An Attempt at a French-Canadian "Colony" in South Carolina

Before the pandemic, I gave a presentation in a private residence to a small group in Maryland. I enjoy telling my Québec/New England-based stories outside of the region because audiences have fewer preconceptions and ask surprising questions. At this presentation in Maryland someone asked why the Franco-American textile workers in New England didn’t move to the Southeast when the industry began to relocate there in the early 20th century.   

I’m sure there was no large-scale exodus of Franco-American labor from New England to the South in that period. But I have found evidence of at least one attempt to lure them southward.

A French-Canadian “Invasion” of the South in 1903

The New-York Daily Tribune, in its May 7, 1903 edition, reported on an attempt to establish a French-Canadian “colony” in Dixie.

FRENCH CANADIANS INVADE SOUTH.
A Project to Establish Colonies in the Cotton Belt.
Washington May 6 (Special).— A party of well to-do and influential French Canadians passed through Washington last night, bound for the South where they will make an extensive examination of the cotton belt with a view to selecting sites for one or more French Canadian colonies. It is expected that this will prove to be the beginning of an extensive immigration of French Canadians who have been attracted by the glowing accounts they have heard of the Southern States, and, impressed with the establishment of extensive cotton mills where the younger members of their families can find employment, are seriously contemplating the purchase of extensive tracts of land, which will be used by the older colonists for agricultural purposes.

Exactly who these “well to-do and influential" French Canadians were I haven’t yet ascertained, but their plan was clear. Many of their compatriots in the States had come from farms in Québec and planned a return to agriculture by heading south. The younger generation, many of them having worked in the mills of New England, would find employment in the South’s growing textile industry. 

The following piece from the Batesburg (South Carolina) Advocate of September 30, 1903 alludes to the Spring visit of the French-Canadians and gives further details about their plans. These Canadiens, it appears, were arriving via Massachusetts.

A COLONY LOCATED.
A Lot of French Canadians to Settle Near Summerville [South Carolina].

A PIONEER BAND HAS ARRIVED,
And Are Now Engaged In Building Homes at the New Settlement, Others Will Follow Soon.

The News and Courier, of Thursday, says that Mr. L. Scott Allen, who is connected with the land and industrial department of the Southern Railway, with headquarters in Washington, arrived in Charleston Wednesday morning and immediately afterwards went up to Summerville. Wednesday night he returned to the city and is located at the St. John Hotel. His visit to this section is in the interest of a colony of French Canadians which is to be established on the line of the Southern Railway near Summerville, and all of this is a direct result from a visit paid by a number of French Canadians last May.

It will be recalled that early in the spring a party right from the manufacturing districts of Massachusetts visited Charleston under the chaperonage of Mr. Allen, and inspected the lands here and at Summerville. They seemed much pleased with conditions and prospects and indicated that they would consider the advisability of bringing a large number of their countrymen, French Canadians, then working in the mills, to the Sunny South, where they could once more engage in agricultural pursuits as they desired.

The first of the colonists have arrived, the contingent numbering two families, 10 persons in all. The site of the colony is about a mile and a half out of town and Civil Engineer Hale of the Southern railway put its services at the disposal of the colonists in running the lines for the fences and houses. The contingent is just an advance corps of the many people who will arrive here next month and in November from Canada and New England.

The Southern railway land agents have arranged to bring large numbers of Canadians south, to settle at various points in South Carolina and the Summerville colony will be one of the largest and most encouraging. Land Agent Scott Allen of the Southern has the particular colony in charge, is accompanying the pioneers, and will be here for several days assisting them in their settlement. The Canadians are all a fine class of people and their arrival in Summerville means a big thing for the town and vicinity. The Canadians will engage extensively in farming and raising cattle. They will build their own schools and churches and the colony will be a settlement of some proportions and importance.

