Radio Script #943

Little Talks on Common Things
October 15, 1972

The French-Canadian population has rendered notable contributions to Maine during the past century, especially to the textile cities of Biddeford, Lewiston and Waterville. Many of these French families have attained prominence in industry, business and the professions. They have been placed in high political office and have won the respect of their Anglo-Saxon neighbors. In several communities they have been settled so long, that as they reach the third and even the fourth generation of Maine residence, no one thinks of them as a once impoverished minority, but just good American citizens with full equality in all areas of life.

Several times this program has referred to the French of Waterville, but I’ve never said much about their presence and influence in the whole State of Maine. Today I want to tell some of the facts that have recently become publicized because of new, scholarly interest in ethnic studies, particularly as concerns the history, custom, and folkways of the various national groups that form the modern population of Maine.

One of our foremost scholars, himself of French-Canadian descent, is Dr. Gerard Brault, Professor of French at the University of Pennsylvania. Last June he addressed the Maine Historical Society on the Franco-Americans of Maine. From that address and from many other sources of recent origin, came the facts you will hear on this broadcast.

To begin with, how many people of French descent do we have in Maine? The 1970 census recorded that of Maine’s approximately one million people, 141,489, or 14 per cent, claim French as their mother tongue. Since most Franco-Americans are Catholics, parish statistics also give some evidence of their numbers. The church no longer distinguishes between national and other parishes, but as late as 1960 they did list under Franco-American 284 national parishes in New England, 66 of them in Maine. Included in that group were a number, of mixed parishes, those that have a Franco-American majority, but also had non-French members. In 1970 the Franco-American population of Lewiston was given as approximately 25,000, for Biddeford 12,000, for Waterville 6,000. It is safe to say that in all of Maine there are about 150,000 people who consider themselves by descent and language origin as Franco-Americans.

There are, by descent, two distinct groups of Franco-Americans in Maine, and the two groups developed occupationally along different lines. One group was formed from the predominently French population of the Upper St. John Valley from Van Buren to Fort Kent and St. Francis, with Canadian territory just across the river. The first French settlers in that part of Maine came not from Quebec but’ from Nova Scotia. They were refugees banished from the Basin of Minas by the British, a tragic episode in history made famous by Longfellow’s poem, “Evangeline.” Those immigrants to the St. John Valley and their descendants always considered themselves Acadians, not French Canadians.

The more numerous French immigrants to Maine came from the St. Lawrence Lowland between the Maine border and the great Canadian river. The St. John Valley Acadians engaged chiefly in farming and lumbering, while the French coming to Maine from Quebec became largely factory workers in the large mill towns of Maine.

If tbe Acadian French came because they were driven out of Nova Scotia, why did the French come from the Quebec Lowlands later in even larger numbers? The answer is that the necessity for income forced them out.

The St. Lawrence Lowland lies in a triangle formed by the Laurentian mountains in the north and the Appalachians in the south. Modern agricultural research has made clear what the early French settlers in those lowlands could not possibly know – that the region was simply not suited to most types of farming especially to wheat, which was the predominant grain in the early 19th century. The French farmer, just like his Yankee counterpart in Netv England, tilled the soil, planted and harvested, according to age-old customs that stubbornly resisted change. For a long time he used no fertilizer, not even animal manure. He kept turning over the same shallow topsoil with his simple plow, sowed unclean and unimproved seed, and knew nothing about crop rotation. Between 1825 and 1850, the whole Province of Quebec suffered a 70% drop in production of its chief cash crop, wheat. But in the Quebec Lowlands one crop did not fail – children. The population of the whole province increased from 60,000 to 670,000 between 1750 and 1850. With farms no longer able to support the growing population, and with little capital to buy tillable land anywhere, acute crisis hit the people between the St. Lawrence and the Maine border.

History contains innumerable instances of what always happens in such a crisis. People simply get out. That is why 800,000 New Englanders left this time to go to the rich, black soil of the prairies in the early years of the 19th century. For the same reason thousands of Irish left their famine strickened isle in the 1840s and it brought to America more than twenty million people from Eastern and Southern Europe during this century.

