The history of the French in Baltimore dates to the 18th century. The earliest wave of French immigration began in the mid-18th century, as many Acadian refugees from Canada's Maritime Provinces. The Acadians were expelled from Canada by the British, who were victorious in the French and Indian War, and in the Seven Years War in Europe. They took over French territory in North America east of the Mississippi River.
Later waves of French settlement in Baltimore from the 1790s to the early 19th century brought Roman Catholic refugees of the French Revolution and others fleeing the Haitian Revolution in the French colony of Saint-Domingue.
In the late 20th and 21st centuries, additional Creole and French speakers have immigrated to Baltimore and other US cities as refugees from Haiti. Their nation has struggled with violent political upheaval and severe natural disasters.
In 1920, 626 foreign-born White people in Baltimore spoke the French language as their mother tongue. [1]
As of the 2000 United States Census the French American community in the Baltimore metropolitan area numbered 47,234 (1.9% of the area's population); an additional 10,494 (0.4%) identified as French Canadian American. The Baltimore area's total population of French descent numbered 57,728, or 2.3% of the area's population. [2] According to Census responses, some 5,705 people in Baltimore speak the French language (including French Creole) at home. [3]
In the same year Baltimore city's French population (excluding Basques) was 4,721, 0.7% of the city's population. There were also 824 French-Canadians, 0.1% of the population. [4]
As of 2011, immigrants from France were the forty-fifth largest foreign-born population in Baltimore. French (including patois and Cajun) was the fourth most common language of people who spoke English "less than very well". French Creole was the thirtieth most spoken language of people who spoke English "less than very well". [5]
In 2013, an estimated 5,383 French-Americans resided in Baltimore city, 0.9% of the population. An additional 1,007 people, 0.2% of the population, identified as being of French-Canadian descent. [6]
The French and Indian War was the North American theater of the Seven Years' War in Europe, lasting from 1754 to 1763. There was intense fighting between the troops of British America and the French inhabitants of Acadia, a colony of New France located in what are now the Canadian Maritime provinces and the U.S. state of Maine. In 1755 the British expelled the French-speaking Acadians; approximately 11,500 were exiled in total.
Most of the surviving exiled Acadians traveled to Louisiana, a French colony, where their descendants became known as Cajuns. Other refugees returned to France or resettled in Baltimore.
Ships carrying 913 Acadian refugees arrived in Maryland in November 1755. Shunned by a hostile, Francophobic population due to the war, [7] the Acadians had to rely upon themselves to better their conditions. Drawing on their skills as fishermen, many Acadian men became sailors and longshoremen. [8]
During the French Revolution (1789–1799), many French Catholics fled France to escape its religious persecution. Among the refugees who immigrated to Baltimore were the Sulpician Fathers, a Roman Catholic teaching order. Most of the earliest Catholic institutions in Baltimore were established by these French refugees.
The Sulpician Fathers founded St. Mary's Seminary and University and St. Mary's Seminary Chapel. They also founded Catholic institutions elsewhere in Maryland, such as Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg. Elizabeth Ann Seton, who was American-born, owned a home on the grounds of St. Mary's Seminary.
She later moved to Emmitsburg and established the Sisters of Charity, the first American congregation for nuns. In the 1960s Seton's home was restored to its original appearance through the efforts of a committee, which continues to operate the home as a museum. [9] The original seminary buildings were demolished during the mid-1970s, [10] and the campus is now part of St. Mary's Park in the Seton Hill Historic District.
During the time of the French Revolution, there was a related slave revolt on the French colony of Saint-Domingue, on Hispaniola in the Caribbean. Enslaved people gained independence, naming their republic as Haiti.