This account of the settlement, which was to include French-language schools and churches, suggests that the plan was for the "colonists" to form self-contained, French-speaking neighborhoods, like the enclaves they had established in New England’s industrial towns. The French-Canadian organizers were planning to move the “Little Canada” from Massachusetts to South Carolina, just as a previous generation had moved the Québec parish from Canada to New England. 

However, the Southerners regarded the Canadiens as “a fine class of people” a positive regard not often shared by their Northern compatriots. Or perhaps the promoters wanted both the French-Canadians and the locals to believe that there was positive regard. 

Promoting The South 

The Southern Railway promoted agriculture and industrial development in the Southeast with vigor. Railroads in the 19th century were often given land grants by governments and these lands were managed as potentially profitable assets. Railroad companies, especially in the West, had land management offices that promoted the development of towns and industry along their routes.

Burke Davis’s history of the Southern Railway [The Southern Railway: Road of the Innovators, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985] claims that the railroad’s president Sam Spencer tied the economic development of the South to the future of his business. He hired M. V. Richards, "a resourceful promoter," to lead his "land and immigration" department. The L. Scott Allen mentioned in the 1903 Batesburg Advocate piece was Richards’s Boston-based colleague.

Promising "cheap and contented labor."
Southern Railway ad 
in textile trade journal 
Fibre and Fabric
Jan. 22, 1898.

Davis recounts how Richards's office promoted the Southeast through a regular bulletin (printed in English, French, and German) with information about the rich opportunities available; through leading influential parties on Southern junkets; and through exhibits at fairs and expositions. Richards took his PR campaign to Canada and Europe, as well as to various parts of the U.S. 

Davis also notes that the Southern Railway encouraged the “migration of the New England textile industry to the South” through an “aggressive program.” The proceedings of the New England Association of Cotton Manufacturers confirm these promotional efforts.

In the Autumn of 1897, Richards wrote to the Association, then convening in Philadelphia, offering to sponsor them on a tour along the Southern Railway to survey the opportunities for the cotton textile industry in the South. Then President of the Association, Russell W. Eaton, Agent of the Cabot Manufacturing Company of Brunswick, Maine, took a group of twenty Northern cotton manufacturers, a few accompanied by their wives, on the week-long train ride. 

Embarking on Friday, October 29, 1897 from Washington, D.C., and returning there on November 4, the small party was feted throughout Virginia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, with stops for site visits at mills and other attractions along the way.

The excursion of the “well-to-do” French-Canadians that L. Scott Allen led in 1903 was probably not dissimilar to the trip Eaton and his cotton manufacturers had taken six years earlier. Such promotions, claims Davis, did bring "colonists" to the area. He found that the railway's efforts led to “a substantial influx” to the region “including colonies of some size” consisting of European immigrants: Germans, Swedes, North Italians, Czechs, and Hungarians.

The Colony That Wasn’t

An influx of French-Canadians, however, the vaunted “big thing for the town” of Summerville, South Carolina, never occurred. Despite the detailed plans, there was no significant resettlement there of French-Canadian workers from “the manufacturing districts of Massachusetts.”  

The U.S. Census of 1910, seven years after the fervor of 1903, finds only three French-Canadian families, totaling nine people, in Summerville and neighboring Dorchester township. The family names are Bessette, Gaumont, and Quintal. 

All but one of these nine were born in Canada, the exception being 9-year-old Theodore Gaumont, born in Massachusetts. This detail suggests that these three families may be all that was left in 1910 of the 1903 attempt to resettle Massachusetts Franco-Americans in the South. 

These three families do not appear to be living in close proximity to one another which suggests that the dreams of 1903 for a tight-knit French-Canadian neighborhood never materialized. 

The three families are likely to have seemed quite foreign in the Summerville of 1910 where almost everyone was born in South Carolina, as were their parents. Per the abstract of the U.S. Census, 94.4% of the population of South Carolina in 1910 was born in that state (second only to North Carolina in that category). Only 0.4% of South Carolinians were foreign-born. This contrasts sharply with Massachusetts in 1910, where 55.3% of the population was born in that state, while 31.5% of the Bay State's residents were born outside of the U.S. 

