When you think of Lake Village, you might think of the Delta and agriculture. But thanks to an updated version of a beloved book and a new documentary, many people are learning more about the history of Italian culture in what was once known as Sunnyside.
Libby Olivi Borgognoni, 89, the daughter and granddaughter of Italian immigrants who labored at the Sunnyside Plantation in Lake Village, wrote the original “Italians of Sunnyside” book about the plantation in 1995 to celebrate the 100-year anniversary of the establishment of the Italian colony.
Borgognoni lived in a primitive home at the Sunnyside plantation, picking cotton alongside her family.
“From my earliest childhood memories we spoke only Italian with my nonna (grandmother), who lived with us until she died when I was 10,” Borgognoni said. “She told me all the beautiful memories of the life she had lived and left in Italy to come to America to find great trials in the cotton fields.”
In 1956, Borgognoni married and began to take a keen interest in her and her husband Tony’s Italian heritage.
“After I married Tony, a fellow Italian, it was my desire to go and visit every Italian family who immigrated to Sunnyside to hear their stories,” she said. “I then was inspired to recount excerpts of these fascinating stories in my book, ‘Italians of Sunnyside.’”
“It was downtown that many of the older Italians, knowing I spoke Italian, would come by, telling me their stories about their lives in Italy and the trials they endured here in America. All of this had me wanting to learn more.”
Starting in 1969, Borgognoni spent the next 55 years compiling documents and interviewing Italian immigrants and their families. When Borgognoni published the first edition of “Italians of Sunnyside” for the 100th anniversary celebration, nearly 4,000 Italian descendants attended the event.
Dr. Anthony Borgognoni, an optometrist and one of Libby’s six children, helped his mother update the book for the 125th-anniversary celebration in 2020. But that celebration was delayed until now. Anthony and Libby and several other historians and scholars spent two years researching, writing and editing the second edition.
The new edition includes more than 300 pages, with more than 2,000 Italian ancestors and families identified, 700 historic photographs and images and nearly 100 footnotes and citations leading to additional research. Proceeds will go to the Italians of Sunnyside Foundation.
A president, a pope and a great deception
Sunnyside was the first Italian colony in Arkansas, created after the Civil War in 1895 in what is now known as Lake Village.
Shut down and bankrupt following the Civil War, the 13,000-acre Sunnyside Plantation was bought by Austin Corbin, an industrialist from New York, who was eager to build the cheap land into a new empire.
But Corbin needed a labor force to work the land, and slavery was outlawed. Corbin attempted to use prisoners in the state, but this quickly failed, as the prisoners succumbed to intense heat, malaria-carrying mosquitos and poor living conditions.
After a few months, Corbin, one of the wealthiest men in the U.S. at the time, decided to call on an international contact — his niece’s husband, the Italian Prince Francesco Ruspoli, who was the mayor of Rome.
Corbin and Ruspoli struck a deal — that 100 families from northern Italy would immigrate every year for five years. Corbin would give the immigrants 12.5 acres with housing, with the condition that the land and houses were “payable over 21 years at an annual interest rate of 5 percent of the unpaid balance,” according to official documents.
For the poor Italian immigrants, who had recently witnessed their own civil unrest in Italy, the deal at Sunnyside seemed like the best opportunity for a greater life. But they were understandably concerned — just months before arriving, there had been a massive lynching of Italians in New Orleans for crimes that they didn’t commit.
Worried, the Italians asked Pope Leo XIII for a blessing, and in November 1895, he blessed the immigrants with the words, “This blessing asks the Lord to protect you and to make you prosper in body and soul in all your needs.”
After a difficult journey over, the first group of 562 Italian Catholics arrived in December, and their spiritual needs were of chief importance.
“One thing the Italians were clamoring for the moment they got here is they were hoping to establish a Catholic school, a Catholic church and a Catholic community,” said Dr. Anthony Borgognoni, son of author Libby Olivi Borgognoni. “So they kept petitioning Austin Corbin, who began trying to contact bishops in Italy and the Bishop of Arkansas (Edward M. Fitzgerald).”
