La Petite Canada: The Franco-American West Side

Between eighteen forty and nineteen thirty, roughly nine hundred thousand French Canadians left Quebec and came south across the border into New England. They came for the mills. In Manchester, they settled the west side of the city, within walking distance of the Amoskeag millyard, and they built a world.

They called it La Petite Canada. The Little Canada. The plurality had come from the Richelieu River valley, north of Lake Champlain and east of Montreal.

They brought French, they brought Catholicism, and they brought a particular resolve about survival. The French word for it was la survivance, the will to preserve language and identity against assimilation in an English-speaking, Protestant New England. The institution at the center of that world was Sainte-Marie Parish, founded in eighteen eighty on the west side.

The church that rose from it still stands. Its pastor in the late nineteenth century was Monsignor Pierre Hevey, one of the most influential figures in Manchester's Franco-American community. Hevey organized social services, advocated for his parishioners, and in nineteen oh eight, he helped establish something that had never existed in the United States before.

It was first called Saint Mary's Cooperative Credit Association. It was a credit union, specifically designed to allow mill workers, most of whom were shut out of conventional banking, to save money and borrow from each other. Alphonse Desjardins, who had pioneered the model in Quebec, helped design the structure.

The institution opened for business on November twenty-fourth, nineteen oh eight. It is still operating today as St. Mary's Bank.

The first credit union in American history was born in the parlor of a Manchester attorney, organized by a French-Canadian priest, for workers who made cloth.