It is the early hours of a March day in 1812, and the pre-dawn light is just beginning to clear the fog on Passamaquoddy Bay. Two Jonesboro fishermen, Charles and Edgar Wass, are heading out for a day’s work; only the sound of their oars pulling against the ocean breaks the morning stillness. Until, out of the […]
Those aboard the French ship which left Port-Royal in 1607 must have felt pessimistic about the future. Their charter to conduct the fur trade in the region of what is now Nova Scotia had been revoked by the French crown, and the company had been forced to abandon the settlement. Many, perhaps, never expected to see the […]
Albert Le Tarte, who left Brunswick the first of July to sail for France July 7th, has arrived and is in service at the front. He agreed to write the editor of the Record for the benefit of his many friends here and the first letter was received Tuesday. After a few lines of personal […]
I never in my life saw such troubles…It is awful here. Everything has gone up and yesterday afternoon all the big stores had to close up because they didn’t have everything left. Flour has just tripled in price and in a week will be out of reach. Butter has doubled.[1] This was the scene that […]
A threat to security; a liability on the public purse; unwanted and unwelcome. Those sentiments have been applied to today’s refugees, especially this election cycle – but they were also the feelings of many New Englanders to the thousands of Acadians who found themselves placed in towns across Massachusetts (including the District of Maine) in […]
They hardly dared believe their eyes – several had not seen [a priest] in seventeen years Thus was Moïse Fortier, a youthful 27 year-old parish priest, received on a visit to Waterville in 1841. Fortier had been dispatched by the Society for the Propagation of the Faith and the Bishop of Quebec to minister to the […]
When the United States Olympic athletes appear in the opening ceremonies of the 2016 games in Rio, they’ll be wearing shoes made in Auburn by Rancourt & Co., a Franco-American family company with deep roots in the city’s shoemaking history. But they won’t be the first Franco-American contribution of Maine’s Twin Cities to the Games. […]
You might as well try to stop the Androscoggin River from flowing, as to try and stop the sale of drink here. That was the gloomy assessment of Napoléon Lajeunesse, the Deputy Marshall (the equivalent of the Deputy Chief of Police) for the City of Lewiston, Maine, in 1893. Futile or not, Maine’s temperance forces […]
Where do Maine’s Franco-Americans live? That’s a question that’s at once both easy and difficult to answer. The easy answer recalls large population centers well-known for their Franco-American communities – Lewiston, Biddeford, Waterville, Sanford, Augusta, Old Town, and places in the Saint John River Valley like Fort Kent, Madawaska, and Sainte Agathe. But there’s another […]
This past week saw the celebration of Independence Day in the US, of course, but also Canada Day north of the border. Over the winter of 1775-6, Maine was the setting for an audacious but ultimately failed bid that, if successful, would have had drastic ramifications for the history of both countries. Colonel Benedict Arnold, […]
While I currently work for an Augusta-based non-profit, I spent four years as the Coordinator of the Franco-American Collection at the University of Southern Maine. In 2015, I co-authored "The Franco-Americans of Lewiston-Auburn," a general history of that population from 1850 to the present. I was also a consultant for the State Legislative Task Force on Franco-Americans in 2012. I live in Topsham with my wife and two young daughters.
