(upbeat playful music) - You only needed to come from one family.

One family, and you belong to all of them.

That's the way it was in Little Italy.

My mother's side, who would be the Altobelli's and the DiBritos, came from Ellis Island.

Now my dad's side, the Olivieris, the Perzichillis I understand, came in Boston Harbor.

Some ended up in Cumberland, Wisconsin, then they went to the levy in St. Paul.

- All of my grandparents came through Ellis Island.

My mother's side of the family settled in Chicago, and my dad's side of the family settled in Wisconsin.

Both families separately, not knowing each other, came to Dilworth.

- And then some stayed in Dilworth in Little Italy, and then others just kept going all the way out to California.

They followed the railroad.

- Well, Dilworth was settled due to the railroad.

- The railroad set up sightings about every six miles or so along the railroad line.

In 1882, they established one about four miles east of the Red River.

They named it Richardson for a local landowner.

The next year they changed the name to Dilworth or Joseph Dilworth, a member of the Northern Pacific Railway board of directors.

Starting in 1907, the railroad actively recruited Italian laborers to come up from Minneapolis, St. Paul, Western Wisconsin.

- From my grandparents and my dad talking, there was a little bit of discrimination at that time against Italians.

They were only allowed to work on the section as laborers.

- They were given the dirtiest hardest jobs, had to work for many years at the coal dock or the ice house.

- They weren't allowed to be engineers or trainmen.

That changed after my dad graduated high school.

He went to Moorhead State College and while at college, he applied for a trainman's job in Dilworth and they hired him, and that opened a door.

Through the years, I would bet 75% of the kids and relatives my age, we all worked on the railroad at one time.

- My grandfather on my dad's side, the Olivieri side, he was a foreman for 60 years on the railroad in Dilworth, and Grandpa Tony was also he also worked on the railroad.

They all did, all the Italians.

They were hard workers.

- Town of Dilworth grew very, very quickly.

In 1910, a fellow named Carl Bean sold some lots to Rosina Boyd, an Italian woman that lived in the immediate area, and she turned around and sold a lot of those lots to her Italian neighbors.

Pretty soon, there was a sizable Italian community.

That became Little Italy.

- Little Italy was on the south side of the railroad tracks, and the main part of Dilworth was on the north side of the railroad tracks.

Actually, the name Little Italy was given to Dilworth by the people that lived on the north side.

- The name Little Italy, I never heard of anybody resenting that.

We were very proud of it.

You know, where are you from?

Little Italy, little Italy in Dilworth.

- [Larry] And it was just a neighborhood of basically all Italians, and they were all related.

- And if you walked down the street you saw a light on, you could walk into that house and they'd give you a plate of food.

- Family was basically the most important thing growing up.

- We didn't have a lot of money growing up.

We had family.

That was our legacy.

My relatives were divided by a driveway.

I had my mom's relatives on one side, and my dad's relatives on the other side of the driveway, and all of my cousins, we were raised like brothers and sisters.

- We all hung together, we all played together, we were attached to the church.

- Every morning before I went to school, I went to church.

- Then we'd do the evening masses during Lent, and those type of things, and it was just a place where everybody congregated.

- You know, it's something you don't see anymore.

I didn't realize I was growing up in such a great time.

- One of my fondest memories is Christmas Eve Mass that was started at midnight on Christmas day, and then the Italian families would open their homes to whoever was at church, and they would eat.

They would eat all night long and it would start like 1:30 in the morning.

You would house hop and eat 'til the sun came up.

St. Elizabeth's was started by a bunch of Italian families.

One of the big things they brought was their cooking culture.

Our priest, which I remember, Father Gantz, was from Germany.

He talked the women to start having two Italian dinners a year.

- We all worked.

My mom, she was one of the original gals.

I washed dishes, my dad worked, and it's still going today.

My dad's name is Fonzi, his name was Frank Oliver Jr, but they call him Fonzi.

He was the original Fonz with the Pompadour hairdo.

He went to Moler Barber College in Minneapolis and set up his shop on the main street of Dilworth, and it was there for 60 years, and everybody came to dad.

That was the meeting place in town.

The night after a football game, all the coaches were downstairs going over every play they had.

A lot of good memories in that barber shop.

I could go on for hours and hours.

- It seemed like every household made bread once a week.

Like my grandpa, if he needed bread, he'd walk down to one of the neighbors who was making it that day, and he'd trade her something outta the garden for a couple loaves of bread.

Everybody had a big garden.

All the tomato sauce was made by hand.

(can clacking) I mean, hundreds of quarts of tomato sauce each family would make.

If you went to 10 different aunts or cousin's home and had spaghetti, everybody's sauce taste just a little bit different.

Everybody had kind of put their own spin on it the way their family liked it.

I've cooked for thousands of people for dinners over the last 30 years, and I don't measure anything.

It's a handful of this and a handful of that like my mother taught me.

They made wine once a year over in Little Italy.

A boxcar from a train would come in to Dilworth and they'd set it aside, and then all the Italian families that ordered grapes would have a couple days to go and unload the grapes.

They came in 36 pound boxes.

Everybody would go from home to home to home to home for about a two and a half week period making wine.

Everybody had their own barrels, their own presses, their own grinders.

Every home had a wine cellar in it.

- 2023 we had a family reunion, and a lot of people helped pull that together, and that was a testament to what the Italian Little Italy was.

800 people came back for that.

I think there's 30 states that came.

- It was something that I never felt I'd seen in my lifetime.

- There were cousins there I'd never seen before, there were cousins that we hadn't seen a lot of.

- Either they grew up in Little Italy, or their grandpa did, or their dad or ma, or whatever the occasion was.

It was mind blowing that that many people got together and we had that much fun.

I think the culture, cooking, holidays, all those things just seemed to brought people here from Italy, from around the country and then came to Dilworth 'cause of the railroad.

- [Presenter] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.