Quebec Sources
In the 1850s, the socioeconomic conditions in Quebec Province had become quite desperate for many French-speaking, Catholic persons living in the farm country along the Saint-Lawrence Seaway and also in rural towns outside the more thriving businesses within the city of Montreal. Many features of this social condition have been analyzed over the years by Canadian historians and sociologists, who underline the the struggles of soon-to-be Franco-Americans living in the six New England states.
Relatives and Neighbors from the Quebec Diaspora
My Franco-American parents, grandparents and great-grandparents worked their whole lives in trying to earn a living as factory workers in the city’s many textile mills or as small retail merchants in Lowell’s once busy and thriving, economic wonderland that others called the birthplace of the American Industrial Revolution.
Lowell Social Structure
Interwoven into this urban landscape of retail shops, houses, tenements, churches, and a commercial center located at Kearney Square, there also existed massive, multi-story, red-brick, factory buildings (13, at one time), which dotted the urban landscape along man-made canals and the Merrimack River shoreline. Towns in Massachusetts like Lowell, Lawrence, Haverhill and, also, Fall River had played a dominant role in the production of textile products on an international scale.
During the years between 1830 and 1895, the technological success of the Lowell Experiment in textile production had showed the world that centralized, mass production of textiles and, also, leather products led to new manufacturing wealth for the movers and the shakers and, also, to many, low-paid opportunities for indigent, immigrant, low-skill workers at the bottom end of the economic ladder.
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