There’s one beloved tradition New Yorkers craving that familiar yuletide feeling will be especially loath to give up: Christmas trees, which are selling big this season, and the accompanying seasonal migration of Christmas tree vendors into town. Every year, an army of friendly, woodsy-looking salespeople, many from Quebec, set up shop on city sidewalks and sell live Christmas trees that make their way into apartments all over the city, tied to taxi cab roofs and lugged up narrow flights of stairs to upper floors.

Street vendors are a ubiquitous part of the urban landscape of New York City at all times of the year, of course. In every borough, in every corner of the city, they hawk everything from fruit and empanadas to clothing and second-hand goods. But New Yorkers have a particular fondness for the Christmas tree sellers who camp on busy corners each winter, with their fresh-smalling balsams and firs, propped up against sheds they’ve decorated with alluring displays of lights, wreaths, reindeer, found objects, and furniture: homey backdrops meant to seem like a miniature French Canadian Christmas village.

For one month every winter, these Christmas tree sellers become the glue that cements neighborhoods together. On the streets at most hours of the day and night, they’re the first to say hello and the last to say good night; their presence creates a small-town ambiance in a city of 8.4 million people. They become integrated into the community, and the community welcomes them. In a time when disease is trapping New Yorkers in their apartments and upending life-affirming routines, sidewalk Christmas tree stands and their vendors remain a crucial force for resilience in the city, keeping spirits high and connections intact.

Nationwide, the Christmas tree business is a very lucrative industry. Americans spent $2.56 billion on Christmas trees in 2018, and 25 to 30 million families buy live trees every year. A tree purchased on the street in New York may cost anywhere from $35 to $200, depending on its size, its type, and the neighborhood where it is sold. The most expensive trees are Fraser firs, prized for their two-toned needles (dark green on top and silver underneath) and their ability to hold up to indoor heat. Balsams, Douglas firs, and spruce trees are cheaper.

A Christmas tree market on West Street, near Pier 21 in Manhattan, around 1910. Courtesy of the Bain Collection, Library of Congress.

Tree vendors descended on New York as early as 1851, when a tree sold for $1. Today, these salespeople enjoy special status; a 1938 law, passed by the New York City Council, decreed that “storekeepers and peddlers may sell and display coniferous trees during the month of December.” The so-called “Coniferous Tree Exception” was enacted following citizen protests against then-Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia’s “war on Christmas trees,” during which the reform-minded mayor banned selling trees on city streets without a permit in an effort to clear the way for automotive traffic.

Since then, Christmas trees vendors have expanded throughout the five boroughs of New York, from Brooklyn and Queens to the Bronx, with the densest concentration of stands in Manhattan. Trucks from Quebec, Nova Scotia, Vermont, and North Carolina, working for large companies, deliver tens of thousands of trees to vendors around the city every night from Thanksgiving until December 25; the vendors then remain onsite around the clock to sell the trees and protect them from theft.

Since permits are not required, it is a largely unregulated business. Sales and salaries are delivered in cash, under cover of darkness, and business secrets are closely guarded. Some sellers rent sidewalk space in front of any store that will offer it to them. Others participate in auctions operated by New York City Parks and Recreation, which offers five-year contracts for spaces in city parks that can cost $1,000 a year in less desirable locations to $50,000 or more in SoHo Square on Sixth Avenue. A good spot for selling trees on the street is highly coveted and expensive, and competition is intense. Larger Christmas tree companies, including Florida-based Forever Evergreen, which operates the majority of the tree stands in New York, have been known to get into bidding wars, fueling an increase in tree prices. The competition for spaces and customers creates conflicts between vendors. Stories about spying, fights, and burning down tree stands are rampant.

Individual vendors are the heart of the Christmas tree business in New York City. Many come from Quebec, whether their trees do or not, recruited by the tree companies because they are winter-hardy folks who are acclimated to frigid temperatures and are willing to camp out for a month, sleeping in their vans or their sales huts. The vendors form a small community, spread across Manhattan and into Brooklyn.

