Walk north up Acushnet Avenue on a Saturday morning and the smell reaches you before the storefronts do. Linguica curling on a griddle, sugar-dusted malassadas still warm in a bakery case, strong coffee in a glass. Old men argue about soccer in Portuguese on the sidewalk while a butcher ties off another rope of chourico. This is the North End, and it has sounded and smelled like this for more than a century.
The Portuguese in New Bedford did not arrive as tourists or as a footnote. They came off the decks of whaling ships, then off the floors of cotton mills, and they stayed long enough to make this old Massachusetts seaport the most Portuguese city in America. Today roughly a third or more of New Bedford claims Portuguese ancestry, and the city sends its mayor across the Atlantic to a small island in the Azores to honor the bond.
That bond was forged in the hardest way imaginable: on a whaleship, two thousand miles from home, hunting an animal that could kill you with one turn of its tail.
New Bedford: The Place
New Bedford sits on the west bank of the Acushnet River where it opens into Buzzards Bay, on the south coast of Massachusetts about an hour below Boston. The Portuguese story concentrates in the North End, the dense grid of streets and three-decker houses that runs inland from Acushnet Avenue, the neighborhood’s spine. The harbor that built the city still works, now as one of the highest-grossing fishing ports in the country. The housing stock is mostly wood-frame triple-deckers, mill cottages, and brick blocks raised in the cotton boom.
How New Bedford Became Portuguese
Before the Portuguese
New Bedford was a Quaker whaling town before it was anything else. By the 1820s it had grown into the whaling capital of the world, its wharves crowded with ships that left for two, three, even four years at a stretch to hunt sperm whales across the Pacific. The oil they brought back lit the lamps of America and greased its machines, and for a stretch of the nineteenth century New Bedford was said to be the richest city per capita in the United States.
Those long voyages had a problem built into them. A ship could not carry a full crew of New Englanders for a voyage that paid only at the very end, and men deserted, sickened, or died at sea. Captains needed to take on hands somewhere along the way. The prevailing winds gave them an answer almost as soon as they cleared the harbor.
The Portuguese Arrive
The winds carried New Bedford ships first toward the Azores, the nine Portuguese islands scattered in the mid-Atlantic. The whaler Charles W. Morgan, launched in New Bedford in 1841 and still afloat as a museum ship today, made its first port of call at Porto Pim in Horta, on the island of Faial, to take on supplies before crossing the ocean. That stop was routine. Captains topped off their water and provisions, sold a little whale oil, and signed on island men to fill out the crew.
For Azorean farmers and fishermen, a berth on a Yankee whaler was a way out. The islands were crowded and poor, the soil divided into ever-smaller plots, and young men faced years of conscription into the Portuguese army. A whaleship offered escape and the faint promise of America at the end of it. Beginning around 1800 they came aboard in growing numbers, and by the 1860s Portuguese seamen made up as much as sixty percent of New Bedford whaling crews. Many rose to harpooner, mate, and master. From the turn of the century until American whaling died out in the 1920s, Portuguese captains and crews were the dominant force in the trade they had once merely joined.
The men who survived the voyages came ashore in New Bedford and stayed. The earliest cluster settled near the waterfront in a knot of shanties locals nicknamed Fayal, after the island so many of them had left. They wrote home, and they sent for brothers, cousins, and wives. This is the thread that defines the whole story. The whaleship brought the first man, and the first man brought the family.
New Bedford at Its Peak
Whaling was already fading when the next engine of arrival fired up. New Bedford had opened its first cotton mill in 1846, when the Wamsutta Mills was incorporated, and by 1849 it was weaving its first cloth. As whale oil gave way to kerosene, the city poured its whaling fortunes into textiles. By around 1920, at the height of the boom, New Bedford ran some seventy mills employing more than forty thousand workers, one of the largest cotton-manufacturing centers in the country.
The mills needed hands, and the hands came from Portugal. After 1870, immigrants from the island of Madeira and from mainland Portugal joined the Azoreans already there, this time recruited not by whaling captains but by the promise of steady factory wages. Whole families worked the spinning and weaving rooms, children included. By 1905 more than seven thousand islanders had settled in the city. The Portuguese became, and remain, the largest cultural community in New Bedford.
As the neighborhood filled, it built the institutions that anchor it still. In 1871 the parish of St. John the Baptist was founded to serve the Portuguese, the first Portuguese-American Catholic parish in the country. The South End got its own parish, Our Lady of Mount Carmel, in 1902, founded by Father Jose Duarte Nunes, a priest from the Azorean island of Terceira. The North End followed with Our Lady of the Immaculate Conception in 1909. Around the churches grew the bakeries, the social clubs, and the import shops of a working Portuguese neighborhood, the same kind of immigrant enclave taking shape in cities up the coast, from the Ironbound to the Italian North End of Boston.
The Change
The mills did not last. Cotton manufacturing began moving south in the 1920s for cheaper labor, and the Depression finished much of what remained. The great brick mills emptied out, and for decades many stood as hulks along the river. Yet the Portuguese community did not scatter the way mill towns often do, because a second wave was already on its way.
On September 27, 1957, the Capelinhos volcano erupted off the western tip of Faial and burned for more than a year, swallowing farmland and homes. Senators John F. Kennedy and John Pastore pushed through the Azorean Refugee Act, signed in 1958, opening thousands of visas to islanders. The new arrivals poured into the same North End streets their countrymen had settled a century before, refilling the parishes and the storefronts. In 1972 the city made the connection official, naming Horta on Faial its sister city, with Mayor John A. Markey traveling to the Azores to sign the agreement.
