Petit Portraits

Mining the past of a vibrant community reacquaints
Prof. Catherine Beaudry with her roots

By Jillian Cohan

“All happy families resemble one another; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.” —Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina

She returns to the photograph again and again.

The family portrait is arresting on its own. Hilahre and Demerise Therrien, circa 1920, surrounded by their 14 children. Sixteen faces stare solemnly at the camera, two of the daughters betraying slight smiles. An interesting relic. But Catherine Beaudry’s fascination with the photo comes not from the Therriens’ singularity; her interest stems from their representative value.

“I’ve seen hundreds of [portraits] like that,” the associate professor of French says of her research into Le Petit Canada, a community of French Canadians who settled in Lewiston, Maine.

In the mid-1800s the Canadiens began migrating south from hill farms in Québec, seeking jobs in the textile mills and shoe factories along Maine’s Androscoggin River. In Lewiston they settled in tenements built for families of six, not 16, and worked 12-hour days in the factories. Beaudry has spent the last two years documenting their stories.

She knows families like the Therriens as well as her own, for they have similar roots. Her great-grandfather, François Veilleux, emigrated from Québec to Jackman, Maine—“200 miles from Nowheresville,” as the locals say—to work in the lumber camps. Her grandparents, the Chouinards, bought a house in Lewiston in 1921. Her brother and sister were born there while her parents were on home leave from the Foreign Service. After 40 years in the service, her parents moved back to the area in 1986. “But you don’t want to hear about me, you want to hear about my research,” she says, waving away questions.

Yet the two are intertwined, as Beaudry’s interest in her family history grew into a passion to document the community as a whole. In 2002 she received a grant from Dickinson’s Research and Development Committee to support the oral-history project. Between her duties on campus, she prowled through the Franco-American Heritage Collection at the University of Southern Maine’s Lewiston-Auburn campus. On a series of research trips, she conducted dozens of oral-history interviews and sorted through the records of hundreds more in the archives of Lewiston’s Franco American Heritage Foundation and in the Bates College archives.

Paraphrasing Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, Beaudry explains that all the happy families she researched tell similar stories. Like the Therriens, they worked hard and played hard. At the height of the immigrant migration, Le Petit Canada had 18 social organizations, ranging from literary salons to snowshoeing clubs. By 1960 Lewiston had 28 language clubs with 14,000 members. And at the heart of the community was the St. Peter and Paul Church, founded in the 1870s. In the 1930s the parishioners built a new church.

“People were astounded,” says Beaudry. “Here were [the Canadiens] making the worst wages in the American manufacturing industry, at the height of the Depression, and they built a gorgeous Gothic church.”

Lewiston’s French Canadians were equally generous in establishing parochial schools, the first of which was built in 1905. “They called it the French-Canadian city hall,” Beaudry says, because the school was the community’s center.

The emphasis on education was key to maintaining the French traditions, she adds. The schools were run by nuns who had come directly from France, fleeing the restrictions placed on them by the government. In Lewiston they flourished and expressed their French culture.

“The normal immigrant pattern is to forego the mother tongue within three generations,” Beaudry says. “In Lewiston they maintained the mother tongue for five generations because of the French-speaking parish and the French parochial schools.”

What distinguishes Lewiston from other communities is that, in the 20th century, Franco-Americans represented 70 percent of the city’s population, Beaudry says. In that time period, the French were the least represented European immigrant group in United States—an anomaly that intrigues the French professor.

Most of the sociological studies done on Le Petit Canada are based on census reports from the 1950s to 1970s. “You get a lot of graphs and tables,” Beaudry says. “I wanted to give life to the numbers.”

What she found was that not all of the thousands of families who boarded the Grand Trunk Railroad in Québec and disembarked on Lincoln Street in Lewiston were happy like the Therriens. And true to Tolstoy’s words, the unhappy families told different stories. Over time Beaudry discovered the lost children—those whose mothers died in childbirth, whose fathers were crippled by chronic arthritis or suffered from “cotton lung,” a respiratory illness that came from working in the damp textile mills.

When women died in childbirth, their husbands often remarried and fathered second families. With limited living space, the “children of the first bed” were farmed out—literally sent to work on a farm—or sent to orphanages run by the parish nuns.

“I thought they’d be like Oliver Twist, but they aren’t Dickensian at all,” Beaudry says. Orphans were boarded at the parochial schools, not sent away to asylums (as they would have been in Québec), so they remained part of the vibrant French-Canadian community.

As she pulls out videotapes from the Franco American Heritage Center, Beaudry marvels at the resiliency and pride of the French-Canadian people—her people.

Le Petit Canada maintained its traditions until the 1960s, when the manufacturing industry slowed and American popular culture took hold. You can still see the French legacy in Lewiston’s phone book, she says. Surnames like “Guay,” “Michaud,” “Fornier” and “Therrien” are as common as “Smith” and “Jones” are elsewhere.

And there’s the annual Festival de Joie, a three-day Francophone-heritage festival. Beaudry plans to bring students to the festival this summer as part of Dickinson’s language program at Laval University in Québec City. She’ll also present her research in May at a conference on diaspora at the University of Toulouse, France.

Turning back to the family portrait, she explains that most Canadiens had assimilated by the late 1960s. The Therriens are still out there—Beaudry’s sources include an oral-history report written by Alice Therrien, Hilahre and Demerise’s 14-year-old great-granddaughter—but the men and women who remember the old days are dying off.

The value of her work, Beaudry says, is in fleshing out their stories to create a complete portrait of the community. And who better to compose that portrait than a granddaughter of Le Petit Canada? •

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