Little Canada

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This article is about French Canadian communities in the United States. For the city in Minnesota, USA, see Little Canada, Minnesota. For the hamlet in South Yorkshire, England, see Little Canada, Doncaster.

Little Canada (French: le petit Canada) is a name for any of the various communities where French Canadians congregated upon emigrating to the United States in the 19th and early 20th centuries.

Approximately 900,000 Quebecers emigrated to the United States in the period of 1840-1930 during the first wave of the Quebec diaspora. The vast majority of these francophones settled in the six New England states: Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island and Vermont. Emigrants moved to states close to Quebec, particularly those bordering the province, because of their generally impoverished state and lack of jobs as a result of a poor economy over-reliant on agriculture. Centers of the New England textile industry such as Lowell, Massachusetts and Woonsocket, Rhode Island were a major destination for Quebec labor.

French Canadians from other provinces, those from Ontario typically emigrated to Illinois and Michigan, while those from Manitoba and other Western provinces usually emigrated to Minnesota and Wisconsin. Minneapolis and St. Paul, Minnesota boasted a large French Canadian community circa 1900.

One of the more famous "Little Canadas" was the West Side of Manchester, New Hampshire, a city with a large French speaking population due to the recruitment of labor in Quebec to work in the textile mills in the 19th and 20th centuries. "La Caisse Populaire Ste. Marie," or "St. Mary's Bank," located in Manchester's Little Canada, was the first credit union chartered in the United States, specifically founded to serve the French Canadian population. The credit union, or "people's bank" ("la caisse populaire") was a financial institution pioneered in Quebec, by quebecers who had difficulty obtaining credit from banks controlled by anglophone Canadians.

The most noted resident of Manchester, New Hampshire's "le petit Canada" was Grace Metalious, author of the best-selling novel Peyton Place. Interestingly, Metalious denied her French Canadian heritage and mostly lived in non-French Canadian neighborhoods in Manchester, due to her mother's desire to avoid prejudice. During World War II, Metalious eventually had to live in Little Canada after her husband went off to war due to a housing shortage.

Revlon founder Charles Revson, of Russian-Jewish extraction, grew up in a cold-water tenement in Manchester's Little Canada.

Another prominent Little Canada was found in Lowell, Massachusetts[1], the home of novelist Jack Kerouac.

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