The Landmarks of the Portuguese in New Bedford
St. John the Baptist Church, 344 County Street. Founded in 1871, this was the first Portuguese Catholic parish in the United States, the mother church of immigrant New Bedford. The original building was dedicated in 1875 and destroyed by fire in 1908, and the gray stone Romanesque church standing today went up in 1913 to a design by Boston architect Matthew Sullivan. After a hundred and forty-one years it merged with another parish and closed in 2012, but its towers still mark the skyline above the old neighborhood.
Madeira Field, 50 Madeira Avenue. Every August this field in the North End hosts the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, billed as the largest Portuguese feast in the world. It began in 1915 when four immigrants from Madeira kept a promise made during a dangerous Atlantic crossing, reviving the festa of their home village of Estreito da Calheta. The founders, three of them named Manuel, started it at the Immaculate Conception church; the Club Madeirense S.S. Sacramento bought the field beginning in 1951 to give it a permanent home.
Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Rivet Street, South End. Father Jose Duarte Nunes, a native of Terceira, bought a tract on Rivet Street in 1902 and dedicated the new parish to the Virgin under the title of Mount Carmel. Its summer procession, with the statue carried through streets lined by families from the islands, remains one of the most photographed traditions in the city.
WJFD 97.3 FM, New Bedford. The Portuguese language has aired from this frequency since 1950, and WJFD calls itself the most powerful Portuguese-language FM station in the United States, broadcasting around the clock. For immigrants who arrived after the volcano, and for the generation before them, the radio was how you heard news from home, fado in the evening, and the death notices read aloud.
Acushnet Avenue, the North End. Not a single building but a corridor, this is the commercial heart of Portuguese New Bedford. Along its blocks sit the salchicharias that smoke their own linguica and cacoila, the bakeries that fry malassadas to order, and the cafes where the talk is still in Portuguese. The Portuguese Times, the community’s weekly newspaper, has long been published from the city as well.
The Wamsutta Mills site, Acushnet Avenue. Incorporated in 1846, Wamsutta was the city’s first cotton mill and the seed of the industry that drew Madeirans and mainlanders by the thousands. The surviving mill buildings, brick and block-long, are the ghost at the center of this story: the reason the second wave of Portuguese came, and the floors where so many of them spent their working lives.
Where the New Bedford Portuguese Came From
The great majority came from the Azores, the mid-ocean islands that were the first stop for every outbound whaler. Faial, with its whaling port at Horta, sent so many people that an early New Bedford settlement was nicknamed Fayal in its honor, and the island remains the city’s sister across the water. Terceira, Sao Miguel, Flores, and the other islands fed the same migration, first by way of the whaleships and later through chain migration as families followed the men who had gone before.
The mill era widened the map. After 1870 the textile factories drew immigrants from the island of Madeira, far to the south, and from mainland Portugal, who arrived for steady wages rather than a berth at sea. The Madeirans brought their own village traditions with them, most enduringly the feast from Estreito da Calheta that became New Bedford’s largest celebration. It is worth noting that New Bedford whalers also recruited heavily in the Cape Verde islands, then under Portuguese rule, and Cape Verdean families built their own distinct community in the city and in nearby Brockton and the surrounding mill towns, a separate story that deserves its own telling.
New Bedford Today
New Bedford is still, by share of population, the most Portuguese city in America, with roughly a third or more of its hundred thousand residents claiming Portuguese ancestry. The North End remains the place to find it, in the bakeries on Acushnet Avenue, on the air at WJFD, and on Madeira Field every August when the feast brings crowds in the hundreds of thousands for barbecue cooked over a forty-foot pit and Madeira wine poured in the Santana House.
It is not frozen in amber. The young leave the three-deckers for the suburbs the way young people everywhere do, and the parishes that once overflowed have merged and thinned. Portuguese is spoken less on some blocks than it was a generation ago, and newer arrivals from Brazil and Central America have changed the mix of the old neighborhood. The community keeps the harbor in business, sends its children to bilingual classrooms, and still ties its public life to a volcanic island most Americans could not find on a map.
The whaleship that first carried an Azorean farmer to this harbor is long gone, preserved as a relic in a museum. The story it started is not. It is in the smell of linguica on a Saturday and the sound of the radio in Portuguese, a chapter that is still, quietly, being written.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did the Portuguese settle in New Bedford?
The Portuguese in New Bedford came first as crewmen on the city’s whaling ships, which stopped in the Azores to take on supplies and men. When whaling faded, the booming cotton mills drew thousands more from Madeira and mainland Portugal for steady factory work, and families followed the men who had already settled.
Is New Bedford still a Portuguese city today?
Yes. Roughly a third or more of New Bedford’s residents claim Portuguese ancestry, making it the most Portuguese city in America by share of population. The North End still has Portuguese bakeries, a Portuguese-language radio station, and the largest Portuguese feast in the world each August.
What are the most famous Portuguese landmarks in New Bedford?
St. John the Baptist Church on County Street, founded in 1871, was the first Portuguese-American Catholic parish in the country. The other touchstones are Madeira Field, home of the Feast of the Blessed Sacrament, and Acushnet Avenue, the commercial spine of the Portuguese North End.
Where in Portugal did the New Bedford Portuguese come from?
Most came from the Azores, especially Faial, which is now New Bedford’s sister city, along with Terceira, Sao Miguel, and Flores. A later wave came from the island of Madeira and from mainland Portugal to work in the textile mills after 1870.
When did the Portuguese first arrive in New Bedford?
Azoreans began joining New Bedford whaling crews and settling in the city around 1800. The larger migration of the Portuguese in New Bedford came after 1870, drawn by the textile mills, with a second major wave arriving after the 1957 Capelinhos volcano eruption on Faial.
If your family’s story passed through New Bedford, a whaleship, a mill floor, a three-decker in the North End, those names and dates are the start of something you can trace.