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…

1930s Ethnic Study: Franco-Americans Break Sociological Mold

Recently, I examined select results from a 2012 sociological study of Maine Franco-Americans. This research bears comparison with a study conducted in the 1930s that included not only Franco-Americans but other ethnic groups as well.

Published as The Social Systems of American Ethnic Groups, by W. Lloyd Warner and Leo Srole (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1945; parenthetical page numbers below refer to this book), this study investigated a New England mill town the authors called “Yankee City.” Successive waves of immigration had brought the Irish, French-Canadians, Jews, Italians, Armenians, Greeks, Poles, and Russians to the town.

In terms of population, the Irish and French-Canadian groups dwarf the others. With the exception of the Irish, the French-Canadians had more than twice the headcount of any of the other groups studied (28).

The modern reader notices that the book refers to Yankees, i.e. Anglo-Saxon Protestants, as “native Americans.” Of course, this term has a very different meaning in today’s identity-political discourse. For the purposes of the study, the world of Yankee City divides into “regular Americans,” i.e. Yankees, and others who are called “ethnics.”

French-Canadians began to arrive in Yankee City in the 1880s, the second oldest group among the “ethnics.” The thesis of the study is that the longer a group’s sojourn in the USA, the more it becomes assimilated to “regular American” ways and the higher its economic and social status (2). The Franco-Americans in town contradict this hypothesis.

The researchers quantified the residential, occupational, and social status of the various ethnic groups. Despite their relatively long tenancy in the town, the Franco-Americans ranked fifth among the eight ethnic groups in terms of the status of the neighborhoods in which they tended to live (40).

With respect to home ownership, the Franco-Americans ranked dead last as compared with the other groups. Only 25.9 percent of the Franco-American group owned a home, as opposed to 63.4 percent of the Jewish population and 55.5 percent of the Russians (80).

With respect to occupational status, the Franco-American group ranked lower than all of the others with the exception of the Poles and the Russians, the latter groups having arrived in Yankee City only about 10 to 20 years before the study was conducted (60).

  

Data from an Ethnic Study of "Yankee City"
Source: Warner and Srole, 60

In terms of a general measure of class status, which takes into account social connections among other measures, the Franco-American group appears somewhere in the middle. They are ahead of the more recently arrived Poles, Russians, and Greeks but of lower status than the Irish, Jews and Armenians (70).

The authors propose an elaborate theory regarding the social status associated with physical characteristics (such as skin color and facial features), religion, and language (284-296).

Their theory holds that the closer an ethnic or racial group approximates to the physical, religious, and linguistic norm of the “regular Americans,” the lower the socio-economic barriers and the greater the ease with which that group assimilates to the Yankee way of life.

Fascinatingly, the authors recognize that “the Catholic French,” presumably the “French-Canadians” of the study, are "out of place" within their scheme (289). The authors are indeed correct. The study shows that the Franco-American in Yankee City did not occupy the slot in the ethno-racial caste system that the authors' model predicted.

I assume that the intelligence and capacities of the Franco-American group fall within the same range as those of any other group of human beings. How, then, do the authors account for the relatively low status of the Franco-Americans given the length of their tenancy in Yankee City?

The authors find one possible explanation in the traditional family system of Québec. In this system, the father of the family determined the station in life of his children. The family rather than the individual was the unit of measure as regards social status. Successful family members transfer their success to the family as a whole (100-101).

Young adult children were not self-determined. They did not make their own career decisions based on self-perceived talents or their own desires. Their lot depended on their position in the family as perceived by their parents, especially the family’s patriarch. I don’t need to explain how the assumptions of this system differ from those that favor the self-made man or the rugged individualist of “regular American” lore. 

There is another factor, not mentioned by the authors, retarding the Franco-American’s assimilation and relative socio-economic status: the history of domination of the French North American groups by Anglo-Saxon Protestants.

Other groups in Yankee City, such as the Armenians, Greeks, and Jews, were also under foreign domination for centuries. However, with the exception of the Irish, none of these groups were under the domination of an Anglo-Saxon Protestant culture, and none of them under a North American culture of this type before their arrival in the USA.

I contend that the Canadien immigrants of this period saw only minor differences between les anglais of Canada and les anglais of the USA. In both countries, their elites had an express ideology of determined resistance to assimilation by the Anglo-Saxons.

Even a desire to rise in the Yankees' social order implies a degree of assimilation to their worldview, a view that many Canadiens were taught was poisonous and destructive to faith and morals. The authors are measuring the degree of social cohesion with an Anglo-Saxon group, the very type against which the “Catholic French” had a long history of bitter conflict and separatist resistance.

The study looks at the “ethnics” through the lens of Yankee values. Its measures of success include the house on the hill, a white-collar job, and membership in the golf club. “Ethnics” also have their own measures of success, their own values and priorities.

The authors recognize that these values may interact in a complex way with those of the dominant culture (100). The complexity created by competing value systems may impede both the immigrants' acceptance of the dominant culture and the latter's acceptance of them.

For instance, the researchers found that the index of residential status for the Franco-American group was lower than expected because a disproportionate number of them resided in the poorest section of town. This is the section where the group began to form a cluster shortly after their arrival in Yankee City.

