'Little Canada': Laconia's French heritage remembered

Flipping through the Laconia phonebook, it's easy to see that there is no shortage of French heritage in area residents. Like many other communities in northern New England, immigrants from Quebec came in waves, most of them lured by promises of better work than they could find in Canada.

Tonight, from 6 to 7:30, the Laconia Historical and Museum Society will be opening an exhibit, titled "Je t'aime Laconia," (I love you Laconia), which will illustrate the French Canadian influence in Laconia's past and present. The opening will take place in the Public Library, and is free and open to the public.

Frank Binette was born in Manchester 90 years ago, and he's lived in Laconia since 1946. In that time, he's compiled the genealogies of hundreds of French-Canadian families and has learned a great deal about how they came to live in Laconia.

According to Binette, the first wave of French-Canadian immigration to New England resulted from the U.S. Civil War in the 1860s. Many young French-Canadian men chose to leave the family farm to join the Union Army and receive monthly pay. At the end of the war, the soldiers of fortune had learned a few words of English, and had made acquaintances with some fellow soldiers, from whom they learned about the possibilities of mill work.

Binette said that many French-Canadian men went from serving in the war to working in the mills. The mill owners were impressed by their new imported laborers, and when new mills started sprouting up along rivers and rail corridors, the mill owners sent recruiters up to Quebec to fill the mill's needs for workers.

Because they didn't want to compete against one another, the recruiters split up the Province of Quebec by counties, and as a result, the workers who immigrated to work at any particular mill tended to be from the same county in Quebec. If a person were researching a French-Canadian who worked in the mills in Springfield, Mass., Binette said that person most likely emigrated from Richelieu County. If the mill was in Nashua, the worker most likely came from Kamouraska County. And in Laconia, most of the mill workers came from Beauce County, Quebec, located on the southeastern edge of the province, bordered by Maine's Somerset County.

Jenna Carroll-Plante, the Museum and Historical Society's executive director, said New Hampshire saw an increase in the number of French-Canadian residents from 1,780 in 1860 to 101,324 in 1930. In Laconia, there were an estimated 1,900 French-Canadians in 1890, and by 1926 there were more than 3,000.

Both Carroll-Plante and Binette said some of the most valuable resources in tracking French-Canadian migration and genealogy are Roman Catholic Church records. Carroll-Plante found that the early immigrants began to worship at St. Joseph Church on Church Street. However, as their numbers quickly grew, the church decided that it was best to give the French-Canadians their own church, and resulting was the creation of the Sacred Heart Church on Union Avenue in 1894.

There were three parts of the city that were referred to as "Little Canada" due to the heavy concentrations of French-Canadian residents. Those were: Lakeport; the area known variously as Casino Square, Normandin Square or Busy Corner; and the hill near Lakes Region General Hospital known as Pine Hill or French Hill.

As Binette explained, the first wave of immigrants came from the family farm, and likely had little or no education. With that in mind, it is conceivable how the stereotype of a "dumb Frenchman" was created. However, this didn't last too long, because the entrepreneurs and professionals from the regions in Quebec soon followed their customer base. Carroll-Plante noted that many French-Canadians even came to own the mills.

From the period of the 1880s through the 1930s, Laconia saw the creation of many French-directed organizations. They had their own parish, which included a large school through the twelfth grade, there were many social organizations, and businesses throughout the city advertised that they were able to assist patrons in French.

The last wave of French-Canadian immigration stopped around the period of World War II, perhaps because of dwindling opportunities in American mills, or perhaps because Canada's own industrial revolution was employing its workers.

In Binette's mind, this world event also spelled the end for the enclosed French-Canadian culture in places like Laconia. He feels the experience young men had, of traveling the world and serving alongside other men of various backgrounds, taught them to forget the cultural boundaries that they had been brought up to live within. "World War II was the turning point. It created an atmosphere where they mixed more than they ever did before."

"The young men came back from the war with a different attitude. They had been through a lot," he said. They lived on their own for the first time, away from their family and the family's rules. "When they looked for a girlfriend, they didn't necessarily look for a French-Canadian girl."

In doing genealogies, Binette finds that French-Canadian men, even those living in the U.S., were likely to go back to Quebec or look within their ethnic neighborhoods to find a bride. After the second World War, though, this pattern broke, and the French-Canadian cultural institutions began to decline.

"Je t'aime Laconia" will be on display at the Laconia Public Library until November. Many of the items came not from the Historical and Museum Society's collection, but from local private collections, which underscores a point for Carroll-Plante. "We had to reach out to the community. Their heritage is important, if they're not saving it, there's no story."

Binette, a resident of the Taylor Community, enjoys researching genealogies for his family and friends, and occasionally for strangers, even though he has lost nearly all of his eyesight. He does it for no reward other than his own pleasure, and can usually trace a family from New England back to Quebec and then to France.