The same abstract of the census records only 39 people born in French Canada in the entire state of South Carolina in 1910. The three families living in Summerville/Dorchester township make up nearly a quarter of the state's entire French-Canadian contingent.  

The French-Canadian families in Summerville/Dorchester township practiced agriculture. Two of them owned farms, while one family rented theirs. The couples that founded these families were in their 50s and 60s in 1910, except for the Gaumonts who were in their 30s. The census data would tend to confirm the detail in the 1903 Tribune piece that the proposed Summerville development was to include “older colonists” seeking a return to agriculture. 

Two of the heads of household of these French-Canadian families were naturalized U.S. citizens, while the third, “Moses” [Moises] Quintal, was neither naturalized, nor could he and his wife speak English. They had two adult daughters who could speak English and probably they enabled the family to function in Summerville.

But the French-Canadian families did not stay in the Summerville area. As far as I can tell, by 1920 they were gone. The fate of two of the three families after 1910 is uncertain, but I see no evidence for their continued presence in the vicinity by 1920. 

The Gaumonts appear to have given up on the farming life to return to the mills. The 1920 U.S. census finds the Gaumonts in New Bedford, Massachusetts. The male head of household worked as a loom fixer in a cotton mill, where his wife and their now 19-year-old son were weavers. They abandoned the southern experiment and returned to the North.

Railway station in Summerville
circa 1935-40

For unknown reasons, the “colony” of French-Canadians in Summerville fizzled. The Francophone school and church were never built. Younger generations never took jobs for any length of time in local textile mills. Within less than 20 years, nothing would remain of this attempt to bring French-Canadian farmers and textile workers from New England to the South. 

Were there other such attempts? The Tribune piece of 1903 suggests as much. Further research awaits…

Non-stereotypical Occupations of Franco-American Women in 1900

Did you know that there were twelve Franco-American women listed as “clergymen” in the 1900 U.S. census? I discovered this in a 1913 scholarly article that reported the occupations of French-Canadian origin residents of the U.S., per the 1900 federal census. The article gave the exact number of Franco-Americans who had each of some 140 jobs.

I’m thankful to that article for informing me that such detailed information was available, but just eyeballing the author’s data tables I saw obvious arithmetic mistakes. When I looked harder, I found some more. (The editor back in 1913 didn't catch them.) Not able to trust any of this author’s numbers after finding these glaring errors, I girded myself for doing his research all over again.

At last I found the data in a 1904 report of the U.S. Bureau of the Census. My analysis based on this report discovered some occupations of Franco-American women and men that challenge stereotypes. It also revealed a general profile of French-Canadian origin workers across the U.S. at that time.

Top Occupations

The data below represents gainfully employed people in 1900, 10 years of age or older, who had at least one French-Canadian born parent.1 (It excludes the many eight- and nine-year-olds who were so employed at that time.) Of this group, nearly 343,000 workers, 77% were recorded as male and 23% as female. The 1900 data shows that instances of “mixed marriages” – i.e. a French-Canadian origin person marrying anyone else but another French-Canadian origin person – were rare. Almost all of those who had one French-Canadian born parent had two; some who had one French-Canadian born parent had a U.S. born parent of French-Canadian origin.

Table 1 shows the top ten occupations for this group. It includes only those jobs that claimed 3% or more of this population (why the percentages don't sum to 100%). 

These occupations taken together account for 63% of employed Franco-Americans in 1900. The remaining more than one-third of this population had about 130 other jobs. It's not surprising that "cotton mill operative" was the top job, followed not far down the list by "other textile mill operatives."2  Textile work of various kinds employed 28% of all French-Canadian origin people working outside the home, the largest industrial cohort by a mile.

