THE FABRE LINE: KEY TO RHODE ISLAND’S ETHNIC DIVERSITY

By Patrick T. Conley

This article first appeared as a Providence Journal commentary. An enlarged, illustrated version was published in the summer 2009 issue of  Steamboat Bill, the Rhode Island-based Steamship Historical Society of America journal.

My interest in Rhode Island immigration stemmed from my research into the history of Catholicism in Rhode Island, a church with a multiethnic flavor evidenced by its many “national” parishes–more than fifty in number.  In the early 1970s, I established the Ethnic Heritage Program at Providence College and began to collect multicultural memorabilia.  In 1974, I assumed the chairmanship of the Rhode Island Bicentennial Commission (ri 76) and immediately appointed eighteen ethnic heritage subcommittees to involve later arrivals to Rhode Island in their state’s celebration of the 200th anniversary of independence.

To keep this project alive after 1976, I drafted legislation to create a permanent Rhode Island Heritage Commission. This effort, in turn, influenced historian Albert Klyberg to commence a quarter-century-long ongoing effort to create a state Heritage Harbor Museum. I am the recently elected president of that struggling project. Unfortunately, the state Heritage Commission was both underfunded and inept, and so it has been merged with the Rhode Island Historic Preservation Commission, a brick-and-mortar agency that has little interest in the heritage- and people-oriented programs that I had envisioned.

That is part of this story; the other part is the 2002 acquisition by my wife Gail and me of a mill building at 200 Allens Avenue in Providence, adjacent to Rhode Island State Pier No. 1–Rhode Island’s immigrant port of entry. Built by the Providence Gas Company in 1899 as a “purification plant” to extract hydrogen gas from coal, the structure has had several uses, including one brief stint in 1925 as a warehouse for the Fabre Line and a sixty-year run from 1940 through 2000, as the City Tire Company.

On the prophetic date of April 1, 2004, Gail and I began the historic renovation of this building. Some 3½ years and 6½ million dollars later, we succeeded in placing the rehabilitated structure on the National Register of Historic Places. We chose the building’s fourth floor east as the new home of the Rhode Island Publications Society and created the private, invitation-only Fabre Line Club to help the society disseminate its cultural and educational message.  We chose to call the renovated building Conley’s Wharf because of its proximity to State Pier No. 1 and selected the club’s name to emphasize our ethnically diverse membership, traceable in part to the visits of Fabre Line ships to our adjacent State Pier in the early twentieth century.

The Fabre Line, more than any other single factor, accounts for Rhode Island’s ethno-cultural diversity. From the inauspicious visit of the Madonna in April 1911, which ran aground at Fox Point, until the arrival of the Sinaia on June 26, 1934, Fabre’s transatlantic steamships carried well over 80,000 southern and eastern European immigrants to the Port of Providence. The Madonna’s visit stemmed from Rhode Island’s response to a 1909 federal government-sponsored commercial survey declaring that the Port of New York was overburdened and advising steamship companies to divert some of their traffic to other Atlantic ports.  Providence geared up to respond to this situation with the assistance of the state, which floated bonds in 1909 and 1912 to finance the acquisition of waterfront property along Providence’s outer harbor in South Providence and at Field’s Point. At the latter site, the city built a 3,000-foot municipal dock to handle cargo; on the former site, Rhode Island constructedState Pier No. 1 on seventeen acres of land at the foot of Public Street to receive not only freight but immigrant passengers.

 The Fabre Line, formed on March 31, 1881, by French merchant Cyprien Fabre, was an incentive for constructing the new state pier.  Providence wanted Fabre Line business, but the old India Point docks had proved inadequate to berth the company’s oceangoing vessels. Without a facility upgrade, the Marseilles-based steamship company would have selected another American port of call. In fact the Fabre Line steamship Venezia made the first landing at State Pier No. 1 on December 17, 1913, five months prior to the dock’s official dedication on May 21, 1914, by Franco-American governor Aram J. Pothier.

