trafficante wrote: ↑Fri Aug 18, 2023 8:54 am
PolackTony wrote: ↑Thu Aug 17, 2023 11:46 pm
I don’t know much about Italian immigration to Mobile, but there does seem to have been a small Calabrese colony there (though apparently mainly composed of people from Cosenza and Catanzaro provinces), alongside a small Sicilian colony.
Daphne, AL and Baldwin County (east of Mobile) comes up a lot when looking at Italian colonies in the Mobile area.
The first "colony" in this area was set up in 1888 by a man named Alessandro Mastrovalerio who bought land in Daphne for Italian immigrants wanting to move from the northern states. It was a rather successful agrarian colony. I'm not sure where Mastrovalerio was from exactly, maybe Puglia or Campania?
This site has more info on the colony. Might have some names of note in the "founding fathers" section:
https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=130913
Eric has covered the mafia history of Birmingham, and ties to other parts of the US, in detail on his blog. A must-read for anyone who has nto done so yet:
https://mafia.substack.com/p/alabama-ne ... -agrigento
As people are likely aware, apart from Louisiana along with Eastern Texas and South Florida, the US South as a whole attracted comparatively very few Italian immigrants (or immigrants from other Southern and Eastern Europe in general, for that matter). To give a sense of scale, in 1890, slightly over 300 Italians were enumerated in the entire state of Alabama, while in 1910, when the Italian population of AL peaked, there were only about 3000 in the state, with just under 50% residing in the city of Birmingham (and a number of others scattered in the rural counties in the Birmingham hinterland, where they engaged in truck farming of produce for the city market along with a small number of Greek immigrants also), due to employment opportunities in the steel production and coal mining sectors (while around 1910 Italians made up about 40% of the labor force for the coal mines, few actually worked in the mines themselves, preferring open-air jobs such as driving the trains that transported the coal).
Planters in the Deep South had trouble attracting immigrant laborers to work their properties, and actively sought Italian immigrants, contracting with local Italian labor agents and their
patroni counterparts in Northern cities, as direct importation of foreign contract laborers was illegal. Conditions were often very poor in rural labor colonies in AL and MS, however, with malaria and other disease rampant and abysmal living quarters (it was apparently a common practice to house Italian workers in the dilapidated accommodations that had previously housed slaves). The Italian consulate in NOLA began receiving reports of Italians being exploited as "debt peons" (essentially, indentured servants) and the few Italians in the rural Deep South mainly fled to Northern cities, while a few relocated to Birmingham.
Several other projects were initiated in the late 19th and early 20th century to resettle Italians from northern cities like NYC and Chicago -- where the slum conditions in port-of-entry immigrant ghettoes were believed to be particularly unsuitable for former
contadini from the Mezzogiorno, leading to crime and other social pathologies -- which mainly failed.
As you note, Alessandro Mastrovalerio, at the time the publisher of the Italian NYC paper
La Tribuna Transatlantica, set up a tiny Italian colony in Daphne, Baldwin County (on the other side of Mobile Bay from Mobile itself), and in 1890 convinced 20-odd Italian families from NYC to settle there. These are the names from the commemorative sign that you linked to above, and they are mostly from Northern and Central Italy (Piemonte, Toscana), apart from a couple of Southerners (e.g., Paolo Napolillo I believe was from Campania). This colony was successful in that the settlers remained and the colony persisted well into the 20th Century (they primarily farmed strawberries, as well as a few other crops), but it was tiny and attracted very few further settlers. In 1893, Mastrovalerio founded another colony in Lambert, Mobile County, though this colony consisted of 12 German-speaking families from South Tyrol in the Alps (today in the administrative region of Trentino-Alto Adige).
B. wrote: ↑Fri Aug 18, 2023 8:58 am
From my article, re: Mobile:
In 1904, an Alabama Sicilian named Francesco Cirrinicione killed Salvatore Pampinella, the latter described as the "head" and "leader" of the New Palermo colony near Mobile, Alabama. Pompinella allegedly owed Cirrincione a debt that he couldn't or wouldn't pay, much as Pasquale Amari of Russellville killed a man at a card game in Ribera for similar reasons prior to his arrival in America. I can’t substantiate either man’s specific heritage, but both the Cirrincione and Pampinella names are prevalent in Palermo province which would be consistent with this murder taking place in Mobile’s “New Palermo”.
Just to add some further context to this.
I am aware of two projects to resettle Sicilians from Northern cities to colonies in rural Alabama, both of which failed miserably. One was an abortive Chicago project, which apparently didn't even get off the ground as apparently nobody in Chicago was interested in going to Alabama. The other -- which hardly did any better -- was "New Palermo", founded in 1904 in Malcolm, Washington County, about 40 miles north of Mobile along the Southern Railroad. The project was planned by Salvatore Coniglio Pampinello, a New York Sicilian, who attracted a tiny handful of families to relocate from NYC. The project fall apart within the year, however, as it was poorly planned and outfitted, and the settler families began fighting with each other. Pampinella reportedly fled the colony in May of 1904, after it became evident that he was unable to fulfill his obligations to the colonist and local landowners. He returned, however, and in November of 1904, he was stabbed to death in front of his wife and kids by Francesco Cirrincione, reportedly in a dispute over Pampinello having not paid the men of the colony for wood that they had harvested and sold. The colony collapsed after this and the colonists seem to have returned to NYC. In 1909 in NYC, one of the former colonists, Giuseppe Drago, tried to restart the project but was stymied by legal battles with his erstwhile backers, the Mutoli brothers, and it never took off. I believe that Drago was probably the Giuseppe Drago, born about 1879, who in 1910 was a photographer/gallery owner living on E 20th St btwn First and Second, and which I believe corresponds to a Giuseppe Drago of that age from Palermo Città who arrived in NYC in 1902. There was a Giuseppe Mutoli who was an architect and marble sculptor, born about 1874 in Palermo, who lived in both Chicago and NYC (he died in the latter in 1920). If he was one of the Mutolis here, then I wonder if the Chicago project I mentioned above was related to the 1909 Drago-Mutoli plan (I'd need to dig some more into it).
Per my info, Salvatore Coniglio Pampinello was born about 1853 in Baucina to Giuseppe Pampinello and Anna Corneglia; he arrived in NYC in 1898 with his wife, Rosalia Lanza, also of Baucina, and their kids. In 1910, Rosalia and kids were living in Manhattan at 224 E 13th St, btwn Second and Third (she was listed as widowed). I'm also unsure as to who Francesco Cirrincione was, though as you note, the surname is concentrated around Palermo Città, Bagherià, and Baucina. Given Panpinello's apparent origins, I note that a Francesco Cirrincione born in 1863 in Baucina arrived in NYC in the 1890s and stayed there at least through 1900; around 1910, he appeared in the Chicago suburb of Joliet, where he remained until his death in 1953. No idea if it could even possibly be the same guy, as I'm not sure whether the Alabama Cirrincione was ever convicted for Paminello's murder.