The category of “Laborers (Not specified)” is vague. The 1904 report tried to clarify it: "In agricultural districts agricultural laborers and, similarly, in manufacturing districts unskilled workmen are often reported simply as ‘laborers’." The report qualifies them as "common, general, or day laborers" who toiled, for example, in the construction of "roads, sewers, drains, ditches, canals, water works, etc."3

I have seen in the U.S. censuses of this era many instances where people who are identified only as “laborers” are living in mill-owned housing and appear to be working in mills or in jobs dependent on them. The researchers knew this and tried to reduce the count of unspecified "laborers" by re-categorizing them as the evidence warranted. Despite their efforts, "laborers" constituted the second largest cohort among Franco-Americans in 1900.

After textile workers and unskilled laborers, the next largest category was farmers and farm workers, followed by some trades that claimed less than five percent of Franco-Americans. Surprisingly, lumbermen, a job often associated with that era’s French-Canadians, occupied only one percent of employed Franco-Americans.

Discussions about French-Canadian origin people in the U.S. tend to be regional, but this data encompasses the entire United States. The fact that cotton mill workers led the list of occupations, and by a substantial margin, argues for the importance of the New England cohort among French-Canadian origin people in the U.S. The French-Canadian ascendancy in the New England textile manufacturing labor force was the most significant and visible fact about this immigrant group on a national level at the beginning of the 20th century.

Women’s Occupations

But the numbers in Table 1 are skewed toward men, since the latter represent more than three-quarters of gainfully employed Franco-Americans in 1900. If we take women and men separately, differences become clear. Table 2 shows the analysis for Franco-American women, recording only those occupations that claimed greater than three percent of the total. 

Of the nearly 79,000 gainfully employed women and girls, a whopping 37% were cotton mill operatives. More than one-half worked in the textile industry, in either cotton mills or in some other type of textile factory. One-tenth were servants or waitstaff. Dressmakers and shoe makers account for a little less than another tenth.

Jobs accounting for less than three percent of gainfully employed females included more than 120 occupations from teachers (many more women than men were teachers), to packers and shippers, to bakers, to potters, to physicians and surgeons (42 Franco-American women were doctors). Of some 140 occupations listed in this report, Franco-American women serve in all but 18 of them. But the six occupations listed in Table 2 employ three-quarters of all women and girls working outside the home.

Many women have occupations that confound our expectations about the world of 1900 and engage the imagination. For example, what was the story of the twelve clergywomen among the Franco-Americans? They certainly weren’t Roman Catholic. In my research of 19th c. New England I have seen women ministers among the Universalists who later merged with the Unitarians. It’s possible that some enumerator got confused and listed Catholic nuns as "clergymen." But if that were the case, I’d expect to see more than twelve instances of it. The occupation listed for nuns is usually related to their function as teachers, nurses, etc. What path did these twelve Franco-Americans travel to arrive at the status of clergywomen? Researching their stories is a doctoral thesis waiting to happen. 

And what was the experience of the two Franco-American women who were “lumbermen and raftsmen” and the other two listed as “wood choppers” in 1900, living in the world of forests and chantiers? While three Franco-American women were “fishermen or oystermen,” no less than 102 were “iron and steel workers,” long before the Rosie the Riveter image appeared. Who were the six Franco-American women who were “officials of banks and companies” in 1900, the 32 who were government officials (before women could vote), the 33 photographers, or the one and only lawyer among them?

Men’s Occupations

Table 3 shows the top occupations for Franco-American men. Again, I have included only those jobs held by at least three percent of the nearly 264,000 employed Franco-American men in 1900. 

“Laborers (Not specified)” was the top job for men, representing 15% of employees, with 16% working in textile mills (cotton or other textile operations), and another 15% in agriculture, as farmers or farm laborers. It’s the preponderance of women working in cotton mills that made this occupation the top job of Franco-Americans. Almost as many Franco-American women as men worked in textile mills.

