Climb Smith Hill on an April morning and the church bells carry a long way over the slate roofs. The story of the Armenians in Providence, Rhode Island begins on streets like Camden Avenue and Douglas Avenue, where families who had fled the burning of an empire built a community so determined that they nicknamed it the Citadel. They came with little more than the names of their villages and a Bible printed at Euphrates College, and they made a city their own.
The Place
Providence sits at the head of Narragansett Bay, the capital of the smallest state in the union and one of the oldest cities in New England. For more than a century it called itself the Jewelry Capital of the World, its downtown workshops drawing immigrant craftsmen who could turn base metal into something that shone.
North of the State House rises Smith Hill, a steep wedge of triple-decker houses and corner shops that became the heart of Armenian Providence. Down by the harbour, the Port of Providence brought ships directly from Marseilles, while Union Station funnelled the rest in by rail.
It was, in other words, a working city that needed hands. The Armenians who arrived between the 1890s and the 1930s had hands, and they had reasons not to go home.
How It Became Armenian
The first families, before the storm
Before 1890 there were only a dozen or so Armenians in all of Rhode Island, most of them in Providence as students, businessmen and professionals. Many of the earliest were Protestant Evangelicals, graduates of the Euphrates Armenian College in Kharpert, in the Ottoman interior, who carried both their faith and a hunger for education across the Atlantic.
In 1889 several of these immigrant families began meeting weekly for prayer. Within two years they had organised as a church and were worshipping inside the Beneficent Congregational Church in Providence. It became the first Armenian church officially established in North America, a quiet first that Providence Armenians still cite with pride. The Armenian Evangelical movement in America traces its formal beginnings to these very gatherings.
The pogroms and the genocide
The trickle became a flood for the worst of reasons. The Hamidian massacres of the mid 1890s, and then the genocide of 1915, drove Armenians from their ancestral lands in eastern Anatolia. Whole villages were emptied, and the survivors scattered toward any door that would open.
Providence opened. Between 1898 and 1932 some 6,375 Armenians arrived in Rhode Island and raised their families here. The newcomers called their new home the Citadel, mitchnapert in Armenian, a word for a fortress, because they meant to hold.
The streets of Smith Hill
The Douglas Avenue and Smith Hill sector was by far the largest and most concentrated Armenian settlement in the city. On Camden Avenue alone, a tight cluster of twenty-six families lived between house numbers 35 and 202. First Street, Burgess Street and Prospect Street filled in around them.
For single men arriving without families, the community organised shared houses of safe haven where twenty to thirty men lived in single and double rooms. People from the same village stuck together: the men of Palu took rooms on Orms Street, the people of Bahgin clustered on Codding Street and later at 433 Chalkstone Avenue. It was a way of reassembling a lost map, street by street.
Work, and the long climb
The jobs were hard and the city was full of them. Armenian men found work in the Locomotive Works, the Rhode Island Tool Works and the Corliss Engine factory, and they saved. Those savings turned into tailoring shops, grocery stores, butcher shops and candy companies.
By 1934 some twenty-seven jewellery related businesses in Providence were owned and operated by Armenians, woven into the trade that made the city famous. Down at Hoyle Square, the commercial knot bounded by Westminster and Cranston streets, roughly sixty Armenian owned businesses came and went over fifty years. On Broad Street alone, thirty-six Armenian businesses existed at one time or another.
Some grew very large. The Nahigian family built Purity Laundry into the largest laundry in Rhode Island. Jack and Rose Hagopian founded Ro-Jacks Food Stores in 1954 and grew it to thirteen supermarkets across Rhode Island and Massachusetts, employing two thousand people by 1998. Charles Belzinkian’s Christmas Tree Shops became a chain of twenty-eight stores across New England.
Building the churches
A community measures itself by what it builds, and Providence Armenians built churches. The Apostolic faithful first organised as Holy Translators, then as Saints Sahag and Saint Mesrob, taking over the former Jefferson Street Baptist Church in 1913 and consecrating it the following year. Its steel cross, fitted with a neon blue light in 1935, glowed over Route 95 for decades and could be seen from approaching aircraft.
A second parish, Sts. Vartanantz, formed in 1933 after an ecclesiastical split, worshipping at borrowed addresses until it bought the former St. James Episcopal Church at 402 Broadway for eighteen thousand dollars. It was consecrated on 23 June 1940, and the parishioners cleared the mortgage in three short years, donating their own labour to lay new floors and raise new altars.
The Evangelical strand endured too. Incorporated as the Armenian Evangelical Church of Providence, with Euphrates added to its name in tribute to the college that had shaped its founders, the congregation bought 42 Hammond Street in 1912 and stayed there fifty-six years. Three faiths, one people, the same hill.
The Landmarks
Sts. Vartanantz Armenian Apostolic Church, 402 Broadway, Providence. Built around 1890 as St. James Episcopal, it was consecrated as an Armenian church on 23 June 1940. The parish, founded in 1933, marked its eighty-fifth anniversary in 2025 and remains a centre of community life, with its Ladies’ Guild, Men’s Club and Sunday School.
Saints Sahag and Mesrob Armenian Apostolic Church, Jefferson Street, Providence. Housed in a Venetian Gothic building of 1868 to 1869 by the Norwegian architect Niles Bierregaard Schubarth, it became an Armenian church in 1913. Its neon blue cross, installed in 1935, became a landmark visible from the highway. The Egavian Cultural Centre was added in 1958.
