The Federal Hill Riots of 1914, often called the “Macaroni Riots,” epitomize the struggle of immigrant communities in Rhode Island. As World War I was breaking out, food prices spiked. Laborers gathered on street corners to listen to “agitators” blame business owners. A mob formed that attacked wholesale grocer Frank P. Ventrone’s business block here. They smashed windows and hurled macaroni into the street. Police intervention quelled the disturbance, but the next day new confrontations sparked an even bloodier riot in which eighteen were injured, including 15-year-old Quinnio Oddi, shot by police. Over two weeks, there were five violent confrontations between Federal Hill residents and the police. The violence manifested the desperation of Providence’s immigrant working poor. Child labor was the norm; long hours earned little pay; laborers were easily replaced and had no assurance of work; they had no voice in government. In the midst of this poverty and social unrest, radicals like Luigi Nimini agitated for change. Nimini published his Italian-language newspaper Il Ragione Nuova from his shop at 206 Atwells and founded the Karl Marx Club at the corner of Atwells and Dean, the same corner where radical speakers riled up the crowd in August 1914.

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In June 1830, the residents of Tiverton gathered for the annual town meeting, an opportunity for the freemen of the town to participate in local government. Included on the day’s agenda was a proposal to create a town farm as a refuge for the destitute and mentally ill. The creation of this “asylum for the poor” made Tiverton one of the first towns in Rhode Island to adopt a new approach to caring for local paupers.

Before the creation of poorhouses, town farms, or asylums, many communities auctioned off the poor, encouraging affluent residents to place bids for their labor as indentured servants. By the mid-1800s, the shift from farm to factory work created a new group of landless, jobless, and itinerant poor—too many to be absorbed into the traditional system. Towns viewed poor farms as a modern, humane way to combat poverty, drunkenness, and deviation from social norms, while allowing people to earn their own keep. Town leaders hoped to reform the poor through labor, while decreasing the burden on taxpayers. Spending on poor relief was often the single largest item in town budgets.

Although the freemen of Tiverton favored establishing a town farm, locating funds and deciding on suitable property was a complicated task. More than a year passed before the appointed committee purchased sixty acres of farmland from the Gray family for $4,300. The town purchased livestock for the farm and gave the committee authorization “to finish the house standing on said farm, in a good and plain manner.” By 1832, the town farm was ready for occupants.

Life was not easy for inmates. Burdened with endless chores, they raised pigs and cattle, and cultivated corn and other “grain, roots and vegetables and provisions.” Inmates lived under the strict supervision of the farm’s caretaker who lived onsite to discipline and reform the poor. Annual inspections by town officials and written accounts submitted by the Overseers of the Poor ensured that the caretaker and inmates managed resources for the benefit of the town. The overseers expected the farm to be self-sufficient, with inmates raising enough food to feed themselves.

In 1886, the Overseers of the Poor ceased keeping records for the farm, marking the beginning of a slow transition from a strictly regulated poor farm to a refuge for the elderly and disabled. A 1910 Department of Commerce report indicated that town farm housed only eight inmates, mostly single men and women, who lived in the house that the Overseers of the Poor acquired nearly a century earlier.

Ruth Manchester, a lifelong resident of Tiverton, recalled playing with the caretaker’s children and visiting the farm’s kitchen for cookies and other baked treats as a child in the 1920s. Although the town farm still ran a small dairy—selling milk to Ruth’s family and other Tiverton residents—it was no longer the agricultural venture of earlier decades. With the establishment of the Social Security Act in 1935, other options became available to those, particularly the elderly and indigent, who had once found themselves at the mercy of the Overseers of the Poor. Tiverton’s Town Farm continued to operate until 1955, when it became a private rest home, which operated until 1982.

Although a small cemetery with the unmarked graves of inmates is nearby, the house is gone and only the names of the Overseers of the Poor are preserved in Tiverton’s town records. The names and identities of those who lived and worked on the farm are lost to history.

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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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In June 1830, the residents of Tiverton gathered for the annual town meeting, an opportunity for the freemen of the town to participate in local government. Included on the day’s agenda was a proposal to create a town farm as a refuge for the destitute and mentally ill.

Before the creation of poorhouses, town farms, or asylums, many communities auctioned off the poor, encouraging affluent residents to place bids for their labor as indentured servants. By the mid-1800s, the shift from farm to factory work created a new group of landless, jobless, and itinerant poor — too many to be absorbed into the traditional system. Towns viewed poor farms as a modern, humane way to combat poverty, drunkenness, and deviation from social norms, while allowing people to earn their own keep. Town leaders hoped to reform the poor through labor, while decreasing the burden on taxpayers. Spending on poor relief was often the single largest item in town budgets.

Although the freemen of Tiverton favored establishing a town farm, locating funds and deciding on suitable property was a complicated task. More than a year passed before the appointed committee purchased sixty acres of farmland from the Gray family for $4,300. The town purchased livestock for the farm and gave the committee authorization “to finish the house standing on said farm, in a good and plain manner.” By 1832, the town farm was ready for occupants.

Life was not easy for inmates. Burdened with endless chores, they raised pigs and cattle, and cultivated corn and other “grain, roots and vegetables and provisions.” Inmates lived under the strict supervision of the farm’s caretaker who lived onsite to discipline and reform the poor. The overseers expected the farm to be self-sufficient, with inmates raising enough food to feed themselves.

In 1886, the Overseers of the Poor ceased keeping records for the farm, marking the beginning of a slow transition from a strictly regulated poor farm to a refuge for the elderly and disabled. A 1910 Department of Commerce report indicated that town farm housed only eight inmates, mostly single men and women, who lived in the same house that the Overseers of the Poor had acquired nearly a century earlier.

Ruth Manchester, a lifelong resident of Tiverton, recalled playing with the caretaker’s children and visiting the town farm’s kitchen for cookies and other baked treats as a child in the 1920s. Although the town farm still ran a small dairy — selling milk to Ruth’s family and other Tiverton residents — it was no longer the agricultural venture of earlier decades. With the establishment of the Social Security Act in 1935, other options became available to those, particularly the elderly and indigent, who had once found themselves at the mercy of the Overseers of the Poor. Tiverton’s Town Farm continued to operate until 1955, at which time it became a private rest home that finally closed in 1982.

Today, a small cemetery containing the unmarked graves of inmates marks the town farm. The farmhouse where inmates lived for more than a century has been demolished and only the names of the Overseers of the Poor are preserved in the town’s records. The names and identities of those who lived and worked on the Tiverton Town Farm are lost to history.

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