That the largest cohort of men was unskilled, unspecified laborers is a statement about their status. Despite the Québécois myth of the rich uncle from the States, the largest numbers of French-Canadian origin men in the U.S. were either general laborers, mill workers, or toiling down on the farm – a relatively modest socioeconomic niche by anyone’s standards in 1900. These were much the same roles that men filled in Québec in that period.  

Elites

However, in any population there are outliers. As the 20th century dawned, small numbers of people of French-Canadian origin rose to positions that commanded wealth, honor or authority in the United States. Some of this class would certainly qualify as “rich uncles” on either side of the border. 

In this period, the Franco-American elite would've included the clergy, professionals (especially doctors and lawyers), business owners, and journalists.4  It might also include company officials, bankers and brokers, agents (mostly in insurance or real estate), and government officials, elected or appointed.

People of French-Canadian origin, in all of these vocations combined, made up 9668 individuals (377 women), 3% of employed Franco-Americans. There are more than six times as many Franco-American cotton mill workers. In the U.S. at large, the percentage of people having these elite positions was 6% of all employed people, double the percentage for Franco-Americans. The Franco-American elite, as defined by these occupations, made up a minuscule 0.6% of the U.S. elite.

The 1900 census data on occupations gives a rare snapshot of French-Canadian origin people across the U.S. at the end of a peak period of migration away from the St. Lawrence Valley. Franco-Americans, both men and women, served in more than 100 occupations, in every industry, and at every level of skill and education. However, most people of French-Canadian origin in the U.S. at the time were still concentrated in factory or farm work. In percentage terms, not many rose to positions of affluence or honor. But a few – including a small number of women – did.

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Notes

1. U.S. Department of Commerce and Labor, Bureau of the Census, Special Reports Occupations at the Twelfth Census, prepared under the supervision of William C. Hunt, Washington: Government Printing Office, 1904. Cf. esp. General Tables, pp 68-75. My Tables 1-3 derive from this report.

2. I have included in my "other textile mill operatives" category those who worked in woolen, silk, hosiery and carpet mills, as well as those who were listed in the report above as unspecified “other textile mill operatives.”

3. Special Reports Occupations at the Twelfth Census, xxvi, 7n1.

4. In my count of medical professionals among these elites, I included those listed as "physicians and surgeons" and "dentists."

The Case of the Cabot Mill

In the manuscript United States Census for Cumberland County, Brunswick, Maine for the year 1880, I find the family of my great-grandmother, Albina Ouellette (b. February 1868, Roxton Falls, Québec). The census reports that Albina, age twelve, her father, and seven of her eleven siblings, including her ten-year-old younger brother, worked in the Cabot Manufacturing Company textile mill. The census for Brunswick in that year contains approximately twenty continuous pages of French names. Almost all of these individuals were born in Canada and were employed by the Cabot mill. There is little doubt that the area of Brunswick represented in these pages is what is referred to in contemporary newspaper accounts as “the French Quarter” or “the French locality.”

In 1886 a serious outbreak of Diphtheria would spread through the French Quarter of Brunswick. This disease, which is associated with overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, would spread to at least 142 individuals, mostly French-speaking children, between April and September of 1886. I estimate that somewhere between eight and ten percent of the French-speaking group in the town became infected with the disease.

Mr. A.G. Tenney, editor of the English-language newspaper, the Brunswick Telegraph, mounted a campaign in his paper against the Cabot Company, which lasted several weeks and detailed the poor conditions that prevailed in the company housing in the “French locality” at that time. I will quote one passage from this series at length:

The houses are built in close contact; there are no yards; the sheds and privies are near by; the drainage – the sink spouts are running only a few feet or so outside of the houses where all dirty water is poured out – falling on the surface of the ground, some of which drains into the cellar and leaves one of the most prolific sources of disease. The houses have from two to three stories, some of which are divided into eight tenements; the average number of people is about twelve in each tenement (96 to a house); the number of rooms in each is from five to seven; bedrooms are small, many of which have only one window where there are two beds. This will give you an idea of the amount of dirty water and slops that are poured out on the surface, close by the block – leaving the most offensive odor that can exist. These large blocks are accommodated with only four privies – giving about twenty five people for each privy – and those privies are cleaned only once a year, and this is done during this present hot weather of July. These places have overflowed since the month of May.

