By ROBIN CAUDELL
Staff Writer
July 09, 2009 03:22 am
—
Susan M. Ouellette found the absence of French-Canadians in the standard histories of Plattsburgh and Clinton County really weird.
"I knew from my own experience there were a lot of French people living in Plattsburgh," said Ouellette, who is chair of the History Department of St. Michael's College in Colchester, Vt. "I was one of them."
Ouellette grew up in Keeseville, where she attended Our Lady of Grace Academy and St. John the Baptist Church. Today, she will lecture on the French-Canadians in the North Country at Clinton Community College's quadricentennial programming, "The Legacy of the Lake and Its People."
"This talk is based on an article I published in the 'Journal of New York History' a few years ago," she said. "Essentially, this article grew out of a research project that I had been working on looking at French-Canadian immigrants."
Though standard sources were devoid of any mention of French-Canadians and their contributions, she turned to original sources such as the Federal Census.
"Something like three-fourths of all the population of Plattsburgh in the second half of the 19th century (1850-1900) were immigrants. And the bulk of those immigrants were French-Canadian. More than half of Plattsburgh's population was French-Canadian."
She wondered why they were present in such large numbers yet were invisible in the historical record.
"Because these people were laborers, mainly unskilled laborers, working for very low wages, they were not considered important enough to memorialize. It was important to talk about Dr. Kellogg and the railroad barons. These thousands of ordinary workers got paid practically nothing. They were living in dire poverty and working in the mills. They were completely unimportant, disposable in some ways."
A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE
Aside from Ouellette's natural outrage, she was trying to discover why this historical amnesia occurred.
"The people who were in charge of commissioning these historical works were Anglos. They were very ambivalent about the presence of immigrants in their towns because these were not like them. French-Canadians were especially difficult. Not only were they not like them, they spoke a different language and they were Catholic. So, you couldn't even trust them. One guy referred to the French-Canadians as the Chinese of the Northeast."
Ouellette was surprised to learn that Francophones hosted the biggest Fourth of July fetes in Plattsburgh. Trainloads of celebrants came down from Canada for the speeches and parades. The newspapers of the time had op-ed commentary on the French-Canadians' star-spangled exuberance.
"Someone wrote, 'We should take back the celebration of our nation's independence from these foreigners.' The City of Plattsburgh put on French-speaking constables to control the crowds. Everyone knows the French-Canadians get drunk, get in brawls and are disorderly. They were celebrating what they saw as their citizenship. If you asked them if they felt they belonged, they would have said yes."
While helping to write the centennial history of Plattsburgh, Ouellette discovered how pervasive the French-Canadian presence was here. She found a letter from one of the first women to attend the Normal School.
"She wrote, 'When you got off the train in Plattsburgh, you would think you missed the stop and wound up in Montreal.' Everyone around her spoke French. That's at the end of the century. I would be willing to bet for a long period of time, for a very long time afterward, the same was true."
The woman wrote about hearing a bread seller in the street.
"He was yelling out his wares in French. That's what my talk is about," Ouellette said. "There are all these people contributing to the larger growth and expansion of this new industrial town. The Yankees were the ones who benefited from this. They were incredibly ambivalent. They didn't feel guilty about the money they made on the backs of these people. They worried about the influence of these foreigners in their town."
CONSTANT MIGRATION
Ouellette points out the strange irony that the French were here before the Yankees. The same Anglo-Franco dynamic played out in Burlington.
"When Nathaniel Hawthorne visited Burlington in 1838, he noticed the French-Canadians. When his travelogue got published in 'New England Magazine,' he wrote, 'Canadian bank notes circulate as freely in Burlington as American because there are so many French-Canadians.'"
Time and population were on the French side.
"There were never many Yankees to begin with. Immigrant populations were always a feature of the town because of the way in which Yankee people located to Plattsburgh. They came as landowners and businessmen. They came with wealth. They established themselves and became the elite of the city and town."
In the first half of the 19th century, Anglophones had as many progeny as their Francophone counterparts. Because there weren't as many overall, they didn't produce as many children.
"The truth is there is a constant migration of people coming all through the centuries. French-Canadians came before the revolution. They filtered into Plattsburgh and upstate New York from the very first days."
During the era of Henry Delord, around the time of the War of 1812, a smallpox epidemic broke out.
"The French-Canadians living around the lower Saranac were blamed for it," Ouellette said. "There was a fairly visible population of French-Canadians then, and it just grew. They continued to come in the 1820s and 1830s. There was a growing population of Irish immigrants and other immigrant groups from the 19th through the 20th century. The city grew exponentially based on its immigrant population, never on its native-born population."
E-mail Robin Caudell at: rcaudell@pressrepublican.com
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Photos
Pepin and Mouso Livery in Plattsburgh, c. 1885.
Log drivers on the upper Saranac, c. 1885.
