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Little Canada (French: le petit Canada) is a name for any of the various communities where French Canadians congregated upon emigrating to the United States, in particular New England, in the 19th and early 20th centuries. A variant of Canadian French known as New England French is still spoken in parts of New England. [1]
Some early emigrants relocated to the United States because they had chosen to side with the Americans during the American Revolution. Parish archives of Old St. Joseph's Church in Philadelphia record trips made by Jesuit Father Ferdinand Steinmeyer (Father Farmer) to the Revolutionary War depot near Fishkill, New York, where he baptized over a dozen children of French-Canadian and Acadian parents. Most of the men were members of the 1st Canadian Regiment of the Continental Army, recruited in 1775 by James Livingston in anticipation of an invasion of northeastern Quebec. As the expedition failed, they, their families, and the American militias were driven out of Canada.
Approximately 900,000 French-Canadians emigrated to the United States in the period of 1840-1930 as part of the Quebec diaspora. [2] The vast majority of these francophones settled in the six New England states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont, as well as northern New York state.
Emigrants moved to states close to Quebec, particularly those bordering the province, because of their generally impoverished condition and lack of jobs as a result of a poor economy over-reliant on agriculture. In the 19th century, the United States was one of the most industrialised and prosperous nations on earth. The emigrants left behind a traditional rural society to enter an industrial world. [2] Centers of the New England textile and other manufacturing industries such as Lowell, Massachusetts; Gardner, Massachusetts; Holyoke, Massachusetts; [3] Manchester, New Hampshire; Lewiston, Maine; and Woonsocket, Rhode Island were major destinations for Quebec laborers.
French Canadians from other provinces often moved elsewhere: those from Ontario typically emigrated to Illinois and Michigan, while those from Manitoba and other Western provinces usually emigrated to Minnesota and Wisconsin. Minneapolis and Saint Paul, Minnesota, boasted a large French Canadian community in 1900.
One of the more famous "Little Canadas" was the West Side of Manchester, New Hampshire, a city with a large French-speaking population due to the recruitment of laborers in Quebec to work in the textile mills in the 19th and 20th centuries. "La Caisse Populaire Ste. Marie", or St. Mary's Bank, located in Manchester's Little Canada, was the first credit union chartered in the United States, specifically founded to serve the French Canadian population. The credit union, or "people's bank" ("la caisse populaire") was a financial institution pioneered in Quebec by Quebecers who had difficulty obtaining credit from banks controlled by anglophone Canadians.
The most noted resident of Manchester's "petit Canada" was Grace Metalious, author of the best-selling novel Peyton Place . Metalious denied her French Canadian heritage and mostly lived in non-French Canadian neighborhoods in Manchester, due to her mother's desire to avoid prejudice. During World War II, Metalious eventually had to live in Little Canada after her husband went off to war due to a housing shortage.
In contrast, novelist Robert Cormier of Leominster, Massachusetts, highlighted the culture of fictitious but representative Little Canadas in New England in many of his works, notably "Frenchtown Summer."
Revlon founder Charles Revson, of Russian-Jewish extraction, grew up in a cold-water tenement in Manchester's Little Canada.
Other prominent Little Canadas were found in Lowell, Massachusetts, the home of novelist Jack Kerouac, and Lewiston, Maine. [4] Another notable Franco-American community sprang up in Fall River in southeastern Massachusetts. As a result, a number of cultural and charitable organizations, such as the Franco-American Civic League, the Club Richelieu, La Fédération Catholique Franco-Américaine de Fall River, and L'Association Culturelle Française de Fall River, were founded to foster French language and culture within the Franco-American community. [5]
Today, New England French (essentially a variety of Canadian French) is spoken in parts of New England, in particular Maine. [1]
Biddeford is a city in York County, Maine, United States. It is the principal commercial center of York County. Its population was 22,552 at the 2020 census. The twin cities of Saco and Biddeford include the resort communities of Biddeford Pool and Fortunes Rocks. The town is the site of the University of New England and the annual La Kermesse Franco-Americaine Festival. First visited by Europeans in 1616, it is the site of one of the earliest European settlements in the United States. It is home to Saint Joseph's Church, the tallest building in Maine.
Richmond is a town in Cheshire County, New Hampshire, United States. The population was 1,197 at the 2020 census.
French Canadians, or Franco-Canadians, are an ethnic group who trace their ancestry to French colonists who settled in France's colony of Canada beginning in the 17th century.
The French language is spoken as a minority language in the United States. Roughly 2.1 million Americans over the age of five reported speaking the language at home in a federal 2010 estimate, making French the fourth most-spoken language in the nation behind English, Spanish, and Chinese.
A credit union is a member-owned nonprofit cooperative financial institution.
