They called it Tontitown, after an Italian explorer who had paddled the Mississippi two centuries before. Forty families had just walked out of a malarial cotton plantation in the Arkansas Delta, where the river fog had killed their children and the contract had swallowed their wages. Their priest led them north, up into the Ozark foothills, where the limestone hills looked like the Veneto and the air was thin and dry. In the first winter they ate rabbit and polenta in abandoned farm sheds. By the next August they were dancing on a patch of cleared ground, eating spaghetti from a parish trestle table, celebrating their first grape harvest in America.
The Place
Tontitown sits in the northwest corner of Arkansas, in Washington County, where the Ozark Plateau breaks into low limestone ridges and the apple country slides west toward Oklahoma. The town is small, about 4,300 people at the 2020 census and rising fast, wedged between Springdale and the booming Walmart-and-Tyson sprawl of Fayetteville. The houses are frame ranch homes and modest brick split-levels, scattered along Henri de Tonti Boulevard and a grid of farm-to-market roads that still run between vineyards. From a back porch in late summer you can smell the grapes ripening on the wires, and on a Sunday morning the bell at St. Joseph’s still pulls in cars from three counties.
How It Became Italian
Before the Italians
The land that became Tontitown was, in the 1890s, marginal Ozark farmland. It had passed through Cherokee and Osage hands in the early 19th century and then through Anglo-American settlers who scratched out apple orchards on the limestone shelves. By the time Father Pietro Bandini arrived in January 1898, looking to buy 800 acres for his refugees, the soil was tired and the local owners were willing to sell. They were not willing to sell cheaply. The price went from eight dollars an acre to fifteen the day they realised an Italian priest with forty desperate families was buying.
Sunnyside: The Plantation They Fled
To understand Tontitown you have to understand Sunnyside Plantation, three hundred miles south, in Chicot County, on the Mississippi River. In December 1895 a New York banker named Austin Corbin imported over 500 Italian Catholics to grow cotton there. Most came from northern Italy, primarily from the Veneto, with smaller groups from Emilia-Romagna and the Marche. They were small-holder farmers and tradesmen who had been told the American South was a paradise of cheap land and steady wages.
What they found was malaria, debt peonage, and a river bottom they had no idea how to farm. They had never grown cotton. The plantation provided housing only after deductions, the company store sold flour at marked-up prices, and the contract bound them to the land. Corbin died suddenly in 1896, and what little protection he had offered evaporated. A second wave arrived in 1897 to find the colony already dying. Children were buried in the wet ground beside the railway that ran across the plantation.
Their resident priest was Father Pietro Bandini, a Romagnolo, born in Forli in 1852, a former Jesuit who had done mission work among the Crow in Montana. By 1897 he was running the St. Raphael Society’s effort to help Italian immigrants in America. He looked at Sunnyside, looked at the river fog, and decided the only solution was to get his people out.
The Walk to the Ozarks
In early 1898 Bandini scouted northwest Arkansas. He found the Ozark foothills outside Springdale, on the old Frisco rail line, and saw something the other settlers had missed. The climate was dry. The hills were limestone. The soil was poor but well-drained. It looked, to a man who knew the Apennines, like home. Forty families followed him out of Sunnyside that winter, leaving the cotton fields behind. They named the new town for Henri de Tonti, the Italian-born lieutenant of La Salle who had explored the Mississippi for the French crown in the 1680s. Henri de Tonti had no connection to the Veneto, but he was Italian, and he had walked this river country first.
The first winter was brutal. The families lived in abandoned farm sheds. The men went west to the Oklahoma coalfields to earn cash. The women and children stayed behind, surviving on rabbit, pasta, and polenta. Bandini turned an abandoned schoolhouse into both a school and a church, and held mass in his vestments from the Sunnyside parish. Local Anglo-Protestant residents were not pleased. There were arson attempts on the barns. Someone threatened the school. Bandini, who was short and bearded and unafraid, faced them down himself. The families stayed.
