On the second weekend of July, the streets around East Taunton fill with the smell of caçoila and barbecued sardines, a brass band rounds the corner behind a velvet banner, and a crown carried under canopy makes its slow way to Holy Family Church. The Portuguese in Taunton, Massachusetts, have kept this scene alive for generations, an Azorean rite transplanted across the Atlantic and rooted firmly in the soil of the Silver City. In a town where Portuguese is the single largest reported ancestry, the festa is not a costume. It is the calendar.
The Place
Taunton sits in Bristol County, in the southeastern corner of Massachusetts, roughly forty miles south of Boston and a short drive from Fall River and New Bedford. English settlers from Somerset founded Taunton in 1639 and named it for the town they had left behind, a habit of homesickness that the place has practised ever since.
By the nineteenth century it had become an industrial city, nicknamed the Silver City for the fine silverware turned out by firms such as Reed and Barton, founded in 1824, and F.B. Rogers. Iron works, locomotive shops and textile mills crowded its rivers. The 2020 census counted 59,408 residents, and the city still wraps its central green in lights each winter, a tradition begun in 1914 that earned it a second nickname, the Christmas City.
How It Became Portuguese
The Portuguese did not arrive in Taunton by accident. They followed the same Atlantic current that carried tens of thousands of their countrymen to the mill towns and whaling ports of New England, and they came overwhelmingly from one place: the Azores, the nine volcanic islands strung out in the mid-Atlantic between Lisbon and Boston.
The whaling thread, then the mills
The earliest connection ran through the harpoon. New Bedford and Provincetown whalers called at the Azores and Cape Verde to take on water and crew, and young islanders signed on, jumped ship in Massachusetts, and stayed. That first trickle of Azorean men in the mid-nineteenth century established the bridgehead.
What turned a trickle into a community was work. The cotton and woollen mills of Bristol County needed hands, and so did the metal shops of Taunton. Word travelled back to São Miguel and Terceira that there were wages to be had, and the chain of migration began to pull whole families across, one cousin sending for the next.
The volcano and the open door
The pace quickened sharply in the late 1950s. In 1957 the Capelinhos volcano erupted off the western tip of the island of Faial, burying farmland under ash and driving families from their homes. In response, the United States Congress passed the Azorean Refugee Act of 1958, which allowed roughly 4,800 Azoreans displaced by the eruption to immigrate, many of them sponsored by relatives already settled in southeastern Massachusetts.
The door opened wider still in 1965, when the Immigration and Nationality Act abolished the old national-origin quotas that had throttled southern European arrivals for forty years. A fresh wave of Portuguese immigration followed through the 1960s and 1970s, and Taunton, with its mills, its parishes and its established Azorean families, was a natural landing place.
A Luso-American city
By the turn of the millennium the scale of it was plain in the numbers. The 2000 census recorded that around 34 percent of Taunton was Luso-American, with roughly 23 percent reporting Portuguese ancestry and a further 8 percent Cape Verdean. Portuguese remains the single largest reported ancestry in the city today, near 21.7 percent, a share many times the Massachusetts average.
The city formalised these ties abroad. Taunton holds sister-city relationships with Angra do Heroísmo on Terceira and with Lagoa on São Miguel, the two islands that sent so many of its families, a civic acknowledgement of where a fifth of the population traces its roots.
The faith came with them, and it built institutions. Our Lady of the Holy Rosary parish on Bay Street, founded early in the twentieth century to serve Polish immigrants, came in time to serve the Portuguese-speaking community as its congregation shifted. In East Taunton, Holy Family Church became the centre of Azorean devotional life, the church where the great procession of the Holy Ghost ends each summer.
The Landmarks
Holy Family Church, 370 Middleboro Avenue, East Taunton. This is the spiritual anchor of the city’s Azorean community. Each July the Festa do Divino Espírito Santo culminates here with a procession, a mass and a crowning ceremony, after which the congregation walks to the society hall for sopa. The church draws families whose grandparents kept the same rite on São Miguel and Terceira.
Holy Ghost Society of East Taunton. The society runs the Holy Ghost Hall and stages the annual Festa do Divino Espírito Santo, traditionally over the second weekend of July, with the Irmandade do Espírito Santo da Santíssima Trindade as host. Beyond the mass and procession there is music, a bazaar booth, rides, and tables of caçoila, bifana, linguiça and malassadas. The cult of the Holy Spirit is one of the deepest markers of Azorean Catholic identity.
Taunton Sports Club, 33 Baker Road West. A hub of the working-class Portuguese social life that grew up around football and the festa, the club has hosted Holy Ghost feast weekends featuring well-known Luso-American performers. Headliners such as Jorge Ferreira have drawn crowds who grew up dancing to the same singers in the islands.
Our Lady of the Holy Rosary Parish, 80 Bay Street. Built for Taunton’s Polish Catholics in the early twentieth century, the parish later opened its doors to the Portuguese-speaking community as the neighbourhood around it changed. It is a quiet record of how one immigrant congregation handed the keys to the next.