Selling trees is a profitable job that nets between $7,000 and $30,000 in a single month. It offers adventure and the enticements of a month in the Big Apple. But the working conditions are harsh, by any standard. Many stands are open 24 hours a day—and even if they aren’t, the trees must be protected from theft, more or less anchoring sellers to the stand day and night. If a seller has somewhere else to spend the night, they might load their unsold inventory onto a truck for the night, but they still must wait at the stand for the nightly shipment of trees, and take care of after-hours deliveries to nearby apartment dwellers. Mental stress compounds the hard physical work. Vendors carry large amounts of cash over the border when they return home, and fear detection when they pass through Canadian customs on their way back to Quebec. (For this reason, they shun media attention in New York.)

Selling Christmas trees requires marketing moxie. Vendors ensure that their stock of trees, carefully trimmed for symmetry, suits the surrounding neighborhood—smaller, less expensive trees are better suited to a block of modest walk-up apartment buildings, while towering evergreens might sell well in an area with large luxury apartment buildings or businesses. They become ace salespeople, sometimes even playing on stereotypes, with the vendors themselves becoming part of the display. One West Village vendor dresses her American boyfriend in a faux-Quebecois lumberjack getup; in another part of the Village, a French Canadian vendor with perfect English purposely thickens his accent to add to his paysan image.

Tree sellers have perfected marketing their wares, setting up homey little French Canadian outposts throughout the city. These reindeer decorate a stand in Manhattan. Photo by Kevin Cabrera, November 28, 2020.

One stereotype of Quebecers turns out to be true: They are extraordinarily good natured and friendly, which goes a long way toward generating sales and drawing the same customers back year after year. It also cements the vendors as a critical element of urban street life, heightening the actual and perceived safety of the streets and residents’ sense of community. As journalist and activist Jane Jacobs observed, “A well-used city street is apt to be a safe street. A deserted street is apt to be unsafe. There must be eyes upon the street, eyes belonging to those we might call the natural proprietors of the street.” 

Tree sellers are rewarded for their friendliness by local residents who look out for them, bringing them coffee, sandwiches, soup, and companionship, especially in inclement weather. Stores allow them to vendors to use the restroom. A resident may watch over a stand while the seller steps away. Sellers and homeless people—both essentially living on the street—establish mutually beneficial relationships involving exchanges of food and protection. These relationships are deeper than the ones forged between vendors and residents in other seasons. Warm conversations, perhaps briefer now during the pandemic, take place whether a passerby buys a tree or not, making tree sellers’ long shifts in the cold pass more quickly and relieving residents’ long months of isolation for a few moments.

This holiday season—the COVID Christmas—has been a strange one for New York and its Christmas tree vendors. Many vendors faced troubles getting to New York at all, with the U.S.-Canadian border closed to nonessential travel because of the pandemic. The ban does not include Christmas trees, but it does impact the people who sell them, and vendors from Quebec cannot cross the border legally. This year, fear of being detected by customs authorities is even more intense than usual.

New York City has borne more than its fair share of trauma in the last 20 years. But traumas like the September 11, 2001, attack on the World Trade Center and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 have revealed both the city’s toughness and its sociable, almost small-town side—exemplified in the Christmas tree subculture that is as much a part of holidays in New York as adorned shop windows on Fifth Avenue. Like Christmas, the vendors come every year. And in this pandemic year, particularly, they remain essential hubs of safe community contact, counteracting forced isolation. Since the end of the first COVID-19 wave, New York has been reinventing itself in creative ways—for instance, in the way it has created beautiful outdoor dining settings. The annual ritual of welcoming tree vendors, buying a tree, and carting it home in the cold should buck up New Yorkers as they celebrate the symbols—and substance—of their survivorship and goodwill.

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Furthermore, Graffenreid continued, French Canadian workers huddled in “Little Canadas” of “hastily-constructed tenements,” in houses holding from three to 50 families, subsisting in conditions that were “a reproach to civilization,” while “inspiring fear and aversion in neighbors.”

