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New immigration (1880s–1920s)

The Italians of Schuylkill County, Pennsylvania

Later-arriving Catholics among the Slavs — mine laborers, then mill hands and shopkeepers — with four national parishes, a Sons of Italy network, a living Madonna del Carmine procession, and the county’s most notorious Italian-community tragedy. Markers: ★ verified · ✔ confirmed · ✎ corrects a common error · ⚑ open/caution.

Overview

The Italians reached Schuylkill County chiefly between the 1880s and 1910s, drawn — like the Slavs alongside whom they arrived — by anthracite, and concentrated thereafter in the towns and textile mills. They were a mix: a southern majority (Calabrian, Sicilian, Abruzzese, Neapolitan) typical of the post-1880 American wave, plus a distinctive northern Italian / Tyrolean (Trentino) element whose Austrian citizenship before 1919 makes the census undercount them. The 1920 census recorded 2,467 Italy-born in the county — but because Trentini recorded as “Austrian,” the true ethnic-Italian count was higher. ★ (The Tyroleans are distinctive enough to warrant their own treatment — see the smaller-groups profile.)

As later-arriving Catholics, Italians entered an Irish-dominated Church hierarchy “that did not understand them,” and were served — like the Poles, Lithuanians, and Slovaks — through national parishes organized by language. Their “demonstrative religiosity” (saints, feste, street processions) drew suspicion from Irish-American clergy, and their numbers drew open nativism: a Pottsville Republican editorial of December 10, 1888 called Italians “not, as a rule, very desirable immigrants… We could do well without them.” ★ Yet they built durable institutions, and two of the county’s most vivid set pieces — the annual Madonna del Carmine procession in Shenandoah and the violent Kelayres Massacre of 1934 — are Italian-community stories.

Sources: Joan L. Saverino, “Italians of Northwest Philadelphia” (HSP / Germantown Crier); Jake Wynn — “Nativist editorial, anti-Italian, 1888” (quoting the Pottsville Republican); PA-GenWeb — Schuylkill County RC parishes.

Origins: southern Italians and the Trentino strand

Roughly four million Italians, about 80% of them southerners, immigrated to the U.S. between 1880 and World War I, and Schuylkill’s Italian population reflected that southern weight — documented concretely in the Calabrian-founded village of Kelayres (Kline Township), settled by families like the Brunos of Bucita (Cosenza) and the Macalusos (Sicilian, anglicized to “McAloose”). ★ Alongside them came the Trentini — Italian-speaking alpine people from the Dolomites who, because their homeland was Austrian until 1919, “listed themselves as Austrian on census records.” The Bolognani immigrant roster documents Trentino families settling in Minersville, Pottsville, St. Clair, Coaldale, Tamaqua, and Port Carbon (Biasi, Fronza, Delmarco, Rizzi, Recla, Dolzani, Gilli, Datres, Purin), even as the densest Tyrolean cluster lay just over the line around Hazleton and Freeland. ★

✎ Identity caution: the Trentini insisted they were “Tyrolean,” not “Italian,” and spoke dialects “told unequivocally [they] had nothing to do with Italian.” This profile treats the southern/central Italians as the core “Italian” community and cross-references the Tyroleans as a related but distinct group.

Sources: Saverino (HSP); PA-GenWeb (Luzerne) — “The Tyroleans of Northeastern Pennsylvania” (Bolognani list); Trentino Genealogy — “Ethnicity vs. Cultural Identity”.

Four Italian national parishes

The Diocese of Allentown / PA-GenWeb roster, which tags national-parish ethnicity, records four Italian Roman Catholic national parishes in Schuylkill County: ★

ParishTownFounded
Immaculate Conception (Italian)Kelayres1899
St. Joseph (Italian)Pottsville1905
Sacred Heart (Italian)Mahanoy City1907
Our Lady of Mount Carmel (Italian)Shenandoah1914

✎ Disambiguation: the Minersville “Our Lady of Mount Carmel” is German (1855), not Italian — distinct from the Shenandoah Italian OLMC (1914).

The best-documented founding is St. Joseph, Pottsville (1905). It occupied the original 1842 stone church of the German parish of St. John the Baptist (at Fourth and Howard): when St. John’s built its present Mahantongo Street church, “the former church building was sold and became the Italian parish of St. Joseph’s,” during the long pastorate of Father Frederick William Longinus. ✔ (This confirms the 1905 date and the German-to-Italian handoff; see the coal-era Germans profile.) Immaculate Conception, Kelayres (1899) sat at the center of the village’s Italian life — its main entrance faced the Bruno house, and three of the five Kelayres-Massacre funerals were held there. Our Lady of Mount Carmel, Shenandoah (1914) became the spiritual home of the Italian feast and the meeting place of the local Sons of Italy. Most have since consolidated — OLMC merged into Divine Mercy Parish, Shenandoah, in 2014.

