Drive north along Lake Michigan from Chicago, past the wire mills and the wax works, and you reach a small industrial city where copper kettles still simmer over open fire pits every August. The Armenians in Racine, Wisconsin built one of the oldest Armenian communities in America here, a century-deep settlement of refugees from a single Anatolian town who turned a Danish Baptist chapel into a parish and a lakefront park into a feast.
The Place
Racine sits on the western shore of Lake Michigan, halfway between Chicago and Milwaukee, where the Root River empties into a harbour that made the city’s fortune. It was founded as a manufacturing town, and manufacturing is still in its blood.
In 1842 Jerome Increase Case set up his threshing machine works on the Root River, drawn by water power and lake access, and built it into one of the great farm equipment makers in the world. By the early twentieth century Racine was a dense lattice of foundries and factories, a place where a man with strong hands and no English could find a shift the week he arrived.
That promise is what brought the Armenians. They came for the wire and the steel and the wax, and they stayed for the church.
How It Became Armenian
The Armenian community of southeastern Wisconsin is reckoned the second oldest in the United States, a corridor of settlement running from South Milwaukee down through Racine and Kenosha. Racine became its largest stronghold. It is a Midwestern counterpoint to the great western Armenian centres, the kind of community that later generations would look to from the Armenian heartland of Fresno, California and the San Fernando Valley. The story does not begin with a vague wave of migration. It begins with three named men.
The first arrivals, 1892
Hagop Markarian, Avedis Der Margosian and Khachig Torosian are recorded as the first Armenians to settle in Racine, arriving in 1892. They were part of an exodus that had begun across the Ottoman Empire in the 1890s, as Sultan Abdul Hamid’s government orchestrated massacres of Armenians in 1894 and again in 1896.
Close to eighty-five per cent of these early immigrants were young men. Many left wives and children behind in the old country, intending to earn American wages and send for their families later. They found work in the region’s steel mills, glue factories and meatpacking plants, and at Racine’s own giants: the J.I. Case farm equipment works and, later, the S.C. Johnson wax company.
The Tomarza thread
What makes Racine unusual among American Armenian communities is how tightly it traces to one place. The overwhelming majority of its founding families came from Tomarza and its five surrounding villages, in the Kayseri region of central Anatolia. By 1950, when the community numbered roughly 1,200, around eighty per cent could name Tomarza as home.
The thread held in their institutions. As early as 1909, Armenians in nearby South Milwaukee established the Charitable and Educational Society of Tomarza, the Tomarzatsi Educational Society, one of the first Armenian aid associations founded in the United States. It existed to help arriving compatriots from the same hometown find footing in a new world. The instinct to organise around a shared origin was the same one that, decades later, would build the affluent Armenian enclaves of Encino in greater Los Angeles.
Settlement often arrived by a specific path. Many came first to Troy, New York, then to Waukegan, Illinois, where the Washburn and Moen wire mill drew Armenian labour, before crossing the state line north into Racine.
Politics before a church
The community organised politically before it organised a parish. In 1903 a Racine branch of the Social Democrat Hunchakian Party was formed, one of the Armenian revolutionary movements that animated diaspora life in this era. The Armenian Revolutionary Federation, the Tashnagtsoutiun, also took root, and its members kept a clubhouse known as the Marzbed Agoump.
For years there was no resident priest. Some Armenians were in Racine by 1914 or earlier, attending services once or twice a year when a visiting priest travelled up from the Chicago area.
A parish of their own
In 1918 the Racine Armenians organised their own parish council. In 1922 the Racine parish formally split from Chicago, the moment the community marks as the founding of St. Mesrob.
The first madagh, the ceremonial blessing feast that would become an annual fixture, was held in 1923, with early services taking place at Wergeland Hall, a Norwegian-American social club. Fundraising for a building of their own began in 1924, and the Ladies’ Guild formed in 1925 to drive it forward.
That same year the congregation bought what had been a Danish Baptist church on State Street, a fitting inheritance in a city that was also home to one of America’s largest Danish communities. On Christmas Day, 25 December 1925, St. Mesrob Armenian Apostolic Church was consecrated. The naming is attributed to Krikor Keishian and his wife, who served as godparents to the new parish.
One town, two churches
Racine’s Armenians were too numerous, and too spirited, for a single congregation. In 1933 a second parish, St. Hagop Armenian Church, was founded, affiliated with the Armenian Prelacy rather than the Diocese. The split mirrored the wider divisions of diaspora Armenian church life, the same tensions that shaped Armenian parishes from Pasadena, California to the studios and storefronts of Sherman Oaks. In Racine the two congregations stayed close, sharing summer day camps and attending each other’s feasts.
The community took its institutions seriously. In 1935 it established what is remembered as the first Armenian church school in America. During the Second World War, Racine Armenians bought tens of thousands of dollars in war bonds, and in 1955 the city hosted the national convention of the Armenian Church Youth Organization of America.
Out to Erie Street
As the families prospered and moved outward, the parish followed. In the early 1970s St. Mesrob built a new church complex at 4605 Erie Street, on the north side of the city, where it remains today. The State Street chapel had carried the community through its first half-century. The Erie Street complex would carry it through its second.
The Landmarks
St. Mesrob Armenian Apostolic Church, 4605 Erie Street. The heart of the community, consecrated in its original State Street home on Christmas Day 1925 and rebuilt here in the early 1970s. Its congregation celebrated a century of parish life in 2022, a hundred years after the split from Chicago.