The Vineyards Take Hold
In the spring of 1898 they planted gardens. They planted grapes. The Veneti among them, in particular, knew vines. The first harvest came in August 1899 and the colony threw a thanksgiving picnic on the church grounds, with a spaghetti dinner cooked by the parish women and the first wine of the new world pressed in the barns. That picnic became the Tontitown Grape Festival, which has run every summer since, and is the longest-running Italian festival in Arkansas.
By 1905 Tontitown was being held up by the Italian government as a model colony. The Italian ambassador to Washington came to visit, then sent word back to Rome. Pope Pius X sent Bandini a gold chalice and a set of red vestments. Queen Mother Margherita sent white vestments. The Italian government gave him a medal. In 1909 the town was incorporated, with Father Bandini as its first mayor. By 1922 the grapes had grown into a commercial industry serious enough that the Welch’s company built a juice processing plant in Springdale, five miles east, specifically to handle the Tontitown harvest.
The Landmarks
St. Joseph Catholic Church, 1207 W Henri de Tonti Blvd. The spiritual anchor of Tontitown, founded by Bandini in 1898 in a converted schoolhouse, then rebuilt on its present grounds. The old church building, with its white stone walls and modest bell tower, stood for decades; the current sanctuary was dedicated in 1994. Bandini is buried in the cemetery beside it. The parish still hosts the Grape Festival every August on these grounds, with the same trestle tables and the same homemade sauce that the Veneti grandmothers carried over.
Tontitown Historical Museum, 122 Tontitown Way. Opened in 1986 in the former home of the Bastianelli sisters, daughters of original settlers. The museum holds letters, photographs, ship manifests, family Bibles, the small daily objects the families carried out of Sunnyside. It is open Wednesday through Saturday, run largely by volunteers descended from the founding families, and it is the single best place in the United States to understand what the 1895 Sunnyside disaster actually looked like from the inside.
The Tontitown Grape Festival, every August at the St. Joseph’s grounds. Since 1898, with one or two pandemic interruptions. Three days of grape stomping, spaghetti dinners served by the parish, the crowning of Queen Concordia (a tradition since 1932, when Albina Mantegani was the first), Italian songs, raffle stands, and small wine tastings from the surviving local vineyards. It is the longest-running Italian-American festival in the state of Arkansas.
Post Familie Vineyards, 1700 St. Mary’s Mountain Rd. Founded by Mathew Post, an Italian-Catholic descendant of the original colony, on land that has been in the family for generations. Post Familie still grows grapes and makes wine on the Tontitown ridge, and the tasting room is one of the few places in Arkansas where you can drink wine made from vines descended, in spirit if not always in cutting, from those first Bandini plantings.
Tontitown Winery, on the south edge of town. A smaller family operation, run by descendants of original settler families, producing reds and whites for local sale and a respectable muscadine. The vineyards run right up to the back fences of suburban housing developments now, a strange and pleasant collision of new Northwest Arkansas and old Veneto.
The Venesian Inn, 582 W Henri de Tonti Blvd. Founded in 1947 by Germano and Mary Gasparotti, an Italian restaurant that became, and remains, the unofficial dining room of the colony’s descendants. Hand-rolled spaghetti, fried chicken in the Italian-Ozark style the colony invented, and a guest book signed by four generations of Pianalto, Granata, Ceola, and Cortiana grandchildren.
St. Joseph Cemetery, behind the church. Where Bandini was buried in January 1917, after dying of heart failure at a Little Rock hospital. The headstones are a roll call of the original forty families: Pianalto, Penzo, Ceola, Cortiana, Maestri, Ardemagni, Ranalli, Pozza, Zulpo, Sbanatto, Taldo, Mantegani, Granata. Most of the inscriptions are still in Italian.
Where They Came From
The Tontitown families were not, as the name might suggest, from the south. They came overwhelmingly from northern Italy, and most of them from one region: the Veneto, the rolling agricultural country inland of Venice. The surnames make it clear. Pianalto, Cortiana, Ceola, Penzo, Sbanatto, Taldo, Pozza, Ardemagni: these are Venetian names, mostly from the provinces of Vicenza, Treviso, and the foothills of the Dolomites. Smaller groups came from Emilia-Romagna, including Father Bandini himself, who was born in Forli, and from the Marche on the Adriatic coast.
