L'Acadie de la Vallée

Our Pause-Midi for October 16, 2024, was a presentation about the Acadians of northern Maine by Patrick Lacroix.

Proportionally, the St. John Valley of northern Maine is the most francophone region of the United States. Place names like Frenchville, Grand Isle, New Canada, and Sainte-Agathe are lasting tributes to the settlers of French descent who built new communities from the 1780s onward. Many people in the region continue to identify as Acadians. The area is home to the Madawaska Acadian Festival and the Acadian Archives; in 2014, it hosted the World Acadian Congress. However, this tale of cultural resilience conceals a complex history that stretches Acadian history as we know it.

The settlers who traveled upriver and began clearing land in 1785 had not been deported. In fact, many were not Acadians. The influx of people from other regions, notably the St. Lawrence Valley, only grew over the course of the nineteenth century. Different groups mixed and intermarried, giving rise to a hybrid identity, though one firmly attached to Acadian roots. The international border has also played a part in the making of this identity. For generations, the river connected the people on either side; national policies have now produced different fates for the Acadians of New Brunswick and Maine and created new challenges for the latter in particular.

Patrick Lacroix, Ph.D., is the director of the Acadian Archives in Fort Kent, Maine. Originally from Cowansville, Québec, he has taught at colleges in Canada and the United States and has worked with Franco-American groups across New England. He is the author of John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Faith and “Tout nous serait possible”: Une histoire politique des Franco-Américains, 1874-1945, both published in 2021. His long-running blog, Query the Past, features more than 200 posts on topics relating to Acadian and French-Canadian history. 

Click here for our coverage of an earlier presentation by Patrick Lacroix.