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Immigrants from Europe between 1880 and 1924 spawned four South churches marking centennials this year
Wednesday, May 23, 2001 By Linda Wilson Fuoco, Post-Gazette Staff Writer
Three Monongahela Valley churches and two Mon riverfront towns are celebrating their 100th anniversaries this year along with a church on Pittsburgh's South Side. What was going on in 1901 to produce this abundance?
That year fell almost exactly in the middle of what historians call The New Immigration Period, said Nicholas P. Ciotola, a curator at the Senator John Heinz Pittsburgh Regional History Center.
So, the overlapping birthdays are beyond coincidence.
From 1880 until 1924, immigrants arrived in this country in droves, primarily from Eastern and Southern Europe. And soon after settling in, each ethnic group established its own church.
The 100-year-old churches and towns reflect this pattern:
In 1901, Munhall and West Homestead sprang up to the east and west of their older neighbor, Homestead.
Ellis Island, the New York City port of entry for European immigrants, was built to handle the huge numbers, Ciotola said. The peak years for Ellis Island were 1892 to 1924.
"With restrictions on immigration in the 1920s, Ellis Island's population dwindled, and the station finally closed its doors in 1954," according to the official Web site http://www.ellisisland.com/indexHistory.html.
Immigration historians talk about "push and pull" factors. People were pushed out of their homelands "because they cannot make a good living," Ciotola said. They were pulled to Pittsburgh and the Mon Valley by the prospect of jobs in steel mills and coal mines.
The steel mills were the lure that brought The Mesta Machine Co. to the Mon Valley. In 1898, the machine shop opened in the shadow of Andrew Carnegie's plants. Two years later, the land the machine shop stood on became part of the new community named West Homestead.
Turn-of-the-century immigrants were generally leaving agricultural backgrounds, Ciotola said. Usually they didn't own the land they farmed. They were poor and hungry and had virtually no prospects of improving their social or economic status.
Agricultural disasters, such as droughts, could act as a "push" factor, Ciotola said.
The famous potato famine of Ireland occurred in 1846, driving a huge wave of Irish immigrants to the United States. The Irish were preceded in the early 1800s by the Scots-Irish, who left home for religious reasons.
Political upheaval pushed immigration at some points in time, Ciotola said.
People who arrived in the New Immigration Period "were generally unskilled and from farm backgrounds. People with skills were sometimes recruited, such as Italian stonecutters, who were hired to work in Lawrence County stone quarries.
"When the immigrants first came, they and their children often didn't emphasize the old ways," Ciotola said. "They wanted to be Americans. Between World War I and World War II, there was an extreme backlash against immigrants" that tended to dampen enthusiasm for keeping alive the ethnic traditions of Europe.
"By the 1960s and 1970s, the grandchildren and great-grandchildren started going back to their roots," learning about the music, dance, food and traditions of their ancestors.
Ciotola, who has a master's degree in history from the University of New Mexico, is curator of the Italian American Collection at the Heinz History Center.
The study of immigrants and immigration was not a major field of study for historians in the past, but it's now a growing field, he said. His grandparents left Italy and settled in New York, where he grew up. However, some of his relatives migrated west, settling in Pittsburgh's Bloomfield neighborhood.
The history center is working on an exhibit called "Western Pennsylvania A to Z." It tracks immigration and traditions alphabetically, rather than chronologically, and it is expected to open in the fall. The letter P, for instance, stands for pierogi and polka.
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Holy Trinity Roman Catholic Church, West Mifflin-Duquesne