The town is named for the vine, and the men who came to tend it carried the cuttings in their memory. To understand the Italians in Vineland, New Jersey, you begin with a Philadelphia lawyer’s advertisement, a teetotal dentist’s experiment with grape juice, and tens of thousands of acres of cheap, cleared South Jersey soil that promised, to a family from Avellino or Foggia, something close to a second chance.
The Place
Vineland sits in Cumberland County, in the flat agricultural belt of South Jersey, roughly forty miles south of Philadelphia and inland from the Atlantic shore. It is not a quaint colonial village but a deliberately drawn grid, laid out in 1861 by the developer Charles K. Landis along a railway line he had helped secure.
Landis bought some 20,000 acres of pine and scrub and platted a planned community with a mile-wide central avenue, generous farm lots radiating outward, and a strict ban on the sale of alcohol. It was, in the language of the day, a temperance town and a utopian one.
That founding shaped everything. A town built around cheap farmland, fruit, and the moral seriousness of sober labour proved the ideal place for a generation of southern Italian farmers who knew vines, knew patience, and asked for nothing more than ground of their own.
How It Became Italian
Landis advertised, and the contadini answered
Charles Landis was a salesman as much as a planner. He named his settlement Vineland because he had concluded the sandy loam could carry grapes, and he advertised widely, in Europe as well as America, for cultivators who would clear a lot, plant it, and stay.
The offer was concrete: parcels of around twenty acres that a settler was expected to clear and put to fruit. To the contadino who in the old country worked another man’s land under another man’s terms, the arithmetic was almost unbelievable. Land you could own, on a railway to two great cities, in a country that wanted you to farm it.
The first Italians arrived in the 1870s and 1880s, and they did not come at random. They came in chains, one cousin writing home, one paese sending its sons, until whole stretches of the Vineland outskirts were settled by families from the same few provinces of the Mezzogiorno.
The grape that became grape juice
The vine gave Vineland its name and, indirectly, one of its most famous exports. In 1869 a Vineland dentist named Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch, a devout Methodist who objected to the use of fermented wine in church communion, pasteurised the juice of local grapes to halt fermentation. He called the result an unfermented wine.
His son Charles built the idea into a business. The enterprise that became the Welch’s Grape Juice Company began with Vineland fruit, though the family later moved the main operation to New York state when local grape supply proved insufficient for the demand. The grape arbours that fed those first batches were tended, in no small part, by Italian hands.
Grapes alone did not sustain the colony. The Italians of Vineland diversified quickly into the truck farming and fruit growing the region’s soil rewarded, and became the backbone of an economy that ran on small, intensively worked family farms.
Dandelions, escarole, and a peasant cuisine planted in Jersey soil
Among the more remarkable legacies of these settlers is the humble dandelion. Italian immigrants brought the cultivated dandelion to the area as a crop, prized as a bitter green for salads and the southern Italian table, and Vineland became its American capital.
The first National Dandelion Festival was held in Vineland in 1973, and the city has marked the green ever since, with a later mayor proclaiming Vineland the Dandelion Capital of the World. Alongside the dandelion came escarole, endive, and fennel, the finocchio of a transplanted cuisine grown commercially because the people who arrived actually wanted to eat it.
To organise the selling of all this produce, Vineland growers established the Vineland Cooperative Produce Auction in 1930, a marketplace that gave small Italian farmers collective leverage they could never have managed alone. It remains in operation, one of the oldest farmer-owned auctions of its kind in the country.
The other settlers, and a town of immigrants
The Italians were not the only group Landis’s cheap land drew. Beginning in the 1880s, Jewish agricultural colonists fleeing the pogroms of the Russian Empire settled the same South Jersey belt, and Vineland became an anchor of Jewish farm life.
That community deepened after the Second World War, when roughly a thousand Holocaust survivors took up poultry and egg farming around Vineland, financed in part through the Jewish Agricultural Society, until South Jersey was for a time among the egg capitals of the eastern United States. It is a parallel story to the Jewish communities that later concentrated in places like Lakewood and Passaic elsewhere in New Jersey.
But it was the Italians who came earliest, settled most thickly, and most shaped the everyday texture of the town. Where Jewish farmers raised chickens, Italians raised vines, fruit, and greens, and the two communities farmed side by side for the better part of a century.
The Landmarks
Our Lady of Pompeii Church, 4680 Dante Avenue. The street name alone tells you who built the parish. Our Lady of Pompeii has long been the spiritual centre of Italian Vineland, the place where baptisms, weddings, and funeral Masses tied the generations of farming families together. Its devotion to the Madonna of Pompeii is a direct transplant from the religious life of the Italian south.
Merighi’s Savoy Inn, 4940 Landis Avenue. Ernest and Rose Merighi bought the old Hotel Savoy in 1954 and worked it seven days a week, he behind the bar and she in the kitchen. Three generations later it is a local landmark, its ballrooms and gardens the setting for countless Vineland weddings and anniversaries, and its menu still anchored in the Italian American cooking the family brought to it.
Giovanni’s Italian American Delicatessen, 1102 North East Avenue. A neighbourhood deli of the old school, with a full counter of domestic and imported meats and the kind of prepared Italian food that families carry home for Sunday. It is the sort of place that survives because the surrounding streets still want what it sells.