Sources: PA-GenWeb — Schuylkill County RC parishes; St. John the Baptist Parish, Pottsville — history; Wikipedia — Kelayres massacre; Divine Mercy Parish — history.

The Madonna del Carmine procession

The living heart of the county’s Italian heritage is the Feast of Our Lady of Mount Carmel (La Festa) in Shenandoah — a street procession that marked its 110th anniversary in July 2024, placing its origin at the parish’s 1914 founding. A replica statue of Our Lady is carried by hand through the streets under a canopy; the faithful pin cash to the statue; families balance decorated cintas (candle structures, sometimes topped with miniature houses) on their heads; the Upper Schuylkill Band accompanies; and in earlier years families bid for the honor of carrying the statue. The original Italian families — Bindie, Sincavage, Sacco, Decrease — anchor the memory: Albert Bindie’s coal-miner father helped build the original Mt. Carmel church, and Bindie recalled La Festa as a homecoming: “Everybody did that, no matter where they lived, they would all come back.” ★ The feast (canonically July 16, the Madonna del Carmine) is the textbook Italian-American festa — mass, statue procession, food, music, and fireworks — transplanted to the coalfield.

Sources: Coal Region Canary — “Our Lady of Mount Carmel Procession… 110th Anniversary” (2024); Saverino (HSP) — the festa tradition.

The Sons of Italy and the fight against nativism

The Italians organized through the Order Sons of Italy in America (OSIA) — founded nationally in 1905, and notable for its 1920s stand (alongside the NAACP and B’nai B’rith) against the Ku Klux Klan’s anti-immigrant, anti-Catholic campaigns. In Schuylkill County the order was real and named: Lodge No. 1205, Sons of Italy, met at Eagan’s Hall (Main and Centre streets), Shenandoah, and in the summer of 1926 held “a very largely attended meeting” — drawing delegations from Mahanoy City, Raven Run, Girardville, Frackville, and Shenandoah — to protest anti-Italian press coverage and a nativist American Legion speaker (W. G. Morris of St. Clair) who had sneered at “the man who comes from the slums of Italy.” The community leaders who organized the rebuttal were named: C. Olivero, Joseph Bell, Dominic Fersula, and John Malatch. ★ This is the same Shenandoah OSIA body that, by the early 1930s, met in the Our Lady of Mt. Carmel parish auditorium and fielded a baseball team in the local league (the Republican and Herald, April 6, 1932). ✔

✎ The 1205 lodge no longer appears on the modern Pennsylvania Sons & Daughters of Italy roster — a historical, now-defunct lodge whose existence is documented but which did not survive into the present.

Sources: Jake Wynn — “Italian immigrants protested discrimination… Schuylkill County, 1926” (quoting the Shenandoah Evening Herald); Wikipedia — Order Sons of Italy in America; OSDIA — history.

Work, neighborhoods, and business

Italians entered the anthracite economy as laborers — and, in the regional pattern, were sometimes imported as strikebreakers and resented as “scabs,” though that stigma attached more to the Slavs. ✎ Italians were not among the dead at the 1897 Lattimer Massacre, which was a Slavic-immigrant tragedy (see the Poles and Slovaks profiles). As they established themselves, Italians moved into the textile mills of Frackville, Ashland, Tamaqua, Shenandoah, and Coaldale, and into the classic Italian-American trades — stonemasonry and tile-setting, then barbering, tailoring, shoe repair, fruit-dealing, groceries, and saloons. The 1926 Shenandoah meeting noted that many local Italians “are in business and own properties.” Documented Italian-owned establishments include Kelayres’s Tony Cara’s saloon and John Saladago’s drug store, and Shenandoah’s Park Restaurant. ★ Settlement concentrated in Pottsville (around St. Joseph’s), Shenandoah (the strongest community, with OLMC and Lodge 1205), Mahanoy City (Sacred Heart), and Kelayres/Kline Township (the Calabrian village).

Sources: Saverino (HSP); Jake Wynn — Italians 1926; Wikipedia — Kelayres massacre; Wikipedia — Lattimer massacre.

