French-Speaking Canada

In the 1860s, waves of French Canadians started a migration to New England. In only forty years, the French-Canadian population of New England grew from 37,000 to over 600,000. About 31,000 of these immigrants established their new lives in Lowell, and the number more than doubled over the following ten years. Available work in cotton, wool, lumber, and paper mills and furniture-making proved the draw. Through 1920, Canadians represented the largest immigrant in every New England state but Connecticut. Proximity to Quebec and the Maritimes made the trip more accessible than a multiple-day journey across the Atlantic Ocean. Canadian immigrants who usually settled in neighborhoods where they could preserve their language, religion, and family networks.

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Little Canada and UMass Lowell: A Changing Landscape

Meagan Timmins, UMass Lowell

It is no secret that the city of Lowell has a long history centered largely around immigration. The city’s economic prosperity during the operation of the mills along the canal ways as well as the urban environment attracted workers from all walks of life with the promise of a new beginning and riches in the United States. As a result of this influx of immigrant groups, numerous neighborhoods dedicated to these specific peoples began to form in different areas throughout the city. Though these areas would fluctuate as different groups immigrated…

Waves from Quebec: French-Canadians in Lowell

Robert Forrant, UMass Lowell

Between 1860 and 1900, a large wave of French Canadians migrated to New England, with numbers growing from a mere 37,000 to over 600,000 in only 40 years. French farmers were drawn by the presence of extended families and friends and the promise of work opportunities in New England’s growing industrial cities. In this period, about 31,000 of French-Canadian immigrants established their new lives in Lowell, and about 35,000 more arrived within the next 10 years.

Many did not appreciate the presence of French Canadian immigrants, however. Carroll Wright, Massachusetts’s commissioner for labor statistics, offered a strongly worded critique of French Canadian immigrants in 1881:

“They care nothing for our institutions, civil, political, or educational. They do not come to make a home among us, to dwell with us as citizens, and so become a part of us; but their purpose is merely to sojourn a few years as aliens, touching us only at a single point, that of work, and, when they have gathered out of us what will satisfy their ends, to get them from whence they came, and bestow it there. They are a horde of industrial invaders, not a stream of stable settlers.”

The presence of the textile mills promised work and opportunity for men, women, and children. As populations grew, so did the workforce. By the late 1800s, it is estimated that 41% of the men and 81% of the women in Lowell’s French-Canadian labor force were employed by the mills.

In an oral history, Louise Harmon recalled: “When I was a girl [in the late 1880s], pretty nearly everyone went off to the States. Farming did not pay as well as it does now, prices were low, we were always hearing of the big wages earned over there in the factories, and every year one family after another sold out for next to nothing and left Canada. Some made a lot of money, no doubt of that, especially those families with lots of daughters.”

Traditionally, French-Canadian farming families operated as a productive unit, meaning the entire family contributed their labor. Fathers stood as the main breadwinners in their households. Mothers raised the children and kept house. Children were expected to work in order to supplement the father’s low wages, often earning as much as 40% of the total household income. In late 19th-century Lowell, about 9 in 10 French-Canadian families relied on their children’s wages in order to survive. Families who faired the best often had many children or started their own businesses to cater to the French-Canadian community

Lowell’s Little Canada, previously located in what are now parts of Pawtucketville and Centralville, was a neighborhood of cheap wooden tenements, filth, and overcrowding. Tenement blocks were often 3 floors with 28 tiny apartments and no baths. Little money was spent on plumbing and heating. George Kenngott, in The Record of a City: A Social Survey of Lowell, Massachusetts (1912), described the largest wooden tenement block in Little Canada called ‘the Harris’:

It contained: “two shops and 48 tenements of four rooms each, and often contains about 300 inhabitants. It has 30 rooms without windows … there are very few, if any, bathrooms. The washing is done in the kitchen, and the drying on outdoor lines controlled by pulleys.”

However, the communal ties between Lowell’s French-Canadian residents were overwhelmingly strong. Catholic missionary priests from Québec often came to Lowell and were accepted with enthusiasm. Multiple parishes were established, the largest and most beautiful of which being Immaculate Conception Church, widely regarded as one of the most beautiful pieces of religious work in Massachusetts. The churches established schools and social clubs for French-Canadian youth. The community offered English language classes and Franco-American unions to encourage people to earn their American citizenship.

In the mid-twentieth century, the city of Lowell introduced a project to redevelop the dilapidated area of Little Canada, and demolished the tenements that once stood. Residents dispersed throughout the city and to neighboring towns; the Franco-American community they had cherished for so long was gone. But, the French-Canadian influence in Lowell lives on through its churches, corner stores, shops, and families.