Perhaps some families stayed in the poorer section because they wished to remain where they had raised their families, where they were surrounded by friends of their own cultural group. Maybe they wished to be near their church where it was easy to “make a visit” or attend daily Mass. Maybe such considerations were more important to them than “moving up” on the Yankee social scale.

The study points to the important and overlooked fact that the French North American groups fit poorly into the categories of American ethno-racial identity-politics. We are not what are now called people of color nor are we “regular Americans” per the standards of the 1930s. Although many of us have Native ancestry we’re not First Nations either. We landed at neither Plymouth Rock nor Ellis Island.

We're unique in that our cultures are North American, and yet predate the existence of the United States and of today’s Canada. Our peoples occupied parts of what is now the USA before they were parts of the USA. And our peoples were, for the most part, conquered by the English and Americans before the latter imagined themselves as distinct from the former.

There is no pigeonhole for us in the accepted racial and ethnic narratives and these narratives are central to one’s place in the American story. In a future post, I intend to explore how this anomalous position contributes to our general invisibility.

Of How Many Does a French Canadian Family Consist?

The following item appeared in the Brunswick (Maine) Telegraph, May 28, 1875, page two.

Of how many does a French Canadian Family Consist?

A few facts will furnish a reply. There is a family at work in the cotton mill, which consists of a father and mother and twenty-four children, all the children large enough being at work. The woman is the fourth wife; a brother of the husband living with his fifth wife in Montreal, has twenty-five children. Three families arrived here last week to go to work in the mill and they numbered all told 37 persons. A lady friend of ours a few days since met a Frenchwoman, who, looking at the babe in the carriage said to our friend, “I have got fifteen of those.” The only possible reply of the lady with the one babe was, “Oh Lordie!” Ten and twelve and fifteen children are by no means uncommon in the French Canadian families, but twenty-four are a little above average.

My great-grandfather was one of 23 children by two wives. Another great-grandfather was one of 17, all born to the same woman. As astonishing at this seems by modern standards we might bear in mind that family size is conventional. There is no normal family size and customs vary.



The Ouellettes And Their Twelve Children

The picture on the right shows my great-great-grandparents Thomas Ouellette and Josephine (Racine), seated in the center, with their adult children in 1909. These are not their children accompanied by their spouses. All of these people are their children. One of the children, Thomas Ouellette fils, is not in the picture since this photo was taken in Maine and he had returned to live in his native Québec by this point. Another child seems to have died before this photo was taken. I can confirm that Josephine bore at least 14 children and there may have been others about whom I don’t yet know. (My great-grandmother Albina Ouellette Vermette, b. Roxton Falls, QC, 1868 is seated at the far right.)

I am often asked why they had such large families. The usual assumption is that the children were required to serve as the labor force on the family farm. This may have been one reason for the custom of large families, particularly in the earlier days when land needed to be cleared and more hands meant more axes chopping down more trees.

Another reason for the large families was political and involved what was known as la revanche des berceaux – the revenge of the cradles. The idea was that the Francophones would retake Canada from their English conquerors by out-reproducing them. I’ve heard some stories of priests in the confessional asking fathers (mothers seem to have had little say in the matter) why they were not producing more children.

The revenge of the cradle backfired. The rapid population growth outstripped the economic/agricultural development required to support it. This strategy, intended to bring about demographic dominance, led to the departure of a large percentage of the population. Historians will continue to debate the point but it seems to me that the flight from Québec in the later 19th and early 20th centuries, both to the States and to other Canadian Provinces, was the result of an underdeveloped economy.

Given the economic and personal risk, the emotional toll, as well as the social sanctions against making such a move, it seems unlikely that the rural poor would have left la belle province in such numbers unless they were under duress. Many families auctioned off all they had to finance their trip to the States. That’s a risky, desperation move.

Another reason for large families is that children were a farmer’s retirement plan, his and his wife’s Social Security. Life expectancy was considered to be about 65 years for those who survived childhood. In order to enjoy a few years of retirement after a long life of hard work on the farm, it was necessary to produce a son who could inherit the property and support the habitant and his wife in their old age. This son would need to be grown, established, and able to take over his father’s farm by the time his parents reached about 55 to 60 years of age.

About a third of the children born alive did not make it to adulthood. If a couple’s first children were girls, they had to keep reproducing in order to have a son ready to inherit at a suitable age. Since there was a one-in-three chance that any son produced would die in childhood, the couple’s insurance policy, at least up until a certain point in life, was to keep reproducing as long as they were able.

These practical reasons were probably not uppermost in the minds of the parents of these families, however. Once the custom of large families was established it persisted by the inertia characteristic of traditional societies. It was accepted and normal in their world that a woman would be pregnant most of the time between ages 20 and 40. 

Although large families continued to be a custom in the Québec Diaspora in New England, the birth rate began to drop slowly when these families moved into an industrial economy. In these New England Franco-American families, the “revenge of the cradle” factor and the motive related to the traditional socio-agricultural system lost their relevance. The Franco-Americans may have been influenced also by the relatively smaller family sizes of their Yankee neighbors. That said, large families persisted in many Franco-American communities well into the 20th century. The birth rate in Québec did not decline until about 1960.