After the Civil War, French-Canadian immigration to New England boomed as thousands of rural Québécois moved here to work in the mills. But contrary to conventional wisdom, French-Canadians had already arrived decades earlier, starting around 1839, in the Champlain Valley. Patrick Lacroix, a leading scholar of Franco-American history, guided us through the research in a fascinating presentation to the fall conference of the Vermont French-Canadian Genealogical Society in South Burlington on October 22.
In 1820s and ‘30s, Lacroix explained, residents of southern Quebec were clearly experiencing hard times. Pest infestations led to poor harvests and crop failures. Population pressures were intense, as settlements from Montreal to east of Quebec City saw up to tenfold growth in a few generations. Yet nearly all the arable land was occupied, and in the absence of modern farming techniques, poor harvests and crop shortfalls resulted, leading to a full-blown agricultural crisis. Opportunities to perform wage labor were scarce; neither the lumber industry nor the fur trade offered viable livelihoods anymore.
Meanwhile just to the south, In the Champlain Valley, tanneries, sawmills, water-powered carding mills, mines, and forges were springing up in 1830s and ‘40s. These early industrial establishments need workers; farmsteads needed farmhands; Burlington docks needed workers; and Lake Champlain vessels needed crewmen. Starting in the 1820s, the American republic had been building roads, canals, and railways to connect an integrated national market—infrastructure that opened the Midwest and the West to white settler colonization and development.
To be sure, the American economy wasn’t running at full capacity—it was suffering from the Panic of 1837. But Canadians had not been investing in infrastructure the way Americans had, and the southern Quebec economy was languishing by comparison.
The result was a “mass exodus,” as Lacroix put it, from southern Quebec into New England, especially to the Champlain Valley. The first Catholic parish in Vermont was created in the 1830s. The first celebration of St. John Baptist Day on U.S. soil took place in 1839 in Burlington. In 1840 more than three hundred French-Canadian families lived in Burlington, and even more (in descending order) in St Albans, Swanton, Highgate, Colchester, Enosburg, and Charlotte. They formed parishes and established churches—sometimes alongside Irish immigrants, who arrived around the same time. A mostly French-Canadian congregation might have an Irish pastor, then go on to build its own parish. Immigrants from Quebec built mutual benefit societies, as well as cultural and political organizations. The first French-Canadian newspaper in New England was created in Vermont.
French-Canadian settlements dotted the Champlain-Hudson corridor all the way south to New York City. By 1860, New York was the most French-Canadian state in the United States, and New York City was the largest center for French-Canadians.
The story of migration from Quebec to the United States thus began long before the Civil War and stretched along the whole Hudson-Champlain corridor. Lacroix argues that we need a new historical narrative about Franco-Americans that reflects these early migrations and restores the Champlain Valley’s central role.
Patrick Lacroix is the director of the Acadian Archives at the University of Maine at Fort Kent. He refers those interested in this subject to his article “Prelude to the Great Hemorrhage: French Canadians in the United States, 1775-1840,” American Review of Canadian Studies 51, no. 4 (2020): 554-72. His most recent book is “Tout Nous Serait Possible”: Une histoire politique des Franco-américains, 1874-1945 (Laval University Press, 2021). Visit his website at Query the Past.
—Janet Biehl
The “French Ancestry by Town” map was created by André Sénécal of UVM and displayed at the conference. This story was updated October 30.