The Quebec diaspora consists of Quebec immigrants and their descendants dispersed over the North American continent and historically concentrated in the New England region of the United States, Ontario, and the Canadian Prairies. The mass emigration out of Quebec occurred in the period between 1840 and the Great Depression of the 1930s.
French Americans or Franco-Americans are citizens or nationals of the United States who identify themselves with having full or partial French or French-Canadian heritage, ethnicity and/or ancestral ties. They include French-Canadian Americans, whose experience and identity differ from the broader community.
The Sisters of Holy Cross, headquartered in Montreal, Quebec, Canada is an international Catholic congregation of religious sisters which traces its origins to the foundation of the Congregation of Holy Cross in 1837 in Le Mans, France by the Blessed Father Basil Anthony-Marie Moreau, CSC. Two other congregations of sisters also have the same origins: the Marianites of Holy Cross and the Sisters of the Holy Cross.
Three popular American sports were invented in New England. Basketball was invented by James Naismith, a Canadian, in Springfield, Massachusetts, in 1891. Volleyball was invented by William G. Morgan in Holyoke, Massachusetts, in 1895. Paintball was invented in 1981 in Henniker, New Hampshire.
Canadian Americans are American citizens or in some uses residents whose ancestry is wholly or partly Canadian, or citizens of either country that hold dual citizenship.
The East–West Highway is a long-proposed east–west highway corridor in northern New England, intended to link remote northern communities in those states with markets in the Maritimes, Quebec, and upstate New York.
New England French is a variety of French spoken in the New England region of the United States. It descends from Canadian French because it originally came from French Canadians who immigrated to New England during the Grande Hémorragie.
French-Canadian Americans are Americans of French-Canadian descent. About 2.1 million U.S. residents cited this ancestry in the 2010 U.S. Census; the majority of them speak French at home. Americans of French-Canadian descent are most heavily concentrated in New England, New York State, Louisiana and the Midwest. Their ancestors mostly arrived in the United States from Quebec between 1840 and 1930, though some families became established as early as the 17th and 18th centuries.
The Franco-Americans, or French Americans, are a group of people of French and French-Canadian descent living in the United States. Today there are 11.8 million Franco-Americans in the US and 1.6 million Franco-Americans who speak French at home. There are also an additional 450,000 Americans who speak a French-based creole language, for example, Haitian Creole. Even though Franco-Americans are a substantial portion of the US population, they are generally less visible than other sizable ethnic groups. This is partly because of geographical dispersal, and partly because a large proportion of Franco-Americans have acculturated or assimilated.
St. Mary's Bank is a credit union based in Manchester, New Hampshire. Founded in 1908, it is the first credit union in the United States.
During the late 19th and early 20th centuries Holyoke saw an influx of Franco-Americans, predominantly French-Canadians, who immigrated to Massachusetts to work in the city's growing textile and paper mills. By 1900, 1 in 3 people in Holyoke were of French-Canadian descent, and a 1913 survey of French Americans in the United States found Holyoke, along with other Massachusetts cities, to have a larger community of French or French-Canadian born residents than those of New Orleans or Chicago at that time. Initially faced with discrimination for the use of their labor by mill owners to undermine unionization, as well as for their creation of separate French institutions as part of the La Survivance movement, this demographic quickly gained representation in the city's development and civic institutions. Holyoke was at one time a cultural hub for French-Canadian Americans; the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society of America was first organized in the city in 1899, along with a number of other institutions, including theater and drama societies from which famed vaudevillian Eva Tanguay was first discovered, and regular publications, with its largest French weekly newspaper, La Justice, published from 1904 to 1964. The city was also home to author Jacques Ducharme, whose 1943 book The Shadows of the Trees, published by Harper, was one of the first non-fiction English accounts of New England's French and French-Canadian diaspora.
Jacques Armand Ducharme was an American novelist, copy editor, and historian of French Canadian ancestry who wrote The Delusson Family, the first nationally distributed Franco American novel, and the first of the genre published in English, as well as The Shadows of the Trees, one of the first English-language history books covering the Great Migration of émigrés from Quebec to New England, and their history in that part of the United States.
Franco American literature is a body of work, in English and French, by French-Canadian American authors "who were born in New England...born in Canada, [and] spent most of their lives in New England...[, or] those who only traveled through New England and wrote of their experiences." "Franco-American literature" however, as a term, has also been characterized by novels written by the Great Lakes Region diaspora as well. In a broader sense the term is also used as a handle for those writers of Cajun or French descent, outside of the Quebec émigré literary tradition.
The presence of the French language and the New England variety of French, in New Hampshire, has been around since the foundation of the state. Workers in the area even developed their own dialect of French.