| 
Continued from previous page
At the end of the eighteenth century, much further to the
north, is a story about Acadians coming to the St. John Valley by the 1780s in search of a
haven. They arrived in the 1780s after a generation spent in the Fredrickson, New
Brunswick, area where an increasing English penetration, fueled by a massive influx of
American Loyalist settlers, made them fearful of another Deportation.
“Deportation?” my friend Martin asks. Martin is a
college graduate who grew up in southern New Jersey, an articulate, well-read man. Yet, he
asks, “Deportation?”
 |
| Courtesy Pejebscot
Historical Society
|
Can it be that the Acadian Deportation of 1755 is now so
invisible a part of North American history that Martin has never heard of it?
This is the story. Acadians in what we now call Nova Scotia
had been under English sovereignty since the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713. (In New France,
there were three colonies: Acadia in Nova Scotia with its settlers from southwestern
France; Canada, comprising the rest of Canada and much of the American Midwest; and
Louisiana.)
In September of 1755, Acadians were seized from their
communities (most of them while they were at Sunday Mass) and shipped away. That is to
say, English soldiers surrounded the churches and evacuated the people onto ships-without
their elderly left at home to care for infants, without their pregnant women who had not
made the sometimes arduous journey to Mass, without their sick who were alone on the
frontier farms, without their husbands who were on hunting expeditions.
The seized Acadians were scattered all over North America.
Le Grand Dérangement, they call it. “The Great Upheaval.” Many of those
marooned in the southern British colonies of North America eventually found their way to
Louisiana (remember Longfellow’s “Evangeline”?), where they became what is
now known as Cajuns.
|
| "Acadians were seized from their
communities (most of them while they were at Sunday Mass) and shipped away." |
|
The Acadians who were left behind regrouped and fled. They
escaped from Nova Scotia into New Brunswick. Eventually they felt impelled to flee
Southern New Brunswick, too. For these Acadians, the distant St. John Valley was a
no-man’s land where they might set up farming and raise their families in peace
without fear of expulsion by the English.
Within 60 years, unknown to these Valley Acadians, the
Webster-Ashburton Treaty (1842) divided the Valley between the U.S. and Canada, thus
committed the Acadians to pursue different national destinies.
During the American Civil War, recruiters descended on the
American side of the Valley. They told Acadian men that they were subject to the draft for
the Northern Army. The draft was the least of the news to these young men and their
families-the more startling news was that the Valley was part of les Etats!
They were absolutely dumbfounded. They had escaped the
English in Nova Scotia in 1755 and later escaped the English again in southern New
Brunswick, and here were these other English telling them they were part of their country.
And subject to a draft into their army!
The next part of the Franco-American story takes part in
the nineteenth- and twentieth-centuries.
The French Canadians did not intend to immigrate to this
country. Most of us came down as migrant workers, often known as “birds of
passage”-des oiseaux de passage. Workers traveled to Biddeford and later to
Manchester, New Hampshire. As fortunes beckoned, the French-Canadians (not yet
Franco-Americans) went to Springfield or perhaps Woonsocket. Younger families and single
people were more mobile, of course, but this pattern of mobility held to some extent for
everyone. Following the best wages made sense to workers who had come down only to amass a
nest egg, not to settle in a new home.
Starting in southern New England as early as the 1820s,
when the industrialization of the region began in Massachusetts and Rhode Island, the wave
of migration followed industrialization northward until it hit Maine in the 1850s and
1860s.
“He wanted to make a pile of money (un tas
d’argent),” said my great aunt Rosa of her father. “He always thought
he would go back.”
Over the century of mass migrations to the U.S., roughly
1830 to 1930, 50 percent of those who came down did return to French Canada-compared to 25
percent of European immigrants.
Swells in migration rates corresponded with the end of a
depression or recession in the U.S. French Canada experienced these for longer periods,
so, as prosperity returned to the US, an expanding job market here created an accessible
option for those seeking relief from economic underdevelopment.
After the depression of 1873, for instance, there is a
decided increase in migration to New England in the late 1870s and early 1880s. After the
depression of 1893, there is a similar increase. This is the period when my father’s
family came down.