Armenian Martyrs’ Memorial Monument, North Burial Ground, Providence. Raised in 1977 in the city’s 110 acre colonial cemetery, the granite structure stands twenty-nine feet high, carved from natural Vermont stone. Stones on either side of its archway dedicate it, in Armenian and in English, to the memory of the 1,500,000 martyrs of the 1915 genocide. Two curved walls were added in 1998.
Harry Kizirian Elementary School, Camden Avenue, Smith Hill. The school is named for Harry Kizirian, the son of Armenian immigrants who became Rhode Island’s most decorated soldier of the Second World War and later served twenty-five years as Postmaster of Providence. Its address on Camden Avenue sits in the old heart of Armenian Smith Hill.
Armenian Evangelical Church of Providence, 42 Hammond Street (historic site). Heir to the 1889 prayer gatherings that became the first Armenian church in North America, the congregation bought this address in 1912 and worshipped here for fifty-six years. The name later took on the word Euphrates to honour the college that trained its founders.
Hoyle Square, between Westminster and Cranston streets, Providence. This commercial crossroads held roughly sixty Armenian owned businesses over half a century, from Kolligian’s five and ten cent store to grocers, tailors and butchers. It was where the community did its everyday shopping in its own language.
Union Station and the Port of Providence. The points of arrival. From 1911 the Fabre Line ran steamships from Marseilles directly into the Port of Providence, while at Union Station the Travelers Aid society helped immigrants who could not yet speak English find their feet.
Where They Came From
The Armenians of Providence came overwhelmingly from the eastern provinces of the Ottoman Empire, the historic Armenian heartland around Kharpert, Palu and the villages of the upper Euphrates. The Euphrates Armenian College at Kharpert was a direct thread: its graduates seeded the Evangelical congregation, and its name lives on in the church.
Chain migration did the rest. Once a few families from a village had settled on a Providence street, they sent for kin and neighbours, which is why people from Palu landed together on Orms Street and the people of Bahgin on Codding Street. The map of the old country was redrawn, in miniature, across Smith Hill.
Most arrived through Ellis Island and travelled north by the Fall River Line, though after 1911 many came straight into Providence harbour on the Fabre Line. By 1934 Providence held 1,395 Armenian families, far more than Pawtucket, Cranston or any other Rhode Island town.
Those same eastern Anatolian roots fed Armenian settlements across the country, from the dairy towns of the Midwest like Racine, Wisconsin to the San Fernando Valley, where later generations built communities in North Hollywood and Tujunga. Providence simply got there first.
Providence Today
The Citadel has thinned but it has not fallen. By the 2000 census Rhode Island counted roughly seven thousand people of Armenian descent, and most of the old Smith Hill families have long since moved to Cranston, Warwick and the suburbs, following the same arc of assimilation that every immigrant generation eventually rides.
Yet the institutions hold. Sts. Vartanantz still rings on Broadway, Saints Sahag and Mesrob still anchors Jefferson Street, and every April the community gathers at the Martyrs’ Memorial in the North Burial Ground to read the names. The Armenian Radio Hour, begun in 1947, ran past its seventy-fifth year, one of the longest running ethnic broadcasts in the country.
The names on the schools and streets tell the rest. A Brown University once led by Vartan Gregorian, a soldier honoured on Camden Avenue, a state that elected its first Armenian mayor in Warwick. Providence is no longer a city of new Armenian arrivals, but it remains a city that an Armenian family helped to build, and that still remembers it. The story sits alongside other New England Armenian centres, from Armenian Watertown to the community in Belmont, Massachusetts, and beside the other immigrant histories that shaped Rhode Island, like the Portuguese of East Providence and the Italians of Bristol.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did Armenians first settle in Providence, Rhode Island?
A handful of Armenian students and professionals lived in Providence before 1890, and in 1889 Evangelical families began the prayer meetings that became the first Armenian church in North America. The large waves of Armenians in Providence, Rhode Island came after the Hamidian massacres of the 1890s and the 1915 genocide, with roughly 6,375 arriving in the state between 1898 and 1932.
Where did the Armenian community in Providence live?
The largest and most concentrated settlement was the Douglas Avenue and Smith Hill area, where twenty-six families once lived on a single stretch of Camden Avenue. Armenians also settled in South Providence around Hoyle Square, and in East Providence, Pawtucket, Central Falls and Cranston.
What are the main Armenian churches in Providence?
The two Apostolic parishes are Sts. Vartanantz at 402 Broadway, consecrated in 1940, and Saints Sahag and Mesrob on Jefferson Street, an Armenian church since 1913. The Armenian Evangelical Church, with roots in 1889, holds the distinction of being the first Armenian church established in North America.
Why did Armenians come to Providence specifically?
Providence offered factory work in its locomotive, tool and engine plants, and its famous jewellery trade welcomed skilled metalworkers. After 1911 the Fabre Line steamships also ran directly from Marseilles into the Port of Providence, making the city an easy landing point for refugees fleeing the Ottoman Empire.
Is there an Armenian genocide memorial in Providence?
Yes. The Armenian Martyrs’ Memorial Monument stands in the North Burial Ground, built in 1977 and expanded in 1998. The twenty-nine foot granite structure is dedicated to the 1,500,000 Armenians killed in the 1915 genocide, and the community gathers there each April to commemorate them.
How large is the Armenian community in Providence today?
By the 2000 census Rhode Island was home to roughly seven thousand people of Armenian descent. Many families have moved from Smith Hill to suburbs such as Cranston and Warwick, but the Armenians in Providence, Rhode Island still maintain active churches, cultural institutions and the long running Armenian Radio Hour.
If your family’s story passed through Providence, or any of the places Armenians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the villages of Kharpert and the upper Euphrates, to a triple-decker on Camden Avenue, to wherever you are now.