Immigrant Wilmington: Little Italy, Browntown, and the Factories That Drew the World

The neighborhoods west and south of downtown Wilmington bear the layered geography of a century of immigration. Italian families settled around Union and Lincoln Streets between Pennsylvania Avenue and Lancaster Avenue in the late eighteen hundreds and built what became known as Little Italy, an anchored community of row houses, Catholic parishes, and family-owned businesses that persists to this day. Polish workers, many of them working in the leather industry, settled in an area the locals called Browntown.

The factories drew them all. Wilmington's industrial base in the late nineteenth century was unusually diverse: black powder mills, iron shipyards, leather tanneries, textile operations, carriage works. By the early nineteen hundreds, Italian and Polish newcomers outnumbered the Irish and German immigrants who had arrived a generation earlier. Many of them worked in conditions their employers rarely advertised, long hours in loud, hazardous facilities for wages that kept families in row houses stacked tight against the river.

Civic life was not always welcoming. Immigrants sometimes met official discrimination in hiring, an echo of the nativist sentiment that ran through urban American politics in that era. Despite this, immigrant communities organized. Polish leather workers in particular built dense neighborhood networks that tied union organizing to cultural life and parish politics in ways that scholars of labor history still study.

The workforce that built Wilmington's wartime shipyards in the nineteen forties was a direct descendant of these communities. Workers of Polish, Irish, and Italian background, along with a growing African American population from Delaware's southern counties, found themselves side by side in the Dravo yards, building ships for a war that promised, at minimum, a more just world than the one they had been born into.