In New York, a priest named Father Pietro Bandini heard about the colony and defied the orders of several bishops to serve them.
“He loved the idea of a colony being established away from the cities,” Borgognoni said.
Father Bandini arrived at Sunnyside Jan. 18, 1896, and soon found the adoration of all the Italians on the plantation.
The Italians, however, began to realize that not everything was as it originally seemed. The labor was difficult, malaria was rampant and there was no clean water.
“It quickly deteriorated into a nightmare,” Borgognoni said. “… The entire Italian colony contracted malaria. Father Bandini himself contracted in three times. … 15 percent of the entire Italian colony passed away from malaria.”
Father Bandini communicated with Bishop Fitzgerald about the conditions at the plantation while serving at both Our Lady of the Lake Church, known then as St. Mary’s of the Lake Church, and a mission church the Italians had founded from an abandoned church called St. Anthony Church.
The Italians persevered, and Corbin looked for new ways to control the colony workers, including the creation of their own currency, called Sunnyside money, which was required for clothes, crops, tools and rent, designed to ensure the Italians remained in debt.
Letters of complaint from the Italians flooded the offices of the pope, bishops in Italy and Bishop Fitzgerald, who continued to monitor the situation.
Corbin was killed in a carriage accident in 1896, just six months after the operation began, and a new business, O.B. Crittenden and Company, took over the plantation in 1898 with even less favorable terms. The company’s primary benefactor was a powerful senator from Mississippi, Sen. Leroy Percy, a close hunting companion of President Theodore Roosevelt.
Percy, after receiving several complaints, tore up the contracts Corbin had written, declaring the Italians little more than poor sharecroppers.
“He essentially told them, ‘If you don’t like it, you can leave,’” Borgognoni said.
Father Bandini took those words to heart and began to send out search parties to find a more suitable home for the Italian immigrants. Many Italians returned to Italy or moved to Brazil. Others moved to better plantations in Arkansas, Mississippi, Missouri and Alabama.
Father Bandini resigned from his post in New York to remain a chaplain for the Italians, and in 1898 led nearly half of the colony to Tontitown in northwest Arkansas, where a large Italian population remains today. Other cities across the U.S. worked on luring the fed-up Italians to other states for work.
By the late 1890s, only 35 families remained at the Sunnyside Plantation. In a panic, with 80 percent of his labor force gone, Percy decided to “go back to the well.”
“He realized Corbin got these Italians from Italy — so can I,” Borgognoni said.
Soon, Sunnyside became a gateway for Italians immigrating into the U.S., many working at Sunnyside Plantation for a short while before moving on in search of greener pastures. Today, more than 1 million Italian descendants across the country can trace their roots to Sunnyside.
However, Percy’s abuse of the Italians “reached a fevered pitch” until 1907, when the Italian government petitioned Roosevelt to investigate. Not wanting to punish his close friend Percy, Roosevelt and the U.S. Department of Justice appointed a female investigator, Mary Grace Quackenbos, to investigate Percy, O.B. Crittenden and Company and the Sunnyside operations.
“It was primarily his way of saying, ‘I’m not taking this seriously,’” Borgognoni said. “She was the first female investigator for the United States in history … She later became known as the female Sherlock Holmes.”
Although Roosevelt didn’t have high hopes for the female investigator, Quackenbos dug deep and found evidence of wrongdoing at Sunnyside — but Roosevelt buried her report in bureaucratic red tape. Quietly, the report rested, waiting in the National Archives for 80 years.
During that time, the Italians, fed up with their injustice, left the plantation, leaving only a handful of sharecroppers. Several floods and the Great Depression took a significant toll on the plantation.
Following World War II, the Sunnyside Plantation was divided into smaller farms and sold to local families.
Most of the history was forgotten until the early 1980s when a historian found Quackenbos’ report in the National Archives, where an Italian historian verified its authenticity. That was when parishioners and author Libby Borgognoni found it and began to flesh out the story.
