Immigrants from Azores help mold farming life on island
A hundred years ago, only about 400 families lived in Jamestown year-round with almost 20 percent of them having their roots in the Portuguese Azores, which is an archipelago of nine volcanic islands in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean about 2,250 east of Rhode Island.
The first Portuguese name to appear in local records is Meitozo in 1895. Three Meitozo men — Jose, Antone, and Manuel — paid poll taxes that year. (A poll tax was assessed to people regardless of income or assets. It was outlawed in 1964 because it could, and was, used to limit the voting rights of minorities.)
Over the next 25 years, more than 100 native Azoreans found their way to Jamestown. Some of the new arrivals came by way of Massachusetts, which had attracted the sea-going islanders in the 1870s and 1880s. Immigrants later came directly from the Azores, often sponsored by family members who had arrived earlier. The Head family actively recruited Azoreans workers.
Large-scale immigration ended with the restrictive immigration laws of the 1920s that limited the number of immigrants from any country to a percentage of citizens with similar heritage already in America. The Portuguese population was slowly assimilated.
Almost 50 years ago, in the late 1970s, Shirley Tiexiera Quattromani interviewed some of these immigrants and their children. With Catharine Morris Wright, they published the interviews in “The Portuguese of Conanicut Island” in 1980. The interviews paint a vivid picture of this important group of Jamestowners. immigrant to own land in Jamestown. John Sylvia bought property nearby on North Road where his son later had a garage. The Dutras, Furtados and Godenas also bought farms, often field by field, farther north.
It was not an easy life, but as Mary Furtado Bakios, talking in 1979 about her grandfather’s farm on North Road in the 1930s, said, “We all considered my grandfather rich because he had everything.
“He had a little orchard. He had pears and apples and plums. And he used to make his own (pork cracklings) and blood sausage. You know how that’s made. They filled the intestines, the pig intestines, they filled that up; and they fried it, and it was delicious.”
Mary Teixeira gave a more detailed description of preparing to make blood sausage and the prototypical Portuguese sausage chorizo. “You turn (the pig intestines)upside down and you rinse them … Daddy used to go down to J. P. Santos and buy oranges and lemons and you rub it all over the intestines …. to wash the intestine and all they smelt was the fruit.” The stuffing put into the intestine for chorizo was “pork cut up in squares …and wine and paprika and salt, pepper, garlic, and spices. Each farmwife had her own way of combining ingredients.”
Nothing went to waste. Sergio Andrade described the double use of grapes. “We made the wine first, then after we squeeze the grapes, we put back the (pulp and skin), then we put water, let them ferment for a week, or a month, then we put (fresh figs) and ferment for a month, then we made whiskey from that too. It’s nice.”
What did these Azoreans like about Jamestown? Anthony Miller, whose family name was originally deMelas, talked about his father’s love of the place. His father had come to Massachusetts from the island of Terceira in 1901. The family moved to Jamestown about 1909.
“My father’s place (in the Azores) was about from here to across the street (to where) there were vineyards, and then beyond the vineyard was the ocean and these high cliffs, like at Beavertail. … It’s exactly the same. Only the cliffs are higher.”