Within the two years after Graffenried’s piece appeared, both of my grandfathers were born in Maine’s Little Canadas. A century later, when I began researching these roots, I uncovered a lost chapter in U.S. immigration history that has startling relevance today—a story of immigrants crossing a land border into the U.S. and the fears they aroused.

Inheriting an ideology of cultural survival from Québec, the French Canadians in the U.S. resisted assimilation. This led a segment of the American elite to regard these culturally isolated French speakers as a potential threat to the territorial integrity of the United States—pawns, conspiracy theorists said, in a Catholic plot to subvert the U.S. Northeast.

While French-speaking people had lived in North America since the 1600s, the French Canadians Graffenried discussed crossed the U.S. border during the late 19th century, mainly to earn a living in New England’s cotton mills. Cotton textile manufacturing began in earnest in the region during the War of 1812, and by mid-century, it was the U.S.’s largest industry in terms of employment, capital investment, and the value of its products. When the Union blockaded Confederate ports during the Civil War and prices for raw cotton soared, New England’s mills shut down or slashed hours. Textile workers turned toward other industries, joined the army, or headed west.

After the war, with cotton shipping again, the mills reopened, but the skilled textile workforce had scattered. The corporations launched a PR campaign to recruit workers, and Canada’s French-speaking province of Québec answered the call. Before the Civil War there had been a trickle of migration from Québec to the Northern states, but when hostilities ended, trainload upon trainload of French Canadians began to settle in neighboring New England. By 1930, nearly a million had crossed the border in search of work.

They arrived in extended family groups, establishing French-speaking enclaves throughout New England in small industrial cities like Lowell, Massachusetts; Manchester, New Hampshire; Woonsocket, Rhode Island; Lewiston, Maine; and elsewhere.

These Little Canadas, often wedged between a mill and a Catholic church, formed a cultural archipelago, outposts of Québec scattered throughout the Northeast in densely populated pockets. By 1900, one-tenth of New Englanders spoke French. And in the region’s many cotton mills, French Canadians made up 44 percent of the workforce—24 percent nationally—at a time when cotton remained a dominant industry.

French Canadian workers often lived in overcrowded, company-owned tenements, while children as young as eight years old worked full shifts in the mills. Contemporary observers denounced the mill town squalor. When 44 French Canadian children died in Brunswick, Maine, during a six-month period in 1886, most from typhoid fever and diphtheria, local newspaper editor Albert G. Tenney investigated. He found tenements housing 500 people per acre, with outhouses that overflowed into the wells and basements. Tenney excoriated the mill owners, the prominent Cabot family of Boston. Conditions in the tenements, wrote Tenney, “show a degree of brutality almost inconceivable in a civilized community. … A sight even to make a Christian swear.”

Brunswick was not the only mill town with poor living conditions. Journalist William Bayard Hale visited Little Canada in Fall River, Massachusetts, in 1894. “It would be an abuse to house a dog in such a place,” Hale wrote. Some Fall River tenements, continued Hale, “do not compare favorably with old-time slave-quarters,” a not-so-distant memory in the 1890s.

Other immigrants also faced pitiable conditions, but the French Canadians were unique because they thought of themselves as Americans before they came to the U.S. “The French Canadian is as American as someone born in Boston,” said Civil War hero Edmond Mallet, “it is all the nationalities that emigrated here that truly constitutes the American people.” Mallet was part of the small, educated French Canadian elite in the U.S., which included priests, journalists, professionals, and business owners. In their view, “American” was not a nationality, but a collection of “all the nationalities” living under the Stars and Stripes. In keeping with this understanding, they coined a new term for their people living in the U.S.: Franco-Americans.

Franco-American journalist Ferdinand Gagnon argued in an 1881 hearing at the Massachusetts State House that French Canadians were among the original constituent elements of the American Republic. He cited “Langlade, the father of Wisconsin; Juneau, the founder of Milwaukee; Vital Guerin, the founder of St. Paul, Minn.; Menard, first lieutenant governor of Illinois,” among his compatriots who had founded “nearly all the large cities of the Western States.”

