Radip Script #1268

Little Talks on Common Things
March 22, 1981

During the 33 years that this program has been on the air, it has often referred to Waterville’s Franco-American population and their significant contribution to the community. Today we devote the entire broadcast to a more comprehensive account of that important element in Waterville life.

The cause of the big migration of French-Canadians from Lower Quebec in the 1870’s is well known. It was the rapid development of cotton manufacturing in New England. To the mills of Lawrence, Lowell, New Bedford, Fall River, Manchester, Lewiston, Biddeford and Waterville came thousands of persons and hundreds of entire families from Eastern Canada, many from the Beauce region of Lower Quebec.

In 1860 most of the French-Canadians already in Maine were in the St. John Valley. Many of them had not come from the Province of Quebec, but were descendants of Acadians who had been driven from their Nova Scotia homes around the Midas Basin by the British in 1754, a tragic story made familiar to most of us by Longfellow’s Evangeline. Those refugees scattered widely, some as far south as Louisiana, but a significant number found homes in the wilderness on the upper St. John River, where they founded such communities as Van Buren, Fort Kent, Madawaska, and St. Francis. They were later joined by many others from Quebec.

But why were a number of them already in Waterville by the middle of the 19th century, before the rise of the cotton mills? Lower Quebec was notoriously poor country for the French people. The land was not sufficiently fertile, money was scarce, non-agricultural employment hard to find, and families were large. So, as early as the 1820’s, people of the Beauce region, in such towns as St. George and Beauceville,began to look enviously across the border into Maine, where they were welcomed in the lumber camps and on the farms. At first very few of those from across the border remained in Maine. They were mostly unmarried men, who after a season of employment, returned to Canada with the only cash their families had seen for many months. Most trade in the Beauce region was then entirely by barter.

Somebody has to start any group settlement in a particular community. The first to come to Waterville from French Canada was Jean Baptiste Mathieu He left Canada in 1822, only twenty years after Waterville had become an independent town. He came alone, making his way leisurely down the state, stopping to work at various places for a few days or as long as a month, until he came to Shirley just below Moosehead Lake. There he became a truckman, taking supplies into the lumber camps around Greenville, brought his family from Canada, and stayed for five years. In 1827 he moved to Waterville, but no one seems to know just why. Mathieu was a very enterprising, ambitious man, and he soon had success in Waterville. He bought a house in Fairfield and moved it to the section of Waterville known as the Plains. He expanded his trucking business, shrewdly bought land, and induced others to come here from Canada. By 1830 the first of the Waterville Marcous, DeRochers and Rancourts had become his Waterville neighbors. The 1830’s saw a big spurt in immigration because of the opening of what Americans called the Canada Road, from Skowhegan to Quebec City, but which Canadians called Kennebec Road. That road permitted the driving of cattle from Quebec to the richer American market, sometimes all the way to the big Brighton market near Boston, and it afforded easy access to those seeking employment.

Most of the French early comers to Waterville were common laborers with no artisan skills, but they found ready work in the lumber camps, in the sawmills and on the farms. Yet so low was their economic and social status that for many years their employers seldom knew them by name. Old hotel registers at Solon, Bingham and the Forks contain such entries as “Stephen Coburn and three Frenchmen” or “Levi Clevealand and two Frenchmen.” As late as 1870, the diary of George Flood, founder of a Waterville fuel business, frequently referred to “my Frenchmen.”

Except for a few like Mathieu, the French who early came to Waterville faced that kind of situation. Yet fifty French families were here within a few years of the opening of the Canada Road. In 1850 there were more than 50 such families in Waterville, most of them on the Plains or at the Head of the Falls.

We must bear in mind that, until after the Civil War, Waterville had no large industry. On the Messalonskee and near the dam on the Kennebec, a few small industries did good business, but none employed more than a dozen men. The town’s few sawmills, gristmills, tanneries, foundry, and match factory could absorb few of the French immigrants.

It was the Civil War that changed the gradual trickle of French-Canadians into a flood. Some took advantage of the war itself, enlisting in Union regiments. Others took jobs vacated by Yankees who entered the armed services. The after-effects of the war were, however, even more important. The war indeed was the principal cause of the rapid increase of large factories that replaced the small industries. Leading those factories were textiles and shoes. Cotton and woolen mills and shoe factories opened allover New England. To the new mills in Lewiston, Biddeford and WateTVille came a stream of French-Canadians. Between 1865 and 1880 as many as 400,000 Canadians left Canada for the states, half of them to settle in New England, and Maine certainly got a good share.

It was the opening of the Lockwood Mills in 1875 that boosted French-Canadian immigration to Waterville. For many years Lockwood continued to be the town’s largest industry. Wages were low, but much better than in Lower Quebec. The Lockwood management claimed not to indulge in child labor, but that was a matter of legal definition. In the 1870’s, children 12 years old could legally be employed in the mills, and no one ever inquired whether a child claiming to be 12 was actually that age. Those young boys and girls were paid from 25 to 35 cents a day for a 12 hour day six days a week. An adult weaver was paid a dollar a day.