Ten years before the Civil War, in 1850, there were 20,000 French Canadians in New England, most of them in Vermont, and only about 3,700 in Maine. Most or the latter were clustered in Old Town, Orono and Waterville. Lewiston was then only a cluster of dwellings at the great falls of the Androscoggin. Those pre-Civil War French Canadians were noted as lumbermen, just as were the Acadians on the St. John.

The great influx of these Quebec immigrants came after the Civil War, and it came because the war caused a tremendous boom in the textile industry of New England. Let us see just how that happened.

Before the war, the small textile mills had employed mostly unmarried girls, recruited from the New England farm communities. Gradually, as other opportunities opened, the native American employees turned to other types of work. Their places were at first filled by Irish immigrants, who in turn found other opportunities. So, by 1870, a major source of mill workers was the lowland towns of Quebec. Between 1865 and 1900 French Canada lost as many as 600,000 people to New England factory towns.

Early in the 19th century, a group of Boston merchants that included Lowells, Appletons, Cabots and Lawrences, formed corporations to group the tiny cotton mills into huge complexes at such places as Lowell, Lawrence, Haverhill, New Bedford and Fall River, where cheap water power made possible the giant mills. It was those mills that kept running short of labor. The textile mills, connected with a big complex, though starting usually as independents, developed also at Biddeford, Lewiston, Augusta, Waterville, and Old Town b Maine. Those Maine mills were nearer to the Quebec lowlands than were the mills of Massachusetts, and it was not long before they received large numbers of the families who left Quebec. By 1900 about a quarter of the French-Canadian population of New England was located in Maine.

It was natural that immigrating families should be followed to particular Maine places by others from the same Quebec towns. That is why many of Waterville’s Franco-Americaus came from the Beauce villages between Jackman and the St. Lawrence River.

What is not well remembered today is that in the 1870’s, at the time when Waterville’s Lockwood Hills were started, contract labor was common in New England. Some of those contractors were themselves French Canadians. A contractor would agree to supply a certain mill with a certain number of workers by a when date, and he would often get his own profit at both ends, an agreed per capita amount from the factory management, and a percentage of the worker’s pay for a period of time, usually six months, deducted from the ryliy envelope. That system was abolished by federal law in 1885. In Waterville there is no evidence that contract labor ever prevailed. Most families that worked in the Lockwood Mills came because of influence of relatives or friends already here.

It is amazing how steadily the Franco-Americans stuck to the textile mills. The worker often had to stand all day long. The noise was deafening, and in summer the heat was devastating. Cotton dust choked the lungs. Many workers developed eye problems. In 1900 the textile employees worked a 60 hour week from 6 a.m. to 6 p.m. every day except Sunday, and few earned more than two dollars a day.

Many Franco-Americans lived in company houses. Contact between them and the Anglo-Saxon population was rare. In some of the Maine mill towns, the local papers did not even record French births, marriages and deaths. The wall separating Franco-Americans from the rest of the community was erected by mutual consent. The French wanted their own language, their own cultural ways, their own religion.

But, in their separation, the French did not stagnate. They developed an astonishing richness and variety of development. Steadily they improved in financial status, in breadth of occupation, and finally achieved equality of acceptance, so that today one seldom thinks of them as other than just Americans.

By 1935 there were 28 Franco-American newspapers in Maine. In one respect the Franco-Americans differ from most other ethnic groups in the U.S. They keep close contact with the mother country. In annual trips to Canada many families were reminded of the old style of life, and parents could show the children how it used to be.

Franco-American parochial schools played an important part in preserving old values while at the same time fostering new attitudes and ideals. The devoted work of nuns and brothers of several Christian orders have made significant contribution to education in Maine.

Finally, let me say a good word for the language we call Canadian French. We often hear it said, especially by those who learn Parisian French in American schools, that our Franco-Americans speak poor French. That all depends upon how we look upon language. Canadian French is no more distinct from Parisian French than American English is from British English. Every language has local features, every language is affected by a neighboring tongue. There are even differences between Canadian French and Acadian French, just as there are very noticeable differences between Maine English and Georgia English. It is nonsense to say Franco-Americans do not speak good French.

And with this tribute to the fine people who make up so large a part of Waterville’s population, we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1972