Many French-speaking Black Catholic and white French Catholic refugees from Saint Domingue left for Baltimore. In total, 1,500 Franco-Haitians fled the island. [11] The refugee population from Saint-Domingue was multiracial, including white Creoles and their enslaved African workers, as well as many free people of color. Some of the latter were also slaveowners. [12]
Along with the Sulpician Fathers, some of these refugees and their descendants founded St. Francis Xavier Church. The church is the oldest historically Black Catholic church in the United States. [13]
During the violent Haitian Revolution, the city of Baltimore passed an ordinance declaring that all enslaved persons imported by slaveholders from the West Indies, including Haiti, were "dangerous to the peace and welfare of the city". They ordered slaveowners to banish such enslaved people. [14]
In the 1750s, the French Acadian refugees from Nova Scotia established a community along South Charles Street near Lombard Street that was known as "French Town". [15] By the 1830s the Acadian presence in Baltimore had appeared to decline with assimilation or relocation; French Town also disappeared as an ethnic community. [7]
The area that was formerly known as Frenchtown is now designated as the Seton Hill Historic District. [10]
An annual French Fair is held in Seton Hill. [10] In 2014 it was on 11 October, from 12 to 5 in Saint Mary's Park. The Seton Hill Association hosts the fair to celebrate the neighborhood as Baltimore's former French Quarter. The Fair highlights city living and vendors of French themed food, and also presents several music performers. Other activities have included hula hooping on the central green, petanque in the park, a flea and craft market, Art on the Fence, and a kids' corner for building and entertainments.
The Baltimore French School was founded in 1990 by a French immigrant who teaches the French language at Johns Hopkins University and the Peabody Conservatory. [16]
A line of the Bonaparte family has lived in Baltimore. Napoleon's brother Jérôme traveled to Baltimore to meet a man he had befriended in the French Navy. There he met his future wife, Elizabeth Patterson, also known as Betsy. They were married by the archbishop of Baltimore in the Baltimore Cathedral on Christmas Eve of 1803. Napoleon had the marriage annulled and Jérôme was forced to return to France. Betsy Bonaparte continued to live in Baltimore with their son, also named Jérôme. [17]
His son Charles Bonaparte was a lawyer and politician who served as Secretary of the Navy and later the Attorney General of the United States. During his tenure as Attorney General, he oversaw the creation of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. [18]
Avoyelles is a parish located in central eastern Louisiana on the Red River where it effectively becomes the Atchafalaya River and meets the Mississippi River. As of the 2020 census, the population was 39,693. The parish seat is Marksville. The parish was created in 1807, with the name deriving from the French name for the historic Avoyel people, one of the local Indian tribes at the time of European encounter.
Saint-Domingue was a French colony in the western portion of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, in the area of modern-day Haiti, from 1697 to 1804. The name derives from the Spanish main city on the island, Santo Domingo, which came to refer specifically to the Spanish-held Captaincy General of Santo Domingo, now the Dominican Republic. The borders between the two were fluid and changed over time until they were finally solidified in the Dominican War of Independence in 1844.
Louis William Valentine DuBourg was a French Catholic prelate and Sulpician missionary to the United States. He built up the church in the vast new Louisiana Territory as the Bishop of Louisiana and the Two Floridas and later became the Bishop of Montauban and finally the Archbishop of Besançon in France.
St. Mary's Seminary and University is a Catholic seminary located within the Archdiocese of Baltimore in Baltimore, Maryland; it was the first seminary founded in the United States after the Revolution and has been run since its founding by the Society of the Priests of Saint Sulpice.
Louisiana Creoles are a Louisiana French ethnic group descended from the inhabitants of colonial Louisiana before it became a part of the United States during the period of both French and Spanish rule. They share cultural ties such as the traditional use of the French, Spanish, and Creole languages and predominant practice of Catholicism.
The Oblate Sisters of Providence (OSP) is a Catholic women's religious institute founded by Mother Mary Elizabeth Lange, and Father James Nicholas Joubert in 1829 in Baltimore, Maryland for the education of girls of African descent. It was the first permanent community of Black Catholic sisters in the United States.
Mary Elizabeth Lange, OSP was an American religious sister in Baltimore, Maryland who founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence in 1829, the first African-American religious congregation in the United States. She was also, via the Oblates, the first African-American superior general.
James Mary Hector Nicolas Joubert de la Muraille, PSS was a French Catholic priest in the United States. A teacher at St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore, he co-founded the Oblate Sisters of Providence along with Mary Lange.
Ambrose Maréchal, P.S.S. was a French-born Catholic prelate who served as Archbishop of Baltimore from 1817 until his death. He was a member of the Sulpicians.
John Dubois was a French-born Catholic prelate who served as Bishop of New York from 1826 until his death in 1842.