While Gagnon encouraged French Canadians to pursue U.S. citizenship, for him naturalization implied a narrow contract. If naturalized citizens obeyed the laws, defended the flag, and worked for the general prosperity, he felt their duties were discharged—language, religion, and customs could remain in the private sphere. Gagnon’s concept of citizenship was based on Québec’s history, where French Canadians had maintained a distinct cultural identity despite British rule since 1763. The Franco-American elite expected their people to maintain their identity in the U.S. just as they had done in Canada.

But U.S. opinion demanded of the naturalized citizen something more than a merely formal participation in civic life, and Franco-American efforts to preserve their culture soon aroused suspicion and enmity. By the 1880s, elite American newspapers, including The New York Times, saw a sinister plot afoot. The Catholic Church, they said, had dispatched French Canadian workers southward in a bid to seize control of New England. Eventually, the theory went, Québec would sever its British ties and annex New England to a new nation-state called New France. Alarmists presented as evidence for the demographic threat the seemingly endless influx of immigrants across the northeastern border, coupled with the large family size of the Franco-Americans, where 10 or 12 children was common, and many more not unknown.

Anti-Catholicism had deep roots in the Northeast. The region’s Revolution-era patriots had numbered the Québec Act of 1774 among the British Parliament’s “Intolerable Acts,” not least because it upheld the Catholic Church’s privileges in Canada, establishing “popery” in North America. In the mid-19th century, supporters of the Know Nothing movement led attacks on Catholic neighborhoods from New York City to Philadelphia. In New England, among other incidents, a Know Nothing-inspired mob burned a church where Irish and French Canadian Catholics met at Bath, Maine, in July 1854. In October of that year, Catholic priest John Bapst was assaulted, robbed, tarred and feathered, and driven out of Ellsworth, Maine. While the Know Nothings faded away, in the late 19th century the nativists regrouped as the American Protective Association, a nationwide anti-Catholic movement.

Americans who distrusted their Catholic neighbors burned the Old South Church in Bath, Maine. Painting by John Hilling. Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

In this climate, the supposed French Canadian Catholic subversion of New England became national news. Between about 1880 and 1900, as immigration peaked, it attracted coverage in daily newspapers; think pieces in outlets such as Harper’s, The Nation, and The Forum; articles in academic journals; and books in English and in French. The New York Times reported in 1881 that French Canadian immigrants were “ignorant and unenterprising, subservient to the most bigoted class of Catholic priests in the world. … They care nothing for our free institutions, have no desire for civil or religious liberty or the benefits of education.”

In 1885, the paper reported that there were French Canadian plans “to form a new France occupying the whole northeast corner of the continent”; four years later, it outlined the purported borders of New France: “Quebec, Ontario, as far west as Hamilton, such portions of the maritime provinces as may be deemed worth taking, the New-England States, and a slice of New-York.”

And in 1892, The New York Times suggested that emigration from Québec was “part of a priestly scheme now fervently fostered in Canada for the purpose of bringing New-England under the control of the Roman Catholic faith. … This is the avowed purpose of the secret society to which every adult French Canadian belongs.”

Protestant clergy responded by leading well-funded initiatives to convert the Franco-American Catholics. The Congregationalists’ Calvin E. Amaron founded the French Protestant College in Massachusetts in 1885, offering a training course for evangelizing the French Canadians of New England and Québec. Baptist missionaries fielded the “Gospel Wagon”—a hefty, horse-drawn vehicle with organ and pulpit, lit by lanterns at night, preaching Protestantism in French to the Little Canadas of Massachusetts and New Hampshire.

New England had become “a magnet attracting the world to itself. … [Québec is] repellant and shunned by the world’s best blood,” thundered the Baptists’ Henry Lyman Morehouse in an 1893 pamphlet. “The one a mighty current. … that has been as the water of life to the civilized world—the other, a sluggish, slimy stream, that has fructified nothing and given to mankind nothing noteworthy … a civilization where mediaeval Romanism is rampant. … Against the abhorrent forces of this Romish civilization we are contending, especially in New England.”