The 1880 census showed Waterville with a population of 4470 of whom 1630 were French-Canadians. Their living quarters varied from crude huts built into the river bank to neat frame houses. Many families lived in the apartments built and owned by the Lockwood Company – big barrack-like structures with rather primitive accommodations. The residents called them “maison de compagnie.”

As always happens when people with a different language come to a community, the French in Waterville clustered among themselves, and actually developed what for a time became almost a separate complete village on the Plains. There
the Roman Catholic Church and the French language cemented them into a unified group.

The first settler, Jean Baptiste Mathieu,was a devout Catholic, and for many years he made his home the center for holding mass whenever an itinerant priest came to Waterville. It was, however, the Protestant, not the Catholic faith that had the first organized religious services held regularly on the Plains. In the 1830’s, Jonathan Furbush, a divinity student at Waterville College and a member of the First Baptist Church of Waterville, which the college president, Jeremiah Chaplin, had organized in 1818, started a small Sunday School on the Plains. In the 1840’s it was vigorously conducted by C. F. Hathaway, founder of the now renowned Hathaway Shirt Co.

When Rev. S. P. Merrill was the Baptist pastor in Waterville in 1874, he was determined that there should be more than Sunday School classes, and regular Baptist preaching services on the Plains. He so urged the Baptist Mission Society to send a French-speaking pastor that they did send Rev. E. Leger, and he became pastor of what was called the First Baptist French Mission.

In 1887 the Mission opened its new building on Water Street. One of its later pastors was Rev. Isaac LaFleur, father of Robert LaFleur, for whom the Waterville Municipal Airport is named. Another pastor was Auguste Boquelle, who after retirement from the ministry became a prominent interior decorator in this community. In 1933 the mission was made an independent church, and it still functions as the Second Baptist Church of Waterville. The church had faithful members, but never made any large inroads into what was a staunch Catholic community. In time it abandoned services in the French language, and today its membership is composed of people from allover the Waterville area.

Until 1856 Waterville had no resident Catholic priest, but had often been visited by priests from other places, especially Bangor. They from time to time administered the ordinances in homes, espe,cially in that of Jean Baptiste Mathieu. In 1848 Father Jean Baptiste was frequently there. His mission covered a large area, including territory from Augusta to Old Town. In 1856 Father J. J. Niclin was stationed in Waterville, his duties also including Skowhegan. In 1870 Rev. D. Halde became the local Catholic pastor. Before his coming, the Catholics had built a small edifice on Grove Street called St. John’s Church. They had long outgrown its small accommodations, and Father Halde was determined that anew and adequate building should be erected. He purchased the Ware property at the corner of Elm and Winter Streets, and there opened the large brick building christened St. Francis de Sales Church.

The most widely known pastor of that church was Father Narcisse Charland who devotedly served it for 43 years. He started the first parochial school, brought in the Ursuline sisters, and built up a very strong parish. He was a leader in community enterprises and cooperated in many projects with the Protestant clergy. President Roberts of Colby College told me that he and Father Charland used to go out together to distribute Thanksgiving baskets to the poor. Early in the 20th’ century the St. Francis parish was divided into three parishes: St. Francis, Sacred Heart and Notre Dame. Sacred Heart was organized in 1905, Notre Dame in 1910.

Their isolation was not the only cause of slow economic and social acceptance of the French population. An equally important cause was lack of education. Those people should not be blamed for their comparative indifference to schooling. The families were large, and financial necessity compelled early placement of children in the mills. Their clergy, however, kept stressing the need for children to be able to read, so that, unlike many parents, they could at least read the catechism and the Douay Bible.

As time went on, more and more French children were found in the public elementary schools, but few attended the high school or Coburn Institute. As late as 1895, when Franklin Johnson, later Colby president, was principal of Coburn, not a single French name was in the Coburn catalogue. Gradually the parochial system gave almost all local French children an elementary education, but Waterville has never had a parochial high school except for Mt. Merici for girls; so the French children were late in getting into secondary schools in any appreciable numbers. The first French-Canadian boy to graduate from Waterville High School was Levi LaChance in 1881, and the first girl was Lena Butler in 1891. Today at least half of each WHS graduating class is Franco-American.

Although a few of the French youth attended Colby earlier for one or more years, the first to graduate was John Ralph LaFleur in 1915. In the very next class, 1916, was Cyril M. Joly, prominent attorney and municipal judge.

I had intended this to be a single comprehensive broadcast about the local French-Canadian community, but I find we must devote another Sunday to it. Today we have not touched upon that people’s conspicuous rise in economic and social status, their contributions to Waterville’s business, industry and professions, and their prominent part in the political life of the city.

Those items will fill next week’s broadcast, but for today we must say goodbye until next week.

Year: 1981