The Coney Island of Maine, in French
Near Old Orchard Beach, Maine
Listen along the boardwalk in July and you will hear it. French. Not the French of a classroom, but the everyday French of Quebec, spoken by families who have been coming here for generations.
Old Orchard Beach is often called the Coney Island of Maine, an amusement pier and arcade town rather than a genteel mid-coast village, and for well over a century it has belonged as much to Canada as to Maine. The bond began with the Grand Trunk Railway, which ran service straight from Montreal to this beach. For inland Quebecois, this was the closest place to feel the salt spray of the open ocean, and they came by the trainload.
They never really stopped. Today the Chamber of Commerce estimates that a large share of summer visitors, often cited as roughly a third or more, come from Canada. You will see it in the signs, many of them printed in both English and French, and in the names of the motels lining the shore, names like Beau Rivage and Alouette, chosen to make a Quebec family feel at home.
This is a Maine beach town, yes, but it is also, in high summer, a small piece of French Canada by the sea.