St. Hagop Armenian Church, Racine. The second parish, founded in 1933 and tied to the Armenian Prelacy. For decades it has run its own outdoor madagh in late summer, cooking the blessed meal in copper kettles over fire pits, and its members and St. Mesrob’s freely cross between the two.
The Armenian Fest at Rotary Park. Each August the community gathers at Rotary Park on the downtown lakefront for the Racine Armenian Fest, descended from the church picnics St. Mesrob has held for generations. Food is homemade and grilled on site, the air thick with khorovadz and live Armenian music, and admission is free.
The J.I. Case works. The farm equipment manufacturer, founded in Racine in 1842 and still headquartered in the county, was among the industrial employers that drew Armenian labour to the city. For many families, a job on the Case floor was the first American foothold.
The S.C. Johnson company. Racine’s famous wax maker, whose Frank Lloyd Wright administration building is a landmark in its own right, was another employer that gave Armenian newcomers steady work and a reason to put down roots near the lake.
Rotary Park, downtown lakefront. The green space on Lake Michigan where the festival unfolds is itself part of the story. After Covid forced the cancellation of the 2020 fest, the picnic season returned to the park, a public stage for a private heritage.
The old State Street chapel. The former Danish Baptist church the community bought in 1925 was St. Mesrob’s first home, the building where the Tomarzatsi families finally had an altar of their own after years of waiting on a travelling priest.
Where They Came From
Almost everything in Racine’s Armenian story leads back to Tomarza, a town in the Kayseri province of central Anatolia, and the cluster of five villages around it. This was Western Armenian country inside the Ottoman Empire, and its people carried a distinct dialect, distinct foods and a fierce loyalty to one another.
Not every family came from Tomarza alone. Some of the earliest settlers traced to the Kharpert plain, to villages such as Khoulakiugh, and others to Palu and to Gesaria. But the gravitational centre was Tomarza, and the hometown society founded in 1909 made sure that newcomers from those villages were not left to navigate Wisconsin on their own.
The timing of their flight was no accident. The massacres of the 1890s drove the first arrivals, and the genocide and forced displacement of the First World War years drove the largest wave. Survivors joined kin who had already gone ahead. That is the architecture of chain migration: one man establishes himself, and a village follows him across an ocean.
Racine Today
The community is smaller and more dispersed than it was at its 1950 peak, but it has not vanished, and it has not gone quiet. Roughly forty-four per cent of Wisconsin’s Armenians live in the southeastern metropolitan corridor that Racine anchors, a population estimated between two and three thousand, ranked among the larger Armenian communities in the country, according to the Encyclopedia of Milwaukee. It is one strand of the immigrant fabric of the state, alongside later arrivals such as the Hmong of Wausau to the north.
St. Mesrob marked its centennial in 2022 and 2023, a milestone few American Armenian parishes reach. The festival still draws crowds to Rotary Park each August. The madagh kettles still come out. Younger Armenians who left for work elsewhere often come back, drawn by the kind of belonging that does not transfer easily to a bigger city.
Members describe themselves as friendly, humble and modest, a community that helps its neighbours without keeping score. A century after three young men from the Ottoman Empire stepped off a train into a Lake Michigan factory town, their great-grandchildren still gather around the same fire pits, cooking the same blessed meal of butter, yogurt, bulghur and meat that their families carried out of Tomarza.
Frequently Asked Questions
When did the Armenians in Racine, Wisconsin first settle there?
The first recorded Armenians in Racine, Hagop Markarian, Avedis Der Margosian and Khachig Torosian, arrived in 1892. Larger numbers followed during and after the First World War, fleeing massacres and the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire.
Why did Armenians move to Racine specifically?
Racine was a major manufacturing city on Lake Michigan with abundant factory work, including the J.I. Case farm equipment works and the S.C. Johnson wax company. The Armenians in Racine, Wisconsin came for these industrial jobs and for the region’s steel mills, glue factories and meatpacking plants.
What is St. Mesrob Armenian Apostolic Church?
St. Mesrob is Racine’s main Armenian Apostolic parish, founded when the local community split from the Chicago parish in 1922 and consecrated in its first home on Christmas Day 1925. It moved to its current complex at 4605 Erie Street in the early 1970s and celebrated its centennial in 2022.
Where did most Racine Armenians come from?
The overwhelming majority traced their roots to Tomarza and five surrounding villages in the Kayseri region of central Anatolia. By 1950, around eighty per cent of the roughly 1,200 Armenians in Racine named Tomarza as their ancestral home.
What is the Racine Armenian Fest?
The Armenian Fest is an annual August festival at Rotary Park on Racine’s downtown lakefront, descended from church picnics held for generations by St. Mesrob. It features homemade food grilled on site, including khorovadz, along with live Armenian music, and admission is free.
How large is the Armenian community in Racine today?
Roughly forty-four per cent of Wisconsin’s Armenians live in the southeastern corridor anchored by Racine, a population estimated between two and three thousand. It ranks among the larger Armenian communities in the United States and remains active through St. Mesrob and St. Hagop churches.
If your family’s story passed through Racine, or any of the places Armenians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From the villages of Tomarza to the fire pits of Rotary Park, to wherever you are now.