East Providence, you may be greeted with a cheerful “Bom dia!” or another Portuguese expression. Ponto Um, which translates to Point One, advertises the “Best Variety of Brazilian Products” and, indeed, one would be hard-pressed to find another local store that sells more. The small market contains an eclectic and expansive inventory of goods, ranging from cosmetics and household products to hard-to-find spices, frozen foods (like pão de queijo), fresh breads and pastries, meats, and non-perishable products, many of which are imported directly from Brazil. In the back you find clothing, much of it emblazoned with the Brazilian flag, including jerseys so you can support the national futebol team. The Ponto Um Market has only served this neighborhood and wider region since 2007. However, it is part of a long tradition of diverse Lusophone, or Portuguese-speaking, communities in Rhode Island and southern New England. Besides Brazilians, the Ocean State is also home to people from Portugal, Cabo Verde, the Azores, and Madeira, as well as several generations of their descendants. Some of the first people of Portuguese heritage to come to Rhode Island were Jewish families escaping religious persecution in Europe, who traveled by way of Brazil and Barbados in the seventeenth century. By the mid-eighteenth century the community was large enough to need a house of worship, and Touro Synagogue--the oldest in the United States--was established in Newport in 1763. Throughout the nineteenth century, sailors from Cabo Verde and the Azores came to Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts to work in the whaling industry. By 1870, Portuguese speakers began working in the textile industry rather than whaling. Families from mainland Portugal and Madeira arrived in increasing numbers to work in mills and garment shops, joining the Azoreans and Cabo Verdeans who had already settled here. This long history of labor and immigration resulted in the presence of a vibrant multi-ethnic community of Portuguese descent in Rhode Island. Cuisine inspired by these groups can be found on the menus of many restaurants, in the form of Portuguese sweet bread French Toast, and linguiça and choriço sausage pizza. Along Warren Avenue, within blocks of Ponto Um, there is a Madeiran restaurant, Portuguese restaurants, and at least one other Portuguese market. Places like these and Ponto Um allow people to access foods that ensure the maintenance and growth of the foodways they and their ancestors brought with them to Rhode Island.
]]>Within the granite and brownstone walls of Providence’s imposing Gothic courthouse, Manuel shifts nervously from foot to foot. For the second time this year, Manuel stands alone before a judge, awaiting his sentencing. The son of Portuguese immigrants, Manuel’s struggling family has no money to spend on an attorney; the right to free legal counsel is decades away. Earlier in 1925, Manuel had been arrested for violating property rights and committing theft. This time, he was picked up by the Providence Police Department because of truancy. After reviewing Manuel’s record and listening to the testimony of the arresting officer, the judge is finally ready to announce his sentencing – “Six weeks at Sockanosset.” As the judge slams down his gavel, a look of relief creeps across Manuel’s face.
From 1881 until 1985, the Sockanosset School for Boys served as a juvenile detention facility and reformatory. Rhode Island citizens had first determined the need for such a facility as early as 1847, when the Providence City Council approved the establishment of a school for the “confinement, instruction and reformation of juvenile offenders and young persons of idle, vicious or vagrant habits.” For three decades, children of both sexes were sent to the Providence Reform School in Tockwotton House in the city’s Fox Point neighborhood. By 1880, however, concerns over the school’s management and new approaches to “reforming” juvenile delinquents led to the creation of two new institutions: the Oaklawn School for Girls and the Sockanosset School for Boys.
In 1881, construction of the new boys’ school began on the Howard Reservation in Cranston – a site that already included the State Asylum for the Incurable Insane, the State Prison and Providence County Jail, and the state-run almshouse. Five stone cottages were built between 1881 and 1895, each with its own schoolroom and a dormitory intended to house up to fifty boys. The school complex also included a house for the Sockanosset Superintendent, an infirmary, a gym, and an elegant stone chapel. By locating the reformatory on pastoral land away from corrupting urban influences, the founders were following the prevailing doctrine of the nineteenth century: urban chaos and idleness engendered lawlessness. With that belief foremost in their minds, the school’s administrators kept the boys busy on the Howard Reservation’s 225 acres of farmland.
The early years of Sockanosset were highly regimented. The boys spent hours doing physically demanding activities like farm chores, building repair and construction, and coal shoveling. However, forward-thinking school administrators began to shift towards a program of education and rehabilitation. Social reformers insisted that the crimes of juveniles were typically motivated by social circumstance. Roy L. McLaughlin, the Superintendent of Sockanosset during the 1920s, noted that “most of the boys come from ‘broken’ or ‘badly bent’ homes.”
Sockanosset slowly shifted from a reformatory designed to contain and discipline the unruly to a school where classes and vocational training focused on preparing boys for life after Sockanosset. A key part of this training were the vocational classes offered by accomplished craftsmen. At one point, Sockanosset boasted a blacksmith shop, a carpenter shop, a farm school where they raised much of the food they ate, and a printing shop where they printed The Howard Times. Items created by boys at the school were the showpiece of the Rhode Island exhibit at the 1893 Columbian Exposition in Chicago. During its height in the early twentieth century, Sockanosset was known as a respected vocational school. Some boys may have been truant or committed minor offenses in hopes of being sentenced to Sockanosset. As in Manuel's situation, boys being sent to Sockanosset knew they would receive regular meals and practical vocational training.
As the century progressed, however, a lack of funds and overcrowding at the school necessitated the termination of the very programs that had made Sockanosett so forward-thinking for its time. After over one hundred years of operation, the school finally closed in 1985.
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