Armenian nationalist dissident organizations within the Ottoman Empire and intense activity of American missionaries in the region who were sympathetic to the Armenian cause, making the long road of migration somewhat more bearable. With the exception of Fresno, California, which had land suitable for farming, the earliest Armenian immigrants mostly settled in the northeastern industrial centers, such as New York City, Providence, Worcester, and Boston. Armenian emigrants from the Russian Empire were only a minority in emigration from Armenian lands across the Atlantic (about 2,500 moved in 1898–1914), because Armenians were treated relatively better in Russia than in the Ottoman Empire. Once in America, some Armenians organized political parties to serve various causes in America and in the homeland. Turkish Armenian migration rose gradually in the first decade of the 20th century, partly due to the Adana Massacre of 1909, and the Balkan Wars in 1912–1913. Before the start of the World War I, there were already 60,000 Armenians in the US. As more Armenians fell victim to the genocide and more Armenians were deported, the Armenian American community grew dramatically. According to the Bureau of Immigration, 54,057 Armenians entered the US between 1899 and 1917. The top listed countries of origin were Turkey (46,474), Russia (3,034), Canada (1,577), Great Britain (914) and Egypt (894). Immigrants were asked to indicate which state they were going to settle in; for Armenians, the most popular answers were New York (17,391), Massachusetts (14,192), Rhode Island (4,923), Illinois (3,313), California (2,564), New Jersey (2,115), Pennsylvania (2,002), Michigan (1,371). The largest Armenian American communities at that time were located in New York City; Fresno; Worcester, Massachusetts; Boston; Philadelphia; Chicago; Jersey City; Detroit; Los Angeles; Troy, New York; and Cleveland. According to estimates, around 77,980 Armenians lived in the US by 1919. An unprecedented number of Armenians entered the country in 1920, when the newly established Soviet Union forcefully annexed the First Republic of Armenia, but the Immigration Act of 1924 that restricted immigration from southern and eastern Europe as well as Asia barred many other Armenians from emigrating to the US. Most of the post-World War I immigrants were women and children, in contrast to the prewar immigration, which was predominantly young and male. Like Italians, for whom this practice was known as campanilismo, Armenian communities were often formed by people from the same village or town in the Ottoman Empire. This practice almost entirely