Early History

The first Armenians arrived in Whitinsville in the early 1880’s. Men originally came from the village of Pazmashen and other villages surrounding Kharpert of what is now central Turkey to work and send money home to their families. They worked alongside the French, Polish, Irish, Dutch and others at the Whitin Machine Works, the largest textile machinery manufacturing factory in the world at the turn of the 20th century. They had not planned to emigrate permanently, and many made several trips back and forth to their native villages within the Armenian homeland for over 2000 years.

The migration picked up in earnest in the 1890’s with the persecutions and massacres under Sultan Abdul Hamid II, when some of the Armenians who were living and working in Whitinsville lost family members. When the Ottoman Turkish Genocides of the Armenians, Assyrians, and the Greeks methodically began in 1915, the surviving Armenians were torn from their homeland and scattered around the world.

Among the survivors, some separated families reunited, widows married widowers and formed new families, and a few families escaped relatively intact. And when those families arrived in Whitinsville, work expanded beyond the Shop to commerce and providing services to their new community. Explore the early years of the Armenians of Whitinsville below.