Drive west out of Providence on Atwood Avenue and the city loosens into something quieter and more domestic. Two-family houses with grape arbours in the back. A pork store with a hand-lettered sign for soppressata. A bakery where people take a paper number before they reach the counter. This is Johnston, and the Italians in Johnston are not a footnote to the town’s character. By the 2000 census, 46.7 percent of residents claimed Italian heritage, the highest share of any municipality in the United States, and the number has stayed near the top of the national list ever since.
The Place
Johnston is a town of just under 30,000 people in Providence County, immediately west of the city of Providence. It was incorporated on 6 March 1759 after separating from Providence, and was named for Augustus Johnston, the colonial attorney general who later sided with the Crown during the Revolution.
For most of its first two centuries it was farmland and small mill villages: Thornton, Graniteville, Simmonsville, Hughesdale, Manton. The Woonasquatucket River turned the wheels of those mills, and the land that was not built on stayed green. Snake Den State Park still preserves working farmland inside the town limits.
What changed Johnston was not industry but proximity. It sits just over the line from Federal Hill, the Providence neighbourhood that became New England’s most concentrated Little Italy, and when families on the Hill wanted a yard, they moved west into Johnston.
How It Became Italian
The mills and the Hill, 1870s to 1920
Italians began arriving in Providence from southern Italy in the 1870s, drawn by the textile and jewellery industries that needed cheap labour. They settled first on Federal Hill, which by 1895 was roughly half Italian and half Irish.
The growth was extraordinary. The Italian population of the Federal Hill district doubled from around 18,000 to more than 40,000 between 1905 and 1916. By 1920 Italians were the single largest foreign-born group in the entire state. Rhode Island today still has the highest proportion of residents of Italian descent of any state, close to one in five.
The Hill could not hold all of them. As newcomers kept landing, established families looked for room to breathe, and the farmland on the western edge of Providence, in Johnston, was within walking and then streetcar distance of the old neighbourhood.
From tenement to two-family house, 1920s to 1950s
The move into Johnston was a move up. A family that had shared a Federal Hill tenement could buy a two-family house in Thornton or Graniteville, live downstairs, rent the top floor to relatives, and plant tomatoes, figs and grapes in the back. The pattern repeated across the town’s eastern villages, closest to Providence.
Thornton, which straddles the Johnston and Cranston line, became the centre of gravity. The neighbourhood had been a mill village, and a fire on 5 July 1926 destroyed several buildings on Plainfield Street, but the Italian families rebuilt and kept coming.
The institution that anchored them was the church. In 1951 St. Rocco’s Church opened on Atwood Avenue in Thornton and became, in the words of local historians, the heart of the Italo-American community for the area. Named for the saint invoked against sickness, St. Rocco patron of the sick and infirm carried the devotional life of southern Italy directly into Johnston.
The postwar town, 1950s onward
The biggest wave came after the Second World War, when returning servicemen and their growing families wanted suburban space the Hill could not offer. Subdivisions spread west across Johnston through the 1950s and 1960s, and the town’s character flipped from rural to suburban in a generation, almost entirely Italian-American as it did so.
By the time the federal census measured ancestry directly, Johnston topped the country. The mill villages had become a suburb, but the suburb stayed Italian in a way Federal Hill itself, increasingly a restaurant district rather than a residential one, no longer fully was. The families who built modern Italian Federal Hill largely live in Johnston, Cranston and North Providence now, and drive back to the old neighbourhood to eat.
The Italian institutions that had grown up on the Hill, the parish societies, the mutual-aid lodges, the social clubs, travelled west with the families. The Order Sons of Italy in America, founded in 1905, and older Providence bodies like the Italo American Club, chartered in Rhode Island in 1899, drew members from across the towns ringing the city, Johnston among them. These clubs ran the feasts, lent money before banks would, buried the dead with dignity and kept the dialects alive at the card tables on weekend nights.
What held the community together was not a single Little Italy main street but a web of churches, bakeries, delis and clubs spread across the eastern villages, all of it within a short drive of Atwood Avenue. A child growing up in Thornton in the 1960s could be baptised, schooled, fed and married inside that web without ever leaving Italian Johnston.
The Landmarks
St. Rocco’s Church, 927 Atwood Avenue. The current church opened in 1951 on the Thornton side of Johnston and remains the spiritual centre of the town’s Italian community. Its parish school, St. Rocco School, taught generations of local children.
The Feast of St. Rocco, St. Rocco’s Church grounds, Atwood Avenue. Held every August for more than eight decades, the feast is the town’s defining annual event. Around 40 volunteers roll more than 3,000 homemade meatballs to feed roughly 15,000 visitors, who come for peppers and sausage, fried dough, eggplant and rabe, then watch the statue of the saint carried in procession.
The Original Italian Bakery, 915 Atwood Avenue. A neighbourhood institution where customers grab a number and work their way past cases of bread, calzones and pastry. Its pizza strips and the locally famous Pizza Chips, now shipped nationally, are a Rhode Island staple, and the bakery donates the dough for the doughboys sold at the St. Rocco feast.
