Our Hometown
Nashua | French-Canadians in Nashua
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Jeannine Leveque speaks about French-Canadians immigrating to Nashua.
Jeannine Leveque speaks about French-Canadians immigrating to Nashua, the work they did, and the mark they've left of the city.
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Our Hometown is a local public television program presented by NHPBS
Our Hometown
Nashua | French-Canadians in Nashua
Clip | 4m 1sVideo has Closed Captions
Jeannine Leveque speaks about French-Canadians immigrating to Nashua, the work they did, and the mark they've left of the city.
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The French Canadians came in three main waves to Nashua.
The first one was after, which actually coincided with the building of the three churches, Catholic, French Catholic churches here in Nashua.
So the first wave was after the Civil War, and that sort of culminated with the building of Saint Louis de Gonzague, St Aloysius Parish, which is the first French parish.
And then the second one was 1879 through the 1880s.
And during that time, St Francis Xavier in French Hill was established.
And then the last one was during 1890s into the early 1900s.
And during that time in 1909, my own parish, Infant Jesus Church was established.
And like my family, my own grandfather came down in 1912 approximately.
That's when It was that's what they always said.
I haven't found any documentation.
His older brothers and sisters had come down basically during the 1890s and the early 20th century.
But he was the youngest of 15 kids, 14 surviving.
And he came down after the others.
He was 16 when he came from what we were told.
He came with his father the year after his mother died and the others had come and established themselves.
And many of them, the first one got married here in 1899.
So now they're here in 1890.
Obviously, of the 14 surviving kids in the family, one stayed in Canada.
One went to Manchester and the rest came to Nashua.
I think most of them did work in the mills at least part of the time.
But then a lot of them went into related areas.
A number of my grand uncles were actually box makers.
So there were some box making companies here in Nashua.
And at least three of them were listed over the years as box makers.
Some were shoemakers, some were just doing things.
Weavers, loom fixers, all kinds of mill things.
My grandfather actually in his WW1 draft registration card in 1918, said he was working at White Mountain Freezer Company, which was over by Bridge Street, close to going to Hudson.
I don't know what he was doing there, but they made White Mountain freezers, which was for home freezers to keep things cold.
And he was working there at the time.
He was signing up for the draft and he was drafted and did serve in World.
War One and got his citizenship afterwards.
He had taken up papers by the time he signed up for the draft.
Actually, I was in a pretty much of a French-Canadian enclave over in Crown.
Hill, and French Hill was another one.
Obviously, those are two big areas and you used to hear French on the street in downtown, you know, which is the main shopping area where you used to hear French, you used to hear Greek and either Lithuanian or Polish as well.
Not that I could distinguish those two, because I couldn't.
But, you know, I knew they both existed and that they kind of sounded similar to me.
But at least those three languages used to hear on the streets in Nashua.
And it was funny because when I was in college, at a big university in the Midwest and a couple of us were in a French apartment for the summer and we took our French with us and we went shopping in downtown East Lansing.
And we were getting looks like and this is a university that had loads of international students who spoke many languages, and that's like speaking an exotic language, we were speaking French.
And Michigan is not that far from Canada, you know.
So it was kind of really strange.
We get this reaction like, what are you doing that for?
And it's like I said, people speak French on the downtown streets of Nashua, New Hampshire, every day.
And it was like, oh, yeah.
And it's like, yeah.
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