Amaron and Morehouse identified Protestantism with Americanism. For them, it was unthinkable that the U.S. could accommodate a variety of religious traditions and yet retain its political culture.

In retrospect, the fevered discourse about New England’s class of destitute factory workers reveals how little chattering classes in the U.S. knew their neighbors—a people whose presence in North America preceded Plymouth Rock. The “invasion” rhetoric did not discourage Franco-American sentiments in favor of maintaining their identity but intensified them. The Little Canadas continued in vigor for at least another half-century, and slowly dispersed, not due to nativist provocations, but for economic reasons—the decline of New England’s manufacturing base.

Talk of a French Canadian threat waned in the first years of the 20th century, as migration across the northeastern border slowed temporarily. This Victorian episode faded from memory only when U.S. fears were transferred to new subjects: the even more foreign-seeming Jewish and non-Protestant immigrants from Southern and Eastern Europe, who, in the early 20th century, began to arrive in growing numbers on U.S. shores.

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“Franco-American, as in canned spaghetti?” some ask.

I roll my eyes and sigh. “No connection whatsoever.”

Geographically, Franco-Americans resemble Mexican Americans in the Southwest because we also live near our cultural homeland. But unlike Mexican Americans, we’re unknown outside our region. Quite accurately, Maine journalist Dyke Hendrickson titled his 1980 book about Franco-Americans Quiet Presence. The source of this inconspicuous group identity lies in our ethnically and religiously mixed relationship to the United States, Québec, and even pre-revolutionary France, which has given Franco-Americans a highly varied and personal sense of what our identity means.

From the earliest French expedition to the Carolinas in 1524, to the founding of Québec City in 1608, New France eventually extended across North America from the Appalachians to the Rockies, and south to the Gulf of Mexico. But over time, through conquests, treaties, and land sales, French North American colonies became part of the British Empire, or of the United States. The only exceptions were islands near Newfoundland and in the Caribbean, plus an independent Haiti.

For socioeconomic and political reasons, as second-class citizens under British rule in the very country they had founded, roughly 900,000 French Canadians left Québec between the 1840s and the Great Depression. Many settled in New England and eastern New York state. The earliest migrants, mostly farmers, engaged in agriculture or logging in rural areas, or in the manufacture of textiles, shoes, paper, and other goods in urban areas. After the Civil War, when migration increased drastically, members of Québec’s business and professional classes settled among their compatriots. Today, Franco-American descendants of the original French Canadian immigrants total more than three million.

Among the region’s mill towns, there emerged four with Franco-American populations significant enough to vie for the unofficial title of French-speaking capital: Lewiston, Maine; Manchester, New Hampshire; Lowell, Massachusetts; and Woonsocket, Rhode Island. These cities and others had Franco-American neighborhoods called Petit Canada (Little Canada), comprised of residences, churches, schools, businesses, social organizations, newspapers, and other institutions designed to preserve the French language and Franco-American culture. There, one could be born, educated, work, shop, pray, play, die, and be buried almost entirely in French. Streets with names such as Notre Dame, Cartier, and Dubuque were lined with multi-family houses in whose yards there might be a shrine to the Sainte Vierge Marie, the Sacré-Coeur de Jésus or to one’s favorite saint. From those homes came the aroma of tourtière (pork pie), tarte au sucre (maple sugar pie), and other delights.

Unlike other groups who’ve become well known, most Franco-Americans tend to live and practice their culture in intimate, unassuming, and conservative ways. In my opinion, the root of this unobtrusiveness lies in our history.

The 1789 French Revolution didn’t merely topple the king and replace the monarchy with a republic, it also attacked the Roman Catholic Church and made freethinkers of the French masses. Having left France a century earlier, our ancestors missed that Revolution.

Bird’s-eye view of Manchester looking from downtown toward the mills of the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company and beyond to the Franco-American West Side. Photo by Ulric Bourgeois, 1925

Fast-forward to Québec’s Révolution Tranquille (Quiet Revolution) of the 1960s, which had somewhat the same effects on the previously Catholic-clergy-dominated Québécois as did the French Revolution on the French people. But by the time of that revolution, Franco-Americans were already living in the United States.

