On the last Sunday of June, a procession winds from St. Michael’s Church down to the Hudson Portuguese Club, where vats of Holy Ghost soup simmer and sweet bread cools on long tables. The crowns are Marian, the music is from the Azores, and the accents in the street are pure Santa Maria. To understand the Portuguese in Hudson, Massachusetts, you start here, in a small Assabet River mill town where roughly one in three residents traces a line back to a single volcanic island in the middle of the Atlantic.
The Place
Hudson sits in eastern Worcester County, about thirty miles west of Boston, on a curve of the Assabet River. It was settled by Europeans around 1698, spent generations as the Marlborough village of Feltonville, and was incorporated as its own town on 16 March 1866.
From roughly 1850 until the late 1960s it was a mill town in the New England mould, its factories powered by the river and its prosperity built on leather. At its peak the town carried the nickname “Shoe Town”, with seventeen shoe factories crowding the centre.
The last great shoe factory burned in 1968, and the leather trade went with it. What remains is a compact, walkable downtown of nineteenth-century brick that has, in the last decade, become one of the most talked-about small Main Streets in Massachusetts.
How It Became Portuguese
Hudson’s factories needed hands, and in the second half of the nineteenth century they pulled in workers from England, Ireland, Germany, Lithuania, Poland, Greece, Italy and, eventually, the Azores. Most of those communities have since faded into the general population. The Portuguese stayed, and grew, and made the town their own.
One man, 1886
The town’s Portuguese story has a documented beginning. In July 1886, José Maria Tavares arrived in Hudson from the Azores, the first Portuguese immigrant recorded in the town. He came, as nearly all who followed him did, from a string of nine volcanic islands roughly nine hundred miles off the coast of mainland Portugal.
Others followed through the factory gates. By the early twentieth century there were enough Azorean families in Hudson to build the apparatus of a community: a fraternal lodge, a grocer, a band, a church society.
Lodges, grocers and a brass band
In 1908, Lodge No. 19 of the Portuguese Fraternity was formed under its first president, José Grilo. In 1913, Victorino Bairos and António J. Chaves opened the first Portuguese grocery store in town, the kind of shop where salt cod and linguiça and the news from home all changed hands across the same counter.
A Portuguese brass band came together in the winter of 1914 and gave its first performance in 1915. The following year a Holy Ghost Brotherhood was formed by immigrants from the island of São Miguel, carrying to Hudson a Marian devotion that is now the spine of the town’s calendar.
A club that outlived all the others
The institution that anchored everything began in 1919 as the Hudson Sport Club, with headquarters at 86 Apsley Street and João Rio as its first president. The club closed in 1922 and reformed as the Clube Português de Hudson, taking rooms at 49 Main Street.
It incorporated in 1928, the year land was secured, and in 1933 it moved to Port Street, near the river, where it has remained ever since. Hudson once had ethnic clubs for several of its immigrant groups. The Portuguese Club is the one that outlived them all.
The wave that came after Capelinhos
The community that José Maria Tavares started would be transformed by a volcano. In 1957 and 1958, the Capelinhos volcano off the island of Faial erupted for more than a year, burying farms under ash and driving thousands of Azoreans from their homes.
Congress responded with the Azorean Refugee Acts of 1958 and 1960, admitting thousands of islanders outside the usual quotas. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 then dismantled the old national-origins system entirely, and Azorean migration to New England towns like Hudson surged through the 1960s and 1970s.
This is the wave that gave modern Hudson its character. By the 1920s the Portuguese population had already passed a thousand, more than a tenth of the town. The post-war arrivals turned a substantial minority into the defining thread of local life. Hudson elected its first Portuguese-American selectman, António D. Chaves, in 1977.
The Landmarks
Hudson Portuguese Club, 13 Port Street. The community’s living room since 1933. The club moved into new function-hall and restaurant facilities that opened on New Year’s Eve 2004, with formal inaugural ceremonies the following May. On its grounds stands a chapel to Our Lady of Fatima, first built in 1951 by John P. Rio.
St. Michael Parish, 21 Manning Street. The Catholic parish at the heart of the Portuguese feast days, with Masses offered in Portuguese for the island-born and their descendants. The Coronation Mass of the Holy Ghost feast is held here, and the procession to the Portuguese Club steps off from its doors.
Silva’s Bakery, 140 Main Street. A Portuguese bakery that has run for more than seventy years on Hudson’s Main Street. Locals queue for the sweet bread, the custard tarts and the Portuguese rolls that come out of the oven fresh in the afternoon. It is the kind of place that makes a town’s heritage edible.
The Holy Ghost feast, last weekend of June. The Império Mariense festival, named for Santa Maria and rooted in a devotion that dates back centuries, is staged by the Holy Ghost Society. Saturday brings music, dancing and a recited rosary. Sunday brings the Coronation Mass, the procession, and bowls of Holy Ghost soup served with sweet bread and malassadas.