Swine, cows, and hens are kept in the sheds, pig-pens in close connection with wood sheds &c. – giving additional offensive odor. The wells are in the midst of this filth, some of which are not more than twenty feet distant from the sink spout and privies. Sandy soil as it is in this place there is no doubt that some of these wells receive the slops in a few days after their pouring out of doors.

The collection of refuse matter in or around the dwelling houses, such as swill, waste of meat, fish and decaying vegetables, dead carcasses are all present, giving or generating disease germs, affecting the purity of the air; – they should be considered the worst kind of nuisances. Such nuisances one should be compelled to remove or dispose of either by burial, burning or otherwise. Now then, summing up in a few words the above mention will show the favorable condition for any contagious disease to spring up.

[Brunswick Telegraph, July 30, 1886]

Doctor Onesime Paré (b. June 1854, St-Gervais-de-Bellechasse, Québec) provided the Telegraph with descriptions of these conditions, as well as other information regarding the extent and spread of the disease. Doctor Paré and Mr. Tenney should be remembered for the efforts they made to draw attention to the deplorable housing conditions in the tenements. In the newspaper, the evidence of other (Yankee) doctors is brought forward to corroborate the facts as presented by Tenney.

For further corroboration, we may examine the statistics for burials at St. John’s church. William N. Locke, in his article, “The French Colony at Brunswick, Maine: A Historical Sketch” (Les Archives de Folklore, 1 (1946, pp 97-111), provides statistics on burials from this parish in the years 1877-1895. There is a sharp spike in the number of deaths among the French-Canadian community in the years 1886 and 1887. That this increase in mortality is not a natural consequence of an increase in the French-Canadian population during these years is demonstrated by the fact that there were nearly half as many burials in 1888 (41 total) as there were in 1886 (81 burials).

The sad truth is confirmed by an examination of the handwritten vital records kept by the Town of Brunswick. Here I found that 35 children died between April and September of 1886. The records, in most cases, do not state the cause of death, but, in a few, Diphtheria is cited explicitly. That the majority of these children were the victims of the Diphtheria epidemic we may surmise, apart from the newspaper’s testimony, by examining child mortality rates in the years on either side of 1886. The records reveal that nine children died between April and September 1885. In 1887, 18 children died in this same span of months.

These records also show that Diphtheria, in that summer of 1886, was not an equal opportunity disease; without exception the children who died that spring and summer had French names.

In reading the Brunswick Telegraph’s increasingly shrill outcries against the Cabot Company and its directors, I can’t help but imagine my great-grandparents and my great great grandparents, Thomas Ouellette (b. March 1836, Ste-Anne-de-la-Pocatiere, Québec) and Josephine Racine Ouellette (b. March 1842, St-Charles-de-St-Hyacinthe, Québec), or their relatives, friends, and co-workers living in such conditions. Did my great-grandmother Ouellette hear the cries of the children who had the disease? Or were the infected children too sick to cry out? Did she see the lesions caused by some forms of this disease? Did she attend the funeral of a neighbor’s child?

It’s quite likely that she did. Comparing the names of the children who died with the data provided by the 1880 census, and assuming that the cast of characters involved lived in the same places in 1886 that they did in 1880, I can confirm that children were dying all around the location where my great-grandmother lived.

The census enumerator in 1880 designated the Ouellette’s residence, in order of visitation, as dwelling 25. Two-year-old Marie Claire Ste-Marie and her eight-year-old brother, Alexis Albert, died on the same day, April 13, 1886. The census indicates that this family lived in dwelling 23. “Cause of death: Diphtheria,” the town records report. Ten-month-old Joseph Desjardins died on August 26th; this family lived in dwelling 27. Nine-year-old Rosa Leblanc died on June 30th; her family resided in dwelling 29. The census also reveals that no less than thirty-one individuals lived in dwelling 29. On the assumption that these families stayed put between 1880 and 1886, I conclude that my 18-year-old great-grandmother was well aware of the dying children during these spring and summer months.

