When Elizabeth Deveney Frazier walks through cemeteries across Boston, she can often recognize her family’s work before she sees the name.
“I can walk around any cemetery in Boston, and I can pick out stones that we made,” said Frazier, president of Deveney & White Memorials, a family business that has been in Dorchester since 1946. “I can see our signature in the way that we actually carved the stone.”
Deveney & White was one of several Dorchester and Mattapan businesses honored Monday evening at Boston’s 2026 Legacy Business Awards, a city program recognizing longstanding independent businesses that have become neighborhood institutions. Phillips Chocolates, Vargas & Vargas Insurance, Happy Supermarket, Roxbury Center for the Performing Arts and Roberts Photo Studio were also among the awardees.
This year’s 30 winners represented 18 Boston neighborhoods and, collectively, more than 1,000 years in business. The city received more than 2,020 nominations, the most in the program’s history. Residents nominated 347 qualified businesses in total. To be eligible, businesses had to be located in Boston and operating at their current location for at least 10 years.
Above: Deveney & White’s team with their Legacy award: Ed Collupy, Molly Keating, Missy Deveney, Elizabeth Deveney Frazier, Brian Frazier, and Mike Mei. Photo Courtesy: Deveney & White
Aliesha Porcena, Boston’s director of small business, said a legacy business is not defined by age alone.
“A legacy business is a business that obviously has been in business in Boston for 10 or more years, but also they are a community staple, a community pillar,” Porcena said. “It’s somebody that also has provided cultural significance to the local community, somebody that the residents and neighbors love, and a business that has continually given back.”
Donald Wright, interim chief of economic opportunity and inclusion, said many of the businesses recognized had survived economic downturns, changing markets and shifting communities while creating jobs, supporting families and stabilizing commercial corridors.
“Honoring a legacy isn’t just about looking backwards,” Wright said in his remarks. “It is about building a foundation for what comes next.”
Mayor Wu canceled her appearance at Monday’s ceremony at the last minute because she was under the weather.
For Phillips Chocolates, that legacy is now more than a century old. The Morrissey Boulevard chocolatier, known for its handmade chocolate turtles, is in its 101st year and fourth generation of family ownership, said Jonathan Buttrick, the company’s store operation manager.
Phillips Chocolates. Photo Courtesy: Isabel Leon/Mayor’s Office
“It’s still family-run and owned,” Buttrick said. “It’s in its fourth generation, our 101st year. The recipes have stayed tried and true. We don’t compromise on anything as far as the ingredients go, or recipes, or the integrity.”
Buttrick was joined at the event by Michael Pocrass, general manager, and John Spellenberg, sales manager.
Online, wholesale and corporate sales have become bigger parts of their operation, they said, but the heart of the business remains personal.
“We’re in the business of making friends, and our guests, all of our colleagues—we consider all of them friends first, and business kind of naturally falls after,” Buttrick said.
That relationship, he said, is part of what has made Phillips more than a chocolate shop in Dorchester. After more than a century in business, he described it as “an institution in the neighborhood.”
Without Phillips, Buttrick joked, Dorchester would lose “delicious chocolates” and “wouldn’t be as sweet.”
At Vargas & Vargas Insurance, the legacy is built differently. The Dorchester agency was started by brothers Carlos, Mario and Joe Vargas, with Jeffrey Camara, a longtime employee and now partner, working more than two decades with the business.
“We don’t usually get recognized. We’re like that hidden service provider that is not up front,” Carlos said. “It’s nice to be recognized for something you’ve worked all your life for.”
Camara said the agency builds trust through consistency—familiar staff, familiar voices and long-term relationships with clients.
Above, the Vargas & Vargas team with their award. Photo Courtesy: Isabel Leon/Mayor’s Office
“When you call the agency, you have the same people answering the phone,” Camara said. “It kind of becomes a family.”
Mario said one of the biggest concerns clients bring to the agency today is affordability.
He pointed to gentrification, rising insurance costs, taxes, maintenance, and the difficulty longtime property owners face when they want to stay in the neighborhood but costs keep increasing.
The agency also serves clients in multiple languages, which Carlos said matters in a diverse neighborhood like Dorchester.
“Folks come to us because we speak different languages,” he said. “It builds trust.”
He said that trust can create lifelong client relationships.
“I find that immigrants, when they trust you, and you speak their language, and you never steer them wrong, then you’ve got a client for life,” Carlos said.
Carlos and Mario said they immigrated to the United States from Portugal in 1968, an experience Carlos said helps shape the agency’s understanding of how language and trust matter when serving immigrant families in Dorchester.
Deveney & White Memorials, the family-run monument business on Gallivan Boulevard, has been in Dorchester since 1946. For Frazier, receiving the award during its 80th anniversary year made it especially meaningful.
“When you’re in a family business that’s been passed down from generation to generation, it makes the whole award meaningful, because there was a lot of hard work of family members that I never met,” Frazier said. “But I’ve been able to continue the business, and it’s quite a legacy.”
Frazier said the work carries both responsibility and privilege because the monuments the company creates are meant to last permanently.
Deveney & White also works with Chinese and Vietnamese families. One longtime employee, Mike Mei, first came to the business as an artist doing Chinese calligraphy for a family monument.
“Then my father said, ‘Can you do all of the Chinese for all of the stones that we have?’” Frazier said.
Mei has worked with the business since around 1990, Frazier said. “When he started, he could not speak English,” she said. “And now he speaks perfect English.”
Another longtime worker, Ed Collupy, started in 1978 and still helps at the office at age 94, Frazier said. His granddaughter now works there too.
Frazier said families continue recommending Deveney & White because the business meets people with empathy at one of the hardest moments in their lives.
“I think it’s a simple concept, but the most important one is that you have empathy for what they’re going through,” she said.
