Walk down Third Street in Passaic, New Jersey, and you pass a Roman Catholic church with Hungarian carved above its door, a block from a Reformed church where the eleven o’clock service is still preached in Magyar. The Hungarians in Passaic arrived to spin wool in the great mills along the Dundee Canal, and for more than a century they built a parish-sized Hungary on a few crowded streets between the river and the railroad.
The Place
Passaic is a dense, two-square-mile mill city in Passaic County, hard against the Passaic River and ringed by Clifton, Garfield and Wallington. It grew up around the Dundee Canal, a mid-nineteenth-century waterway whose current powered a corridor of textile factories that made the city, for a time, one of the best-known wool-manufacturing places in North America.
Those mills are why almost everyone here came from somewhere else. By the 2020 census Passaic counted roughly 70,537 residents, the great majority now Hispanic, but the street grid was laid out by an earlier wave of Europeans who crossed the Atlantic to stand at the looms.
Among them were the Hungarians, who clustered in the blocks around Third and Fourth Streets and made that pocket of the city, for several generations, unmistakably their own.
How It Became Hungarian
The Hungarians in Passaic are a story told in wool. They came because the mills needed hands, and the mills needed hands because Passaic sat eleven miles from New York with a canal, a railroad and a hunger for cheap labour.
The mills that pulled them in
From the 1880s onward, immigrants from across Europe poured into Passaic to work the textile factories strung along the Dundee Canal. The two giants were the Botany Worsted Mills, whose name became a byword for fine men’s suiting cloth, and the Forstmann woolen operation, which a German firm established in the city in the years around 1903 and 1904.
Oscar Dressler, scouting a site for the Forstmann family, reportedly chose Passaic precisely because it was close to New York and offered a ready supply of immigrant labour. Hungarian peasants, leaving a countryside of failing smallholdings and military conscription, were exactly the labour he meant.
They took the hardest, hottest jobs in the worsted sheds, and they took rooms in the streets nearest the gates. A neighbourhood formed the way mill neighbourhoods always do, by walking distance.
Building the churches
What turned a labour pool into a community was faith, and the Hungarians of Passaic split along the old confessional line they had carried from home: Catholic and Reformed.
The Catholics moved first. St. Stephen’s Hungarian Roman Catholic Church traces its parish to 1902 and 1903, when Father Géza Messerschmiedt arrived to gather the city’s Magyar Catholics. The first recorded baptism, of a child named Elizabeth Berki, fell on Christmas Day 1902. The cornerstone of the church on Third Street was blessed on 21 June 1904, and the first Mass was offered there on Pentecost Sunday, 22 May 1904.
The Reformed congregation, carrying the Calvinist tradition of eastern Hungary, organised its own church in the same first decade of the twentieth century, a few steps away on Fourth Street. Two churches, one small Hungarian quarter, each raised partly with donated wages and partly with the volunteered labour of mill workers on their days off.
A daily Hungarian school
Language was the next battle, and the parishes fought it with schools. St. Stephen’s built a parochial school whose cornerstone was laid in 1936 and which was dedicated on 19 September 1937. The Reformed congregation had earlier run a summer school to keep children fluent.
The boldest experiment came in 1965, when St. Stephen’s opened what was described as the first daily Hungarian school in the United States. More than a hundred children stayed on after their regular schooling each afternoon for an extra hour of Hungarian language, history and heritage.
The strike, the wars, the refugees
Life in the mills was not gentle. In 1926 the Passaic Textile Strike shut the Botany and Forstmann mills and others for the better part of a year, a bitter, well-documented walkout in which the immigrant workforce, Hungarians among them, demanded wages they could live on. You can read the broader account at the Wikipedia entry on the Passaic Textile Strike.
The next decades reshaped the community from outside. After the Second World War, displaced persons from Europe’s refugee camps found their way to Passaic’s Hungarian streets. Then came 1956.
When the Hungarian Revolution was crushed that autumn, families fled west, and Passaic’s churches opened their doors. Between December 1956 and December 1957 the Reformed congregation alone is recorded as helping settle more than 106 refugees, finding them housing, work and money to start again.
Through the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, more Hungarians arrived from beyond Hungary’s redrawn borders, from Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia, ethnic Magyars who still came to Third Street to hear Mass in their own tongue. The Passaic story connects to the wider New Jersey Hungarian world, including the Hungarians of New Brunswick down the Raritan and the older Hungarians of Yorkville in Manhattan across the river.
The Landmarks
St. Stephen’s Hungarian Roman Catholic Church, 223 Third Street. The spiritual anchor of Catholic Passaic since 1902, its church completed in 1904 by parishioners who gave wages and weekends to build it. Generations were baptised, married and buried here, and its school once ran the country’s first daily Hungarian programme.
Hungarian Reformed Church, 220 Fourth Street. A block from St. Stephen’s, the Calvinist counterpart still holds a Hungarian-language service alongside its English one. Its Calvin Hall hosts the Kőrösi Csoma Sándor Hungarian School, where children learn folk dance, language and tradition.