But when I recounted this history to others, even to my own family, the deflection mechanism went into full swing. The response was to try to justify the brutality our ancestors suffered.  What purpose does the deflection serve?

To answer some of these attempts at deflection, from the Telegraph’s account it is clear that Tenney had some confusion regarding the precise cause, but he was correct that overcrowded conditions are favorable to the outbreak and proliferation of the disease. The fact that the conditions in the tenements were not business as usual is attested to by numerous quotations from Tenney’s articles. For example, in the same article quoted above, Tenney describes the conditions as representing “a degree of brutality almost inconceivable in a civilized community.” Two weeks later, Tenney writes:

We only wish that the Boston Cabot gentlemen could listen to the biting denunciations of them as notorious (at least in the case under discussion) for their filthy greed, by gentlemen, we can tell them who, as manufacturers, are their equals in experience, perhaps in wealth, but infinitely their superiors in all that goes to make up the true man, regardful of the lives and health of the men and women whom they employ. Some of these manufacturers…are downright wrathy over the reflection cast upon all other manufacturers by the abominable neglect of Cabot company Directors, to remedy a state of things which no man here dares to deny exists.

[Brunswick Telegraph, August 13, 1886]

  

In the final article in the series, Tenney’s rhetoric against the Cabot Company and what he terms “the disgracefully neglected Cabot homes” reaches a crescendo leaving no doubt about how his newspaper viewed the Cabot Company and the condition of “the French operatives” of the mill:

[Its] record should consign to eternal infamy the management of this corporation, more heartless than the Fejees of old, who in hot blood, murdered their prisoners, then roasted and ate them. The Cabot Company has no such tender mercy for the poor slaves bound to it by the necessities of existence, they dying by slow poison germinated in the filth permitted by the company’s home management to flow over the soil in reeking streams from the vaults of the boarding houses, the poor people inhabiting them being powerless to secure relief.

[Brunswick Telegraph, August 20, 1886] 

From these passages it is plain that such conditions were not what was expected in those times since they were denounced as exceptionally bad even by those of the same occupation and “station in life,” as the “Boston Cabot gentlemen.” These extracts also show how at least one educated Yankee of that period regarded the French-Canadian/Franco-American mill worker of his day. The “French operatives” in the mill were, in Tenney’s view, “poor slaves” bound to the mill by “the necessities of existence”; they were “poor people…powerless to secure relief” from the disease and the conditions that contributed to it.

And the poor housing conditions had prevailed for years prior to 1886. Typhoid Fever – which is contracted through drinking water polluted by human excrement – had passed through the French Quarter in 1881 five years before the Diphtheria epidemic; it would have a return engagement in 1887. Tenney, in his 1886 series on the Cabot Mill, says that the same conditions had existed in the worker’s housing for 15 years, that is, since the early 1870s, when French-Canadians had started arriving in Brunswick in significant numbers. It was not a brief episode due, as was suggested to me, to the fact that the directors of the Cabot Company “didn’t really know what was going on.” I suspect they knew full well. Their local agents most certainly did. Their noses couldn’t lie.

The fact that French-Canadians continued to cross the border to work at the Cabot Mill, as they did during these years of the 1870s and 1880s, is more a statement about the desperate conditions in rural Québec in the late 19th century than it is proof that things “must not have been so bad.” Things were so bad. Necessity drove them into the mills anyway. Choices were few, and good choices were fewer.

For more on Franco-Americans in the textile industry please see my new book available here.

This post is excerpted and edited from my article called "French Pride and the Question of Repression" originally published in Le Forum mars-avril/March-April 2004.