Cantinho dos Açores, 29 Oak Street. The name means “a corner of the Azores,” and the kitchen lives up to it, with slow-cooked meats and the hearty soups of island cooking. It is one of the newer additions to a long line of Portuguese tables in the city, a sign the appetite has not faded with the generations.
The Pearl, 76 Weir Street. A Portuguese restaurant on one of the city’s old commercial streets, it keeps alive the everyday version of the cuisine, the food eaten on a Tuesday rather than reserved for the feast. Weir Street and Weir Village have long carried the city’s immigrant commerce.
Old Colony History Museum, 66 Church Green. Home to the Old Colony Historical Society, founded in 1853, the museum holds the documentary record of a city built by successive waves of newcomers, the Irish, Portuguese, Cape Verdean, Polish and French among them. It is where the story told in this article is kept on paper.
Where They Came From
Taunton’s Portuguese are, above all, Azorean. The chain ran most strongly from São Miguel, the largest island, and from Terceira, home of Angra do Heroísmo, with Faial joining heavily after the Capelinhos eruption of 1957. These are mid-Atlantic islands of dairy pastures, hydrangea hedges and volcanic stone, and the cooking that travelled with their people, the soups and stewed meats and the sweet fried malassadas, is unmistakably island food.
Some came from mainland Portugal and from Madeira, and a substantial Cape Verdean population, descended from the Portuguese colonial islands off West Africa, settled alongside them through the same whaling and mill routes. But the heart of the community, and the festa that defines it, is Azorean, which is why the sister cities are island towns and why the procession in July would be recognised at once by anyone from Angra or Lagoa.
For families tracing similar journeys, the pattern repeats across the region, from the Portuguese in New Bedford and the Portuguese in Fall River to the fishing community of the Portuguese in Provincetown and, far to the west, the Portuguese in Point Loma, San Diego.
Taunton Today
The mills are mostly quiet now and the great silver firms have closed, but the Portuguese imprint on Taunton has outlasted the industries that drew people here. It survives in the parishes, the social clubs, the bakeries and restaurants, and most visibly in the summer festa that still empties homes and fills the streets of East Taunton each July.
The community has aged and broadened, as immigrant communities do. The grandchildren of mill hands are teachers, nurses, business owners and city officials, and not all of them speak Portuguese at home. Yet the institutions hold, the Portuguese American Civic Club, established in 1929, still runs its hall, and the Holy Ghost Society still crowns its emperor each year.
What Taunton offers, in the end, is a working example of how a heritage endures without a museum casing around it. The Azores live here not as a memory but as a habit: in a bowl of sopa after Sunday mass, in a banner carried down Middleboro Avenue, in the way a fifth of a New England city still answers, when asked where its family is from, with the name of an island.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Portuguese people live in Taunton, Massachusetts?
Portuguese is the single largest reported ancestry in Taunton, near 21.7 percent of residents, far above the Massachusetts average of under 4 percent. The 2000 census recorded roughly 34 percent of the city as Luso-American once Cape Verdean ancestry is included. The Portuguese in Taunton, Massachusetts, remain the city’s defining ethnic community.
Why did so many Portuguese settle in Taunton?
Azorean men first arrived through New England’s whaling trade in the nineteenth century, then chain migration pulled families to the cotton mills and metal shops of Bristol County. Later arrivals followed the 1958 Azorean Refugee Act and the 1965 Immigration Act, drawn by relatives already settled in the area.
Where did Taunton’s Portuguese community come from?
Overwhelmingly from the Azores, especially the islands of São Miguel, Terceira and Faial. Taunton holds sister-city ties with Angra do Heroísmo on Terceira and Lagoa on São Miguel, the very places many families left. Smaller numbers came from mainland Portugal, Madeira and Cape Verde.
What is the Festa do Divino Espírito Santo in Taunton?
It is the Feast of the Holy Spirit, an Azorean Catholic celebration held each July by the Holy Ghost Society of East Taunton. It features a procession, a crowning ceremony and mass at Holy Family Church, followed by sopa served at the society hall, alongside music, a bazaar and traditional Portuguese food.
Where can you find Portuguese food in Taunton?
Cantinho dos Açores at 29 Oak Street serves Azorean home cooking, and The Pearl on Weir Street offers Portuguese fare on one of the city’s old commercial streets. During the July festa, the Holy Ghost grounds in East Taunton serve caçoila, bifana, linguiça and malassadas.
What is the connection between the Portuguese in Taunton, Massachusetts, and the Azores?
The bond is direct and formal. A large majority of the community traces its roots to the Azores, and the city maintains sister-city relationships with Azorean towns. Azorean devotional traditions, above all the cult of the Holy Spirit, remain central to community life in Taunton today.
If your family’s story passed through Taunton, or any of the places Portuguese have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a hillside parish on São Miguel or Terceira, to a procession down Middleboro Avenue in East Taunton, to wherever you are now.