Hudson Town Centre and Main Street. The brick blocks that once housed shoe factories now hold one of the most celebrated small downtowns in the country. Hudson won the national America’s Main Street contest, beating more than two hundred other towns, a revival built on restaurants, cafes and the foot traffic the trail brings in.
The Assabet River Rail Trail. The multi-use path that runs through the centre of town, threading the old rail bed past the river that once powered the factories. It is the artery that ties the Portuguese Main Street of bakeries and shops to the wider town and brings visitors into the heart of it.
Where They Came From
Hudson’s Portuguese are, overwhelmingly, Azorean, and within the Azores they are overwhelmingly from one island: Santa Maria, the southernmost and oldest-settled of the nine. Smaller numbers came from São Miguel and Madeira, with a thread reaching back to the mainland region of Trás-os-Montes in the far north-east of Portugal.
The Azores were a place of small farms, hard volcanic soil and too many people for the land to hold. Emigration was the safety valve, first to the whaling ships that called at Faial in the nineteenth century, later to the mill towns of New England where relatives had already cleared the path.
That chain explains why a town like Hudson fills with people from one island in particular. One family sends for the next; a cousin finds a job at the bench beside an uncle; a whole village reassembles, slowly, across the ocean. The same Azorean pull shaped the older and larger Portuguese strongholds down on the coast, the communities you can read about in the Portuguese of New Bedford and the Portuguese of Fall River.
Hudson is the inland cousin of those mill-and-port cities. Where the coastal Portuguese went to the sea, drawn to fishing fleets in places like the Portuguese of Provincetown at the tip of Cape Cod, the Hudson Azoreans went to the leather bench and the rubber works. The destination differed; the islands of origin did not. The same migration even reached the Pacific, where a fishing colony grew at Point Loma in San Diego. Hudson is simply the version of that story set on a river thirty miles from Boston.
Hudson Today
About a third of Hudson’s roughly twenty thousand residents are Portuguese by descent or birth, a proportion that has held even as the town has become a destination for newcomers drawn by that admired Main Street. The 2020 census counted just over twenty thousand people, the largest the town has ever been. The town’s own historical record dates the Portuguese presence to 1886 and credits it as the most enduring of all the immigrant streams the shoe factories pulled in.
That endurance sets Hudson apart from its old industrial neighbours. The mill towns of central Massachusetts each drew their own immigrant labour, and many of those identities have softened into memory, like the French Canadians who built the mills of Lowell or the Irish who settled towns such as Milton south of Boston. In Hudson the Portuguese never softened. They became the town’s centre of gravity.
The heritage is no longer carried only by the elderly. The Portuguese Club still hosts weddings and dinners and the New Year’s Eve party that opened its current hall. The feast still fills the streets each June. Silva’s still sells out of rolls. A second generation, and a third, keeps the language and the Marian devotions alive even as English becomes the everyday tongue.
It is a quieter Portuguese story than the big coastal ports, but a remarkably durable one. In a town that lost its shoe factories and reinvented itself as a culinary day-trip, the one constant across a century and a half has been the islanders from Santa Maria and the institutions they built. The shoe factories are gone. The Portuguese Club, founded in 1919, is still on Port Street.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Portuguese people live in Hudson, Massachusetts?
About one-third of Hudson’s roughly twenty thousand residents are of Portuguese descent or birth, making the Portuguese in Hudson, Massachusetts the defining ethnic community in the town. Portuguese ancestry has been a major share of the population since the 1920s.
Where did Hudson’s Portuguese community come from?
The great majority came from the Azores, and within the Azores chiefly from the island of Santa Maria, with smaller numbers from São Miguel and Madeira and a few from the mainland region of Trás-os-Montes. Chain migration drew relatives from the same villages to the same Massachusetts mill town.
When did the Portuguese first settle in Hudson?
The first documented Portuguese immigrant, José Maria Tavares, arrived in July 1886. The community grew through the early twentieth century and surged after the 1957 Capelinhos volcanic eruption and the immigration reforms of 1958, 1960 and 1965.
What is the Hudson Portuguese Club?
It is the social and cultural heart of the Portuguese in Hudson, Massachusetts. Founded in 1919, incorporated in 1928 and based on Port Street since 1933, it opened new function-hall and restaurant facilities in 2004 and has outlived all of Hudson’s other ethnic clubs.
What is the Holy Ghost feast in Hudson?
The Império Mariense festival, held on the last weekend of June by the Holy Ghost Society, is an Azorean Marian tradition. It features a Coronation Mass at St. Michael Parish, a procession to the Portuguese Club, and Holy Ghost soup served with sweet bread and malassadas.
Where can I find Portuguese food in Hudson?
Silva’s Bakery at 140 Main Street has sold Portuguese sweet bread, custard tarts and fresh rolls for more than seventy years, and the Hudson Portuguese Club restaurant on Port Street serves Azorean fare. The June feast is the best time to taste the full range, from soup to malassadas.
If your family’s story passed through Hudson, or any of the places Portuguese families have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a farm on Santa Maria to a bench in a Shoe Town factory, to a crown carried down Port Street, to wherever you are now.