They came for the same reasons most of northern Italy emptied between 1880 and 1914. High taxes from the new unified kingdom. The agricultural crisis of the 1880s, when American grain undersold European wheat. Conscription into the Italian army’s unpopular colonial wars in East Africa. The pellagra epidemic, which spread through corn-dependent peasant households in the Po Valley. Many had been small landholders in Italy and had no intention of being plantation labourers in America. Sunnyside was a fraud sold to them, and Tontitown was the correction.
Tontitown Today
The town is no longer quite the agricultural island Bandini built. Northwest Arkansas has become one of the fastest-growing metro areas in the United States, driven by Walmart’s headquarters in Bentonville, Tyson Foods in Springdale, and the University of Arkansas in Fayetteville. Suburban housing has crept up to the edge of the old farms. Some of the vineyards have been sold to developers. The population is rising fast and is no longer majority Italian-American.
But the bones of the colony are still there, and they are surprisingly intact. St. Joseph’s parish still functions. The Grape Festival still fills the church grounds every August. Post Familie and Tontitown Winery are still pressing wine from Veneti rootstock. The Venesian Inn still rolls its spaghetti by hand. The Historical Museum still opens its doors four days a week, staffed by Pianalto and Granata grandchildren who can show you a photograph of their great-grandparents walking out of Sunnyside.
What survives in Tontitown is what was always strongest in it. A parish church, a vineyard, a feast in late summer, a cemetery full of Veneti surnames, and a story that begins in a malarial Mississippi cotton field and ends, against every odds, in a small town in the Ozarks named for an Italian explorer who never knew the place existed.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Italians settle in Tontitown, Arkansas?
Italians settled in Tontitown in 1898 after fleeing the disastrous Sunnyside cotton plantation in Chicot County, where malaria, debt peonage, and unfamiliar farming had killed many of their families. Their priest, Father Pietro Bandini, led forty surviving families to the Ozark foothills, where the limestone terrain and dry climate resembled the Veneto region they had left behind.
Is Tontitown still Italian today?
Tontitown is still substantively Italian-American at its core, though the broader Northwest Arkansas boom around Walmart, Tyson Foods, and the University of Arkansas has brought rapid suburban growth and new residents. The original families’ descendants, with surnames like Pianalto, Granata, Ceola, and Cortiana, still run the parish, the vineyards, the restaurants, and the Grape Festival.
What are the most famous Italian landmarks in Tontitown?
The most important landmarks are St. Joseph Catholic Church at 1207 W Henri de Tonti Blvd, founded by Father Bandini in 1898; the Tontitown Historical Museum at 122 Tontitown Way; the annual Tontitown Grape Festival held on the church grounds every August since 1898; Post Familie Vineyards; and the Venesian Inn, a family Italian restaurant founded in 1947.
Where in Italy did the Tontitown Italians come from?
The Tontitown families came overwhelmingly from northern Italy, with the majority from the Veneto region, particularly the provinces of Vicenza, Treviso, and the foothills of the Dolomites. Smaller groups came from Emilia-Romagna, including Father Bandini himself who was born in Forli, and from the Marche region on the Adriatic coast.
When did Italians first arrive in Tontitown?
The first forty Italian families arrived in Tontitown in early 1898, led by Father Pietro Bandini after they walked away from the failing Sunnyside Plantation in southeast Arkansas. They had originally come to the United States in waves in December 1895 and January 1897, recruited from northern Italy by the New York banker Austin Corbin to grow cotton.
What is the Tontitown Grape Festival?
The Tontitown Grape Festival is the longest-running Italian festival in Arkansas, held every August on the grounds of St. Joseph Catholic Church since the first harvest celebration in 1898. It features grape stomping, homemade spaghetti dinners, the crowning of Queen Concordia (a tradition since 1932), Italian music, and wine tastings from local vineyards descended from the colony’s original plantings.
If your family’s story passed through Tontitown, or through Sunnyside before it, or through any of the Veneto and Emilia and Marche villages that emptied into Father Bandini’s care, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hill town inland of Venice, to a cotton plantation on the Mississippi, to a vineyard in the Ozarks, to wherever you are reading this now.