RUMFORD, Maine — On the shore above the Androscoggin River, Jim Rimaldo read off the names of more than 70 families, all with roots in Italy, who came to Rumford in the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Many of those who moved to the town came directly from Italy, with skills as stone cutters and masons, cobblers, and other useful trades in the then-young and growing mill town.
“Those names on the monument, those are the people that built Rumford, you know?” Mary Puiia LaPointe said, adding that her grandparents' names are also on a monument at Ellis Island.
Keeping that heritage alive and visible is the mission for Jim Rimaldo, who also grew up in Rumford, and whose grandparents also came from the old country.
Rimaldo was a longtime member and president of the Sons of Italy, a social club that existed in Rumford for 107 years, he said, before it finally closed in 2021—the last such club in Maine, he said.
Much of the money from the sale was distributed to local groups and charities, but a potion of it was also used to create the monument honoring Rumford’s Italian families.
“We wanted to put something up [to show] that there were Italians here,” he said. “If the Italians disappeared fifty years from now, nobody will know Italians lived here. So this way with this monument, they will always be here and remembered.”
Those 70-some families were not the majority in Rumford. There were many Franch-Canadian immigrants in the town, too, along with Lithuanians and other ethnic groups, people at the ceremony said.
All shared the hard work of building the paper mill and the many other jobs that needed doing.
But they say the Italian families formed a closely-knit community over multiple generations, living near each other, sharing lives, good and bad times, and enjoying each other’s company, said Carmen Perry, whose great-grandparents were some of the early immigrants.
“Field days, we did everything together. The whole group, Sons of Italy, we did everything together,” Perry said.
She added that the various immigrant groups in town all seemed to get along.
“We all loved each other. It was really a wonderful community.”
But times change and years pass, names change with marriages and children move away. Jim Rimaldo says those factors, along with the closing of the Sons of Italy, have all lessened the strong identity of Rumford’s Italian community.
Erecting the monument means a piece of that identity will always be part of Rumford, the town they worked so hard to build.