The Botany Worsted Mills, along the Dundee Canal. The vast worsted complex that drew Hungarians to Passaic in the first place, listed today as a historic district. Its name once meant the finest cloth in American menswear, and its sheds employed thousands of immigrant workers.
The Dundee Canal, running through the old industrial core. The mid-nineteenth-century waterway whose current powered Passaic’s mills and, by extension, summoned its immigrant city into being. The roughly 1.2-mile industrial corridor along it is recognised as a historic district straddling Passaic and Clifton.
The American Hungarian Museum, Reid Library, 80 Third Street. Founded in 1981 on the second floor of the Reid Memorial Library, it gathered the artefacts, costumes and documents of immigrant Passaic. Curated for twenty-five years by Emese Kerkay, it closed its physical doors in 2014 but its collection and online archive preserve the record.
The Hungarian Citizens League, New Schley Street, Garfield. As the community spilled into neighbouring Garfield, its social life followed. The Citizens League and the Hungarian Scouts both made homes just over the city line, where dances and gatherings carried on outside the church halls.
Calvin Hall, beside the Reformed Church on Fourth Street. The auditorium where the Reformed congregation has long held its dances, stage shows and folk evenings. It remains a working room for a shrinking but stubborn cultural life.
Where They Came From
The Hungarians who filled Passaic’s mills came overwhelmingly from the villages of the old Kingdom of Hungary, leaving small farms in the years of heavy emigration before the First World War. Surviving records trace individual families to places such as the Abaúj region in the northeast, the kind of poor agricultural county that sent its young people abroad in numbers.
They were a mix of Roman Catholics and Calvinist Reformed, and they reproduced that division faithfully in Passaic, one church on Third Street and one on Fourth. The split was not friction so much as memory, two ways of being Hungarian carried intact across the ocean.
Later arrivals widened the map. The post-war displaced persons and the 1956 refugees came from across Hungary proper, and the immigrants of the following decades came from the Magyar-speaking lands cut off from Hungary after 1920, in what are now Slovakia, Romania, Ukraine and Serbia. They were all, in Passaic’s eyes, simply Hungarians, and they all found the same two steeples waiting.
Passaic Today
The Passaic of today is not a Hungarian city, and honesty requires saying so plainly. The mills closed, the children prospered and moved to the suburbs of Bergen and beyond, and the streets that were once Magyar are now overwhelmingly Hispanic, part of a city that the 2020 census found to be roughly three-quarters Latino.
The American Hungarian Museum shut its physical gallery in 2014. Many of the old businesses are gone. What remains is concentrated, and it is real.
St. Stephen’s and the Hungarian Reformed Church both still stand a block apart, still mark the Hungarian feasts, still keep a service in the language. The Reformed church’s weekend school teaches a new, smaller generation to dance the csárdás and read Petőfi, and the scouting and folk-dance circles in Garfield keep the thread unbroken. It is a community measured now in dozens rather than thousands, but it has outlasted the very mills that created it, which is no small thing. For the broader sweep of Hungarian America, the Hungarians of Buckeye in Cleveland and the Hungarians of Birmingham in Toledo tell parallel stories of mill-town Magyar life. And Passaic’s immigrant churn continues all around it, from the Poles of neighbouring Wallington to the Cubans of West New York down the river.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Hungarians settle in Passaic, New Jersey?
The Hungarians in Passaic came for work in the city’s textile mills. From the 1880s, immigrants poured into Passaic to staff the worsted and woolen factories along the Dundee Canal, including the Botany Worsted Mills and the Forstmann works, which needed cheap immigrant labour just eleven miles from New York.
What are the main Hungarian churches in Passaic?
The two anchors are St. Stephen’s Hungarian Roman Catholic Church at 223 Third Street, whose parish dates to 1902, and the Hungarian Reformed Church at 220 Fourth Street, which organised in the early twentieth century. Both still stand a block apart and still mark Hungarian feasts.
Is there still a Hungarian community in Passaic today?
Yes, though it is far smaller than it once was. The mills closed and most families moved to the suburbs, and Passaic is now overwhelmingly Hispanic, but both Hungarian churches remain active, a Hungarian-language service continues, and a weekend Hungarian school still teaches language and folk tradition.
What was the American Hungarian Museum in Passaic?
It was a museum of Hungarian immigrant life founded in 1981 on the second floor of the Reid Memorial Library at 80 Third Street. Curated for twenty-five years by Emese Kerkay, it preserved costumes, documents and artefacts before closing its physical gallery in 2014.
How did Passaic help Hungarian refugees after the 1956 revolution?
When the 1956 Hungarian Revolution was crushed, Passaic’s churches took in the refugees who fled west. The Reformed congregation alone is recorded as helping settle more than 106 newcomers between December 1956 and December 1957, providing housing, employment help and financial aid.
What were the Botany Worsted Mills?
The Botany Worsted Mills were a large textile complex along the Dundee Canal in Passaic, whose fine wool cloth was prized for men’s suits. The mills drew thousands of immigrant workers, Hungarians among them, and the site is now recognised as a historic district.
If your family’s story passed through Passaic, or any of the places Hungarians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Abaúj or a refugee camp in 1956, to the worsted sheds on the Dundee Canal, to wherever you are now.