Father & Son Italian Deli, 915 Atwood Avenue. Sharing a building with the Original Italian Bakery, the deli supplies the cold cuts, cheeses and prepared foods that stock Sunday tables across the town, the modern version of the old Federal Hill pork stores.
Snake Den State Park, off Brown Avenue. Inside the town limits, the park preserves the working farmland that Johnston was before the Italians turned it suburban, a reminder that many of the first arrivals took up small farms rather than mill work.
Johnston Senior High School, 345 Cherry Hill Road. The town’s only high school, recognised as a 2005 Rhode Island Department of Education Regents’ Commended School. Its predecessor, the Johnston Junior-Senior High School that opened in 1960, later became the Nicholas A. Ferri Middle School, named for a local educator.
Where They Came From
The Italians who built Providence and its suburbs came overwhelmingly from the centre and south of Italy. The dominant origin regions for Rhode Island were Campania, Puglia, Sicily and Calabria, with a strong contingent from the Lazio interior around Frosinone as well.
These were farming and labouring families leaving land that could not support them, pulled across the Atlantic by Rhode Island’s demand for mill hands and craftsmen. They came through chain migration: one cousin sent for the next, one village street reassembling itself on Federal Hill and then in Johnston.
That southern inheritance is why the food in Johnston runs to soppressata and sausage rather than northern butter and rice, and why a saint from the south, St. Rocco, draws 15,000 people to a parish parking lot every August. The pork stores, the dried sausage, the Sunday gravy simmering since morning: all of it is the cooking of the Mezzogiorno, the Italian south, carried intact across an ocean and three generations.
The same regions seeded other Italian-American strongholds, which is why a Johnston family table can feel familiar to descendants of southern Italians in New York and beyond. The accents and the recipes differ at the edges, but the grandparents often left from the same handful of provinces between Naples and Sicily, within a few decades of one another.
Johnston Today
Johnston remains, by the numbers, one of the two or three most Italian-American towns in the country, year after year. The 2020 census counted 29,568 residents, and Italian ancestry still defines the town more than any other single thread.
It is an unflashy place. The wealth, where it exists, is the comfortable wealth of paid-off two-family houses and family businesses rather than mansions. FM Global and Citizens Bank keep large operations in town, and the school system, with four elementary schools, the Ferri middle school and the single high school, serves a working- and middle-class population.
The town has sent its share of recognisable names out into the world, from hockey player Noel Acciari to television’s Paul DelVecchio, Pauly D, and Celtics coach Joe Mazzulla. But the truest measure of Johnston is still the August feast: the smell of sausage and peppers on Atwood Avenue, the statue carried through a crowd, and a community that moved a few miles west from Federal Hill a century ago and never stopped being itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Johnston, Rhode Island?
The Italians in Johnston are descendants of the families who packed Federal Hill in Providence between the 1870s and 1920s. As the Hill filled, families moved a few miles west into Johnston’s farmland and mill villages for space and yards, and the town has held the highest concentration of Italian-Americans in the country ever since.
What percentage of Johnston is Italian-American?
In the 2000 census, 46.7 percent of Johnston residents identified as being of Italian heritage, the highest share of any municipality in the United States. The town of about 29,568 people has remained at or near the top of the national list in every count since.
What is the Feast of St. Rocco in Johnston?
The Feast of St. Rocco is a multi-day Italian religious festival held every August on the grounds of St. Rocco’s Church on Atwood Avenue. Volunteers prepare thousands of homemade meatballs and southern Italian dishes for roughly 15,000 visitors, and a statue of the saint is carried in procession through the crowd.
Where did Johnston’s Italians come from in Italy?
They came mainly from central and southern Italy, with Campania, Puglia, Sicily, Calabria and the Lazio interior around Frosinone the leading origins. They were farming and labouring families drawn to Rhode Island’s textile mills and jewellery trade, arriving through chain migration that rebuilt whole villages on Federal Hill and then in Johnston.
How is Johnston related to Federal Hill?
Johnston is essentially Federal Hill’s residential successor. The Italians who first settled Providence’s Federal Hill spread west into Johnston, Cranston and North Providence as the old neighbourhood grew crowded. Federal Hill is now largely a restaurant district, while the families who built it live in suburbs like Johnston.
Where can you eat Italian food in Johnston?
Atwood Avenue in the Thornton section is the spine of Italian Johnston. The Original Italian Bakery at 915 Atwood Avenue, famous for its pizza strips and Pizza Chips, shares a building with Father & Son Italian Deli, and the town has a dense cluster of Italian restaurants and bakeries serving the southern dishes brought over a century ago.
If your family’s story passed through Johnston, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village street in Campania, to the tenements of Federal Hill, to a two-family house with a fig tree in Thornton, to wherever you are now.
Related reading: the Italian story did not stop at Rhode Island. The same southern Italian migration shaped the Italians of Staten Island and the Italians of Bensonhurst in New York. Closer to home, the Cape Verdean and Dominican communities of the same city are told in Cape Verdeans in Fox Point and Dominicans in Providence. For more on the town and its feast, see the Johnston entry at Wikipedia and the history of Federal Hill.