After leaving Marseilles, France, Fabre Line ships routinely made stops at Naples, south of Rome; Palermo, Sicily; Lisbon, Portugal; and the Portuguese-owned Azores. At these places, the vessels picked up passengers bound for America, with Providence as their “golden door.” Most of the early arrivals were either Portuguese or Italian nationals. The Federal Bureau of Immigration kept detailed statistics from 1898 to 1932 on the ethnicity and destination of all aliens arriving in the ports of the United States. Those destinations listed 54,973 Italians migrating to Rhode Island (most from 1911 onward).  Of these, 51,919 were from the south of Italy (i.e., in proximity to Naples) and 3,054 from the north. Portuguese designated Rhode Island as their destination in this thirty-four-year span, which totaled approximately 20,000. Although many Italians came to Rhode Island via New York, the Fabre Line accounted for most migrants to Rhode Island from Italy and Sicily during this era.

Because of the Fabre Line’s availability for round trips, many returnees among both groups kept their local population down. From 1908 to 1932, the period for which statistics have been compiled, over 13,000 Italians and 7,000 Portuguese were listed as “emigrant aliens departing” from the Port of Providence. No other local ethnic group had such a high rate of return. After leaving Providence and New York, the Fabre steamships visited ports in North Africa, the Near East, and cities in Italy and Portugal before returning to southern France.

Immigrant traffic declined in 1917 when America entered World War I, but it resumed with a flourish in 1919, and Providence achieved the rank of America’s fifth-largest immigrant-landing port. Nativists pressured Congress to curb this upsurge in arrivals, especially those allegedly inferior migrants from southern and eastern Europe. Congress responded by passing the Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1924. These patently discriminatory statutes (the latter using the 1890 census to set quotas) favored immigrants from northern and western Europe over the more recent Mediterranean, Semitic, and Slavic groups.

The quota system forced the Fabre Line to recruit passengers from new sources, so it sent feeder ships to Greece, the Middle East, Istanbul, Beirut, Jaffa, Alexandria, and the Black Sea.  The result was great diversity among those migrants seeking asylum in America. The expanded roster of arrivals included Greeks, Syrians, Lebanese, Armenians, Ukrainians, Romanians, and Polish Christians and Jews. When French and Cape Verdeans were added to the mix, the Fabre Line made Providence’s State Pier No. 1 Rhode Island’s Ellis Island.  By the summer of 1934, however, the restrictive quotas and the worldwide depression that had begun in 1929 forced a reorganization of the company and ended the Fabre Line’s presence at the Port of Providence.

For nearly a quarter-century the names of the Fabre Line’s vessels had been constantly in the local news and familiar to most Rhode Island residents.  Public officials, stevedores, businessmen, religious leaders, social workers, family members, and others turned out regularly to greet the Madonna, the Venezia, the Roma, the Patria, the Canada, the Asia, the Braga, the Sinaia, the Alesia, the Rochambeau, and the Germania (renamed the Britannia after the outbreak of World War I).  But the S.S. Providence was the source of greatest local pride.

The Fabre Line acknowledged the importance of the Port of Providence to its international operations in August 1914, when it built and christened its new transatlantic flagship. World War I delayed the maiden voyage of the S.S. Providence until June 1920, when it arrived at State Pier No. 1 with great fanfare and celebration. This 11,996-ton queen of the Fabre Line carried officers of the company (officially named Compagnie Française de Navigation à Vapeur, Cyprien Fabre, et Cie) from Marseilles as well as the Portuguese minister to the United States. Fittingly, it was the largest ship to visit Providence up to that time. The liner remained in service until 1951 when it was scrapped. It survives, however, as the logo of our Providence Piers development adjacent to State Pier No. 1 on Providence’s outer harbor.

Though many of the line’s transatlantic passengers continued on to New York (where the ships also stopped) and many others simply used Providence as a point of departure for inland destinations (many French went to Quebec, and some Portuguese passengers even journeyed as far west as California), the Fabre Line dramatically changed the culture and social complexion of Rhode Island and its immediate environs. It remains the hallmark and the symbol of our state’s remarkable diversity and the inspiration for our Fabre Line Club, a private social and cultural organization dedicated to disseminating knowledge about Rhode Island and its heritage.

Patrick T. Conley is the Historian Laureate of Rhode Island.

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