The Kelayres Massacre (November 5, 1934)

The county’s defining — and darkest — Italian-community episode was not a clash with outsiders but an Italian-on-Italian political tragedy in the Calabrian village of Kelayres. On the eve of the 1934 election, the local Republican boss Joseph “Big Joe” Bruno (born in Bucita, Calabria, 1883) and members of his family fired on a Democratic torchlight parade, killing five and wounding many more. The dead — Frank Fiorilla, Andrew Kostishion, Dominic Perna, Josh Galosky, William Forke — were mourned at funerals (three at Immaculate Conception) attended by some 10,000 people, including the newly-elected Democratic governor and the Italian-American attorney general-designate Charles Margiotti, who translated grieving women’s pleas from Italian. Six Bruno family members were convicted; Joe and his brother received life sentences. The episode is documented in the scholarly literature (Cerullo & Delena, Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, 1983; Stephanie Hoover, The Kelayres Massacre, 2014) and remains the richest single window into the politics and tensions of an Italian coal-region community. ★ (This is unrelated to the anthracite-era Molly Maguire violence, which has its own dedicated coverage.)

Sources: Wikipedia — Kelayres massacre.

Culture and legacy

Italian culture in the county centered on the parish, the feast, and the table — and on a strong sense of campanilismo, identity rooted in the home town and region (a southerner and a Trentino often could not understand each other’s dialect). The legacy today is a mix of survival and consolidation: St. John the Baptist, Pottsville remains active (parent of the Italian St. Joseph’s); Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, Shenandoah merged into Divine Mercy in 2014 but its procession continues annually as the county’s premier Italian observance; and the Italian Enclaves Historical Society documents the county’s Italian sites. Common county Italian surnames (Bruno, Olivero, Bindie, Sincavage, Sacco, Fersula) and Trentino names (Biasi, Recla, Dolzani, Gilli) persist.

Sources: Coal Region Canary; Italian Enclaves Historical Society — Our Lady of Mt. Carmel, Shenandoah; St. John the Baptist Parish, Pottsville.

Open questions

  • The charter date and number of Sons of Italy Lodge 1205 and any other county OSIA/mutual-aid lodges. (A strong but unconfirmed lead: the Republican and Herald ran a front-page “Sons of Italy instituted” story on May 17 and 19, 1923 — three years before the 1926 Lodge 1205 reference — suggesting a county Sons of Italy lodge was instituted in May 1923, though this is not yet established as fact.)
  • A fuller Kelayres social history beyond the massacre (the Calabrian chain migration, the village’s institutions).
  • Named Italian-owned businesses across Pottsville, Mahanoy City, and the mill towns (newspapers.com / city directories).
  • Whether any Italian-language newspaper or mutual-aid society (Società di Mutuo Soccorso) operated in the county.
  • The current status of St. Joseph’s, Pottsville — ✔ it is no longer an active parish (closed/merged in the Diocese of Allentown’s restructuring; Pottsville’s active Catholic parishes are now St. John the Baptist and St. Patrick). The exact closure/merger date still needs the Diocese of Allentown.

Sources

Frequently asked

When did Italians come to Schuylkill County?
Chiefly between the 1880s and 1910s, drawn — like the Slavs alongside whom they arrived — by anthracite, then concentrating in the towns and textile mills. The 1920 census recorded 2,467 Italy-born in the county, though that undercounts the northern Italian Trentini, who held Austrian citizenship before 1919 and were logged as 'Austrian.'
How many Italian Catholic parishes were there in Schuylkill County?
Four Italian Roman Catholic national parishes: Immaculate Conception in Kelayres (1899), St. Joseph in Pottsville (1905), Sacred Heart in Mahanoy City (1907), and Our Lady of Mount Carmel in Shenandoah (1914). Note that Minersville's Our Lady of Mount Carmel is German (1855), not Italian.
What was the Kelayres Massacre?
On the eve of the 1934 election, Republican boss Joseph 'Big Joe' Bruno and members of his family fired on a Democratic torchlight parade in the Calabrian village of Kelayres (Kline Township), killing five and wounding many more. It remains the county's most notorious Italian-community tragedy. See /history/molly-maguires for the unrelated, separately covered anthracite-era violence.

Towns: Shenandoah, Pottsville, Mahanoy City, Minersville, Saint Clair, Coaldale, Tamaqua, Port Carbon, Frackville, Ashland, Girardville

Related peoples: Greeks

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