The first Armenians arrived in Whitinsville in the early 1880s. 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.
Men originally came from the village of Pazmashen and other villages surrounding Kharpert (in what is now central Turkey) to work and send money home to their families. The migration picked up in the 1890s with the persecutions and pogroms under Sultan Abdul Hamid II and then finally with the Ottoman Turkish Genocides of the Armenians, Assyrians, and the Greeks that began in 1915.
315 Church Street
Whitinsville, MA 01588
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