Within a generation of settling here, the French Canadians
reproduced their rural villages in urban settings. A church, of course, an elementary
school, a newspaper, benevolent societies and social clubs, a hospice, a hospital (so the
Canadiens would not have to go to an “American” hospital), and an orphanage.
To encourage the “oiseaux de passage” to
settle down, the clergy collected funds from parishioners to loan to families so they
could build three- and four-decker apartment buildings. Property owners, they believed,
were easier to “keep in place”-not only geographically but religiously. Often
several members of a family grouped together, with the clergy’s help, to finance a
building-say, brothers and their families each living on a floor-and then, when they
could, they built more buildings and the brothers each had an apartment building of their
own.
In the early 1880s, Father Hévey, assigned to St. Pierre
et St. Paul in Lewiston, was one of the clergy who organized an informal banking system.
When his effort did not succeed, however, and lost its contributors’ funds, Father
Hévey was hastily transferred to the Manchester, New Hampshire, diocese. There,
undaunted, he organized another banking effort that evolved into the first credit union in
the U.S.-the Sainte Marie credit union.
By 1900, one in every five New Englanders was a
Franco-American living in a francophone community in which the comings and goings between
French Canada and the U.S. were easy and frequent. Careers were made on both sides of the
border. The rapport was close. In fact, the French Canadians called New England le
Québec d’en bas-Quebec Lower Down. Between 1830 and 1930, one in three French
Canadians spent some period of time in New England.
Honoré Beaugrand, mayor of Montréal and editor of leading
newspapers in that city, was at one point editor of the Franco newspaper la République
in Fall River. There he serialized his book Jeanne la Fileuse, the first
Franco-American novel. (I like to think that the Honoré Beaugrand Metro stop in Montréal
is named after a Franco-American!). Calixta Lavallée wrote the text for the Canadian
national anthem “O Canada!” while living in Lowell, Massachusetts. (It was
written, of course, in French and only later translated into English.)
The end to this close relationship came in the 1920s, when
successive U.S. laws restricted immigration. Francophone career mobility slowed and
eventually ceased. No longer could there be an easy north-to-south-to-north-again
movement. East-to-west-and-no-coming-back was what developed. (Like the Acadians, the
French Canadians became a people split between two countries.)
After the 1920s, ambitious Francos began going west-New
York, Ohio, Illinois. There, they were lost in the anglophone world where they were simply
“white”-or “Anglo.” They were no longer available to the Franco
community and were no longer visible to its youth. The young believed they were the first
one doing this among Francos. “It hasn’t been done before.” (This produced
many personal stories mimicking group stories!)
The Franco community we knew in Maine in the 1940s and
1950s and 1960s was a much more proletarian society than that earlier one, a less diverse
one. It would not be until the 1960s that Francos again produced a mixed community, one
that approximated the non-Franco community in class-diversity and education levels.
| 
|
| Cabot
mill employees - Courtesy Pejebscot Historical Society
|
By the 1950s, the mills, which had been our
raison d’être for coming down, were declining quickly (had been in some
decline for two and three generations). Even the most stable of the French-language
newspapers, always besieged by lack of advertising funds and the constant attrition of its
readership towards the anglophone newspaper, began to decline seriously.
“It’s the end,” my mémère said one
day in the 1950s when she opened her Messager to read that the newspaper, founded
in 1880, would be dropping from daily to tri-weekly publication. She was right, even if
the end would not come for another decade-but come it did for the Messager in
1968.
By the 1950s, too, the French-language movie houses were
gone or going, and French-language radio was reduced to a few hours a day even on stations
like Lewiston’s WCOU, which had been founded as a francophone medium. Churches were
offering more and more masses where the sermon and the non-Latin communication was in
English, not in French, as it had been for generations.
Many of us had a feeling that we were the last generation
to be Franco. While it can be said that every generation places its stamp on the group
experience, I think it can also be said that the community I grew up in was the last
generation of Franco-Americans to learn French before learning English, the last
generation to live in family groupings where French was necessary and in which links to
Québec were active and regularly renewed.
- Next Page -
|