The Vineland Cooperative Produce Auction. Founded by local growers in 1930, the auction was the engine room of the immigrant farm economy, the place where a small family’s escarole, peppers, and tomatoes were turned into a living. That it endures says something about how deeply the agricultural habit took root here.
Landis Avenue. The mile-wide central avenue Charles Landis platted is the spine of the town, lined over the decades with the Italian restaurants, bakeries, and pizzerias that mark a community by its appetite. From the bistros at the east end to the older storefronts toward the centre, it is the public room of Italian Vineland.
The Italian Cultural Foundation of South Jersey. A Vineland-based organisation that raises money for student scholarships and local charities while keeping the threads of Italian heritage tied together, through events, education, and the simple work of remembering. It is the institutional form of a community that did not want to forget where it came from.
The dandelion fields. Not a single address but a landscape. The cultivated dandelion that southern Italians planted as a crop still grows on Vineland farms, and the festival that celebrates it remains the clearest living sign that this was a town a particular kind of immigrant made.
Where They Came From
The Italians of Vineland came overwhelmingly from the Mezzogiorno, the impoverished south of Italy, and from Sicily. These were the regions, Campania, Abruzzo, Puglia, Calabria, and the Sicilian provinces, that sent the great mass of Italians to America between roughly 1880 and 1920.
They left for reasons that were brutally practical: exhausted soil, drought, cholera and malaria, crushing taxes, and a system of landholding that kept the contadino permanently in another man’s debt. The land in South Jersey was cheap, the soil was workable, and a man could clear a lot and call it his.
Chain migration did the rest. A single family that prospered in Vineland became a beacon, and the letters and remittances sent home pulled whole networks of relatives and neighbours across the Atlantic to the same grid of streets, until the outskirts of Landis’s temperance town spoke the dialects of a handful of southern provinces.
Vineland Today
Vineland today is a working South Jersey city of more than sixty thousand people, and Italian ancestry remains one of its defining strands. By the figures of the mid 2010s, somewhere around a fifth of residents claimed Italian descent, placing Vineland among the most Italian municipalities in a state that counts well over a million people of Italian heritage.
The farms are fewer than they were, and the dandelion trade in particular has thinned as tastes have changed and the old growers have aged out. The city’s population has also grown markedly more Latino over recent decades, and Vineland is now a place of layered immigrations rather than a single one, which is, in its way, entirely faithful to how it began.
Yet the Italian imprint is not nostalgic so much as load-bearing. It is in the parish on Dante Avenue, the produce auction, the family restaurant that has fed three generations of weddings, and the dandelion festival no other American town would think to hold. The Italians in Vineland did not just settle a place. They taught it what to grow and what to eat, and the town has not forgotten the lesson.
For the descendants, Vineland is the kind of inheritance that is easy to take for granted: a surname, a recipe, a grandfather’s account of clearing twenty acres of scrub by hand. It is the close of a migration that runs from a hilltown in the Italian south, across an ocean, to a flat grid of streets named hopefully for the vine.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are there so many Italians in Vineland, New Jersey?
The Italians in Vineland, New Jersey arrived because the town’s founder, Charles K. Landis, advertised cheap farmland in the 1860s and 1870s and specifically wanted cultivators for the grapes the soil could grow. Southern Italian farmers, who could rarely own land at home, answered in large numbers, and chain migration brought their relatives after them.
When did Italians first settle in Vineland?
Italians began arriving in Vineland in the 1870s and 1880s, in the decades after Charles Landis founded the town in 1861. The bulk of the migration came between roughly 1880 and 1920, the peak years of Italian emigration from the Mezzogiorno to the United States.
What is Vineland’s connection to Welch’s grape juice?
Welch’s grape juice began in Vineland in 1869, when the local dentist Dr. Thomas Bramwell Welch pasteurised the juice of locally grown grapes to make an unfermented communion wine. The grapes that fed the early batches were grown in the arbours that Italian and other settlers cultivated, though the company later moved its main production to New York state.
Why is Vineland called the Dandelion Capital of the World?
Italian immigrants brought the cultivated dandelion to Vineland as a crop, valuing the bitter green for southern Italian cooking, and local farms grew it commercially. The city has held a dandelion festival since 1973, and a later mayor proclaimed Vineland the Dandelion Capital of the World.
How many Italians live in Vineland today?
Italian ancestry remains one of the largest in Vineland, with roughly a fifth of residents claiming Italian descent by mid 2010s estimates. That places the Italians in Vineland, New Jersey among the most concentrated Italian American populations in a state with well over a million people of Italian heritage.
What landmarks reflect Italian heritage in Vineland?
Our Lady of Pompeii Church on Dante Avenue, Merighi’s Savoy Inn on Landis Avenue, family delis such as Giovanni’s, the Vineland Cooperative Produce Auction, and the Italian Cultural Foundation of South Jersey all reflect the community’s heritage. The annual dandelion festival is the most distinctive marker of the town’s Italian farming past.
If your family’s story passed through Vineland, or any of the places Italians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hilltown in the Italian south, to twenty acres of cleared Cumberland County scrub, to wherever you are now.
Vineland’s story rhymes with the Italian farming colony just up the road in Hammonton, and with the Italian neighbourhoods that grew in older New England towns like Bristol, Rhode Island, East Haven, Connecticut, and Revere, Massachusetts. For the urban end of the same migration, the festive Italian streets of Dyker Heights in Brooklyn tell a different chapter of the same story. You can read more about the town’s founding at the biography of Charles K. Landis.