Samuel Eccleston, P.S.S. was an American Catholic prelate who served as Archbishop of Baltimore from 1834 until his death in 1851. He was a member of the Sulpicians.
John Mary Joseph Benedict Chanche, S.S., was an American prelate of the Roman Catholic Church. He served as the first bishop Diocese of Natchez in Mississippi from 1841 to 1852.
St. Mary's Seminary Chapel, located at 600 North Paca Street in the Seton Hill neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, is the oldest Neo-Gothic style church in the United States. It was built from 1806 through 1808 by French architect J. Maximilian M. Godefroy for the French Sulpician priests of St. Mary's Seminary. Godefroy claimed that his design was the first Gothic building in America.
Seton Hill Historic District is a historic district in Baltimore, Maryland. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1975.
Mother Seton House is a historic home located on the grounds of St. Mary’s Seminary at Baltimore, Maryland, United States. It is a 2+1⁄2-story red brick house, similar to other small homes built in the early 19th century for the predominantly French community nearby. It was built in 1808 as the home of Elizabeth Ann Seton (1774–1821), the first American-born woman beatified and canonized by the Roman Catholic Church. In the 1960s it was restored to its original appearance through the efforts of a committee, which continues to operate the home as a museum. Mother Seton House is located adjacent to the St. Mary's Seminary Chapel.
Historic St. Francis Xavier Church is a Black Catholic parish in Baltimore, Maryland. It is said to be the first exclusively Black parish in America, having been established in 1863.
There have been a variety of ethnic groups in Baltimore, Maryland and its surrounding area for 12,000 years. Prior to European colonization, various Native American nations have lived in the Baltimore area for nearly 3 millennia, with the earliest known Native inhabitants dating to the 10th millennium BCE. Following Baltimore's foundation as a subdivision of the Province of Maryland by British colonial authorities in 1661, the city became home to numerous European settlers and immigrants and their African slaves. Since the first English settlers arrived, substantial immigration from all over Europe, the presence of a deeply rooted community of free black people that was the largest in the pre-Civil War United States, out-migration of African-Americans from the Deep South, out-migration of White Southerners from Appalachia, out-migration of Native Americans from the Southeast such as the Lumbee and the Cherokee, and new waves of more recent immigrants from Latin America, the Caribbean, Asia and Africa have added layers of complexity to the workforce and culture of Baltimore, as well as the religious and ethnic fabric of the city. Baltimore's culture has been described as "the blending of Southern culture and [African-American] migration, Northern industry, and the influx of European immigrants—first mixing at the port and its neighborhoods...Baltimore’s character, it’s uniqueness, the dialect, all of it, is a kind of amalgamation of these very different things coming together—with a little Appalachia thrown in...It’s all threaded through these neighborhoods", according to the American studies academic Mary Rizzo.
John Tessier S.S. was a French Sulpician priest who emigrated from France at the time of the Revolution. From 1810 to 1829 he was the Provincial Superior of the Sulpician congregation in the United States. He served as vicar-general to the Roman Catholic Bishops of Baltimore, and for a time oversaw both St. Mary's Seminary in Baltimore and Mount St. Mary's College and Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland.
The city of Baltimore, Maryland includes a large and growing Caribbean-American population. The Caribbean-American community is centered in West Baltimore. The largest non-Hispanic Caribbean populations in Baltimore are Jamaicans, Trinidadians and Tobagonians, and Haitians. Baltimore also has significant Hispanic populations from the Spanish West Indies, particularly Puerto Ricans, Dominicans, and Cubans. Northwest Baltimore is the center of the West Indian population of Baltimore, while Caribbean Hispanics in the city tend to live among other Latinos in neighborhoods such as Greektown, Upper Fell's Point, and Highlandtown. Jamaicans and Trinidadians are the first and second largest West Indian groups in the city, respectively. The neighborhoods of Park Heights and Pimlico in northwest Baltimore are home to large West Indian populations, particularly Jamaican-Americans.
Saint-Domingue Creoles or simply Creoles, were the people who lived in the French colony of Saint-Domingue prior to the Haitian Revolution.
1920 Baltimore French.
St. Francis Xavier Baltimore.
Baltimore French Town.