Cries from the Cottonfield
As the second edition surged in popularity, filmmaker Larry Foley began making a documentary in 2022 on the history of the Sunnyside Plantation. Foley, a professor of journalism and arts and sciences at the University of Arkansas, starts his documentary with the Tontitown Grape Festival, held every August, before tracing his way back in time, even traveling to Rome to conduct interviews with historians.
The two-hour documentary, called “Cries from the Cottonfield,” will be shown on Arkansas’ PBS station at 7 p.m. Tuesday, Sept. 3 and repeated at 3:30 p.m. Wednesday, Sept. 4.
Father Joseph Friend, pastor of Our Lady of the Lake Church in Lake Village, played the role of the community’s first priest, Father Pietro Bandini, in the documentary.
“I got to be a part of the production, and it was a really prayerful experience because I’m in these few shots acting as Father Bandini, just walking through the cotton fields, and he is thinking about his people and the suffering and everything,” he said. “And so in the shot, it was a October day, the cotton was beautiful, it was Sunnyside Plantation. And I’m walking through, and I’m just thinking, ‘Holy cow, all the history of these cotton fields from slavery and the darkness of that, the Italian immigrants coming in after them, and all those cries from the cotton field. And then the joyous moments of people singing together and working together, just picking cotton and being together … It was a really cool experience for me to touch the history of the people here.”
Father Friend said that many of the last names found in historical documents are the last names still brandished by parishioners at Our Lady of the Lake.
“That’s still a massive part of our culture and the parish and Our Lady of the Lake,” he said. “Every year, they have the spaghetti dinner, so the Italian culture is still very present. … We have a lot of families that remember their ancestors and have kept track of that.”
Father Friend said the devotion of the immigrants to the Catholic faith showcases one of the most beautiful things about the Church — its grit.
“When you think of the story of the Church and the apostles, it’s full of grit. The foundations of our faith, the greatest sacrifice that we’ve ever seen, that Jesus, the Son of God, came to lay his life down,” Father Friend said. “That’s not a rainbows and butterflies type of story, you know? That’s a story full of grit.
“… And the reason that we’re able to face hard times and hard things is because Jesus and the Holy Family showed us how to do it — to persevere, to have confidence in God’s will and to say yes, despite how hard it may be. I think the Catholic faith is very credible in how willing it is to talk about grit and celebrate all those who lived it.”
In early August, the documentary premiered at Our Lady of the Lake. Father Friend said the parish hall was packed with parishioners and Italians from the community, many on the verge of tears as they watched the story unfold.
“Just seeing the joy and the buzz in the parish halls as we were about to watch this movie about our community, it was very exciting,” he said. “… All of salvation history is a story, and we reflect on it every Sunday … I think people can get lost in their own story … and we can maybe forget our identity a little bit, that we’re part of something special. So that’s what this (documentary) did for me — just to see these people that are saying, ‘You know what? I’m part of this beautiful story. This gives me a lot of meaning in life.’”
Parishioner Beth Bariola White said she is proud of her Italian heritage.
“Several members of my family are pictured on the cover of Libby’s book, and there are several stories about the Bariola family in her second edition of ‘Italians of Sunnyside,’” White said. “My family has a deep history at both Sunnyside and Tontitown. … We still live here today and strive to keep our culture alive.
“Thousands come here every year to our annual spaghetti dinner, which began on June 30, 1896. It was the first official spaghetti dinner event in America. The whole community works hard to share this delicious meal made from scratch. It is our way of sharing our culture. We have it the first Sunday in March every year, so be sure to come.”
Standing in Father Bandini’s shoes — both in the documentary and as a minister to the people at Our Lady of the Lake — has made Father Friend even more cognizant of his important role.
“Not a ton of us are walking through cotton fields anymore, but we are still spreading the faith. Ultimately, all things will pass away,” Father Friend said. “But we have to think about how we will hand down the faith that was handed down to us.”
Read and watch
If you’re interested in buying the “Italians of Sunnyside” book, visit italiansofsunnyside.org/store. For more information about the documentary “Cries from the Cottonfield,” visit criesfromthecottonfield.com.
