The roots of Italian ancestry run deep in the soil of this former farming community
By BOB JAGOLINZER
Journal Staff Writer
Sunday, 07/28/2002
JOHNSTON - The mayor speaks Italian. The American flag
in his office is flanked by an Italian one.
The Recreation Department runs a bocce league.
There's an election in a few months to determine who will
be mayor and who will fill five council seats and three School Committee seats.
Of the 18 people who have qualified for ballot spots, all but 2 have Italian
surnames: Macera, Acciardo, Santilli, Iannuccilli, Pitochelli, DiPaolo, Macchioni,
Russo, to name a few.
The telephone book lists 19 pizza parlors in this town
of 23 square miles. And that doesn't include the restaurants with names such
as Luigi's and Il Piccolo.
None of this is surprising for a town with Johnston's
statistics.
According to the 2000 census, Johnston boasts the second-highest
percentage of people of Italian ancestry of any community in the United States
with a population greater than 1,000. Hammonton, N.J., where 54.3 percent of
the residents claimed Italian ancestry, came in first.
The census found that 53.6 percent of Johnston's residents
consider themselves Italian. In hard numbers, of the town's 28,195 residents,
15,114 identified themselves as being of Italian ancestry.
So close were the numbers that if 200 more Johnston residents
had claimed Italian ancestry, the town would have ranked first in the country.
Ancestry was a fill-in-the-blank question on the long
census form. It allowed people to write in the ancestry or ethnic origin italian
with which they "most closely" identify. People who claimed multiple
ancestries, such as Italian and Irish, were counted in each category.
IN JOHNSTON, the second-largest ancestry was Irish, which
4,342 people claimed. French and English had more than 2,000 each.
The Italian influence in Johnston had its genesis around
1875, according to a story in The Providence Journal. The story, written in
1891 by an anonymous author, says that Italians were brought to town by Alfred
A. Williams, who owned a farm in the village of Pocasset and wanted some help
tilling the soil. Italian workers "ventured into Johnston from the colony
on Federal Hill," the author wrote.
Most came from southern Italy, where a depressed agricultural
economy prompted many to try the New World. They quickly impressed people with
their ability to farm and make money.
"They are buying or leasing every bit of cheap land
where they can obtain possession," the author wrote. "No old, worn
out or stone-covered area seems too poor to yield adequate returns for labor
expended with judgement and persistency."
The author marveled at the willingness of all the family
members to pitch in with the work, and lamented the fact that the "Yankees"
who also farmed in the town had to spend a good deal of money on clothes and
furnishings for their spouses and houses.
"But when one of these Italians takes a wife she
turns to and works at money-getting with no thought of finery either in dress
or house fixin's," added the author.
THE GRANDFATHER of Johnston Mayor William R. Macera was
among those who moved to Johnston and stayed. The mayor's 89-year-old father,
Ralph, remembers much of the family history.
The elder Macera recalled that his father, Mauro, moved
to Johnston about 1908. He started working for the railroad, for $5 a week.
Then he took a job in one of the mills in the Simmonsville section.
"He lived there with 8 or 10 other men," the
elder Macera said.
A friend persuaded him to start farming and he did, on
about 47 acres on what is now Simmonsville Avenue.
"He had 11 children," said the elder Macera.
"We all pitched in."
Family members plowed, planted, weeded and harvested.
Help, both from the family and from hired hands, was the key to coaxing crops
from the rocky ground. Weeds had to be pulled, an irrigation pond was dug and
the crops were fertilized and closely watched.
"The ground is always ready to grow," the elder
Macera said. "The Yankees didn't have the help."
Joseph R. Muratore, former Italian vice counsel for Rhode
Island and a historian who is particularly knowledgeable about the Italian community,
said farming came naturally to many Italians.
"They came from a place that was warm and sunny,"
he said. "They applied their skills."
The fact that most new immigrants were not fluent in English
was a help, Muratore said. Families stuck together, not just on the farms, but
down through the generations.
The second and subsequent generations moved away from
the land, Muratore said. But many didn't move away from Johnston.
Of Mauro Macera's 11 children, 4 remained in Johnston.
Today the telephone book lists 10 families of Maceras who call Johnston their
home.
The move away from the land was not the experience of
Johnston's rival in New Jersey. In Hammonton, a town about 30 miles from Atlantic
City, the farming influence remains strong. The town is known for its blueberries
and peaches, said Mayor Anthony Ingemi.
He said the Italian community is dominated by people of
Sicilian ancestry.
"The climate and the soil is like it was back in
Sicily," he said.
ACCORDING TO the Rhode Island Historial Society, by the
time of World War I more than 45,000 Italians were living in Providence and
the cities and towns around it.
Italians entered politics and were able to help themselves
and their families get ahead. Muratore said they saw other ethnic groups, such
as the Irish, dominate politics and take many of the political jobs that were
available, especially in the years between the world wars.
"The Italians did the same thing," Muratore
said.
The Italian influence in Johnston remains very strong
today, so much so that many people who live or work here don't even notice it.
"I didn't realize it until I went away to law school,"
said Town Council President Robert Russo, who graduated from the University
of Baltimore. "Then I met people of different backgrounds."
Russo sees the Italian influence in the intensity of the
local politics, usually played with all the subtlety of a professional football
lineman diving for a fumble.
"We get kind of passionate with what we're doing,"
Russo said, laughing. "Maybe it's the heritage from Italy [where governments
change with regularity] that puts Johnston on the edge."
But it's not just politics and pizza that give Johnston
its Italian cast.
Two years ago, the parish of St. Rocco's, the largest
Catholic parish in town, repainted the ceiling of its church. The paintings,
which include one of St. Rocco ascending to heaven as angels watch, resemble
the famous ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The church spent more than $300,000
on the project. An artist from Pawtucket did the paintings, which were then
put on the ceiling.
People who drive through one of the town's busiest intersections,
where Atwood Avenue and Plainfield Street cross, may not realize it but they're
actually navigating the Piazza Guglielmo Marconi, named for the inventor of
the telegraph. It contains an elaborate stone monument to Marconi, paid for
by the Tricolore per gli Italiani nel Mundo, an Italian cultural society.
Vincent Frattallone, treasurer of the Boston-based society,
said that as far as his group knows, Johnston is the only community in the United
States with a square named for Marconi.
Such continued fealty to Italian history and culture could
give Johnston a good shot at being first in this category in the next census.
Hammonton is in the midst of a building boom, with a considerable number of
people of non-Italian ancestry moving in, said Ingemi.
"I think the Italian influence is starting to wane
a little bit," he admitted.
When the next census is conducted in 2010, Johnston could
be number one.
Library assistant Christina Siwy contributed to this story.