Yet even though the Franco half of our collective psyche missed both revolutions and remained in the past, the American half of our dual identity experienced the future-focused sociocultural revolution of the 1960s in the United States. This phenomenon applies mainly to baby boomers, whose Franco identity was already on the wane by the 1960s, while their American identity was susceptible to influences of the times, as is evidenced by the subsequent rise in outright secularism or, in adherents of cafeteria Catholicism, the rise in divorce, cohabitation, contraception, and other practices considered taboo by the Catholic Church.

In fact, each family—and each person, really—has a slightly different sense of what being Franco-American is. Consider my hometown, Manchester, New Hampshire, where the Amoskeag Manufacturing Company (1831-1936) attracted immigrants from Québec and Europe from the mid-19th through the early-20th centuries. With Manchester’s total population at 78,384 (1920 U.S. Census), Amoskeag’s work force peaked at 17,000, some 40 percent of whom were Franco-Americans. At its highest, Manchester’s Franco-American population reached nearly 50% of the city’s total. To serve their needs, they created their own institutions—for example, eight parishes, all of which included a church and a grammar school, and in some cases, a high school. The social services sector comprised orphanages, hospices for the aged and the indigent, and a hospital.

I was born in 1951 and, unlike many Franco-Americans, my family lived across the Merrimack River from Manchester’s Petit Canada, where we were the French family among Scottish, Irish, Polish, Greek, Swedish, and other ethnicities. Although my father’s relatives spoke French, they favored English. Other than belonging to St. George, one of Manchester’s eight French-language parishes, they weren’t members of any Franco-American institutions. By contrast, my mother’s relatives spoke French exclusively and were heavily involved in various aspects of Franco-American culture. Out of respect for my maternal grandparents, French was the chosen language in our home when I was a young child.

My awareness of the difference between our family and others increased when I started school. Nearly every neighborhood kid attended either the public school around the corner from our house or an English-language parochial school somewhat farther away. Meanwhile, I attended St. George, which was Franco-American. There, French and English were taught to us on an equal level, each during its half of the school day. We had to be fluent in both languages upon entering first grade.

Our most important subject was catéchisme, almost as if French were the official language of heaven. Surprisingly, l’histoire du Canada wasn’t taught, nor was Franco-American history. In fact, I don’t recall the term Franco-American having ever been pronounced in class. And as for Acadians, a separate branch of French North Americans, I learned of their existence and that of their Cajun cousins only through my research as an adult!

These terms themselves show how difficult it is to describe the multi-faceted identity of being Franco-American. That term in French—Franco-Américain—is something my maternal grandfather, uncles, and aunts all used. My mother always said we were Canadiens, despite our having been born in the United States. Anglophone kids called us French, and some adults called us French Canadians and still do. Franco-American seems to be a term used mainly by community activists.

Nowadays, much of the daily culture that Franco-Americans once lived by is practiced outside the home during festivities such as the feast of the French Canadian patron saint, la Saint-Jean-Baptiste on June 24. In Manchester, one can eat some of the aforementioned traditional foods in a few restaurants, including the popular Chez Vachon, a must-stop for candidates during New Hampshire’s first-in-the-nation presidential primary. There, the specialty is poutine (French fries and cheese curds in gravy), a late-20th-century Québécois invention some call a heart attack on a plate.

Franco-American identity manifests itself more strongly through organizations such as the Franco-American Centre/Centre Franco-Américain, which offers French classes, films, lectures, and other events, and the American Canadian Genealogical Society, where Franco-Americans from all over the United States come to Manchester to trace their ancestral roots.

With every generation, most Franco-Americans have put a bit more American water in their French wine. Many today don’t speak French and know little about their ethnic heritage. In the United States, pressure from proponents of the English language and American culture has accelerated this evolution. Whereas people once spoke French on the street, in stores, in restaurants, and elsewhere, and whereas Manchester almost always had a Franco-American mayor, such phenomena are now things of the past.

Though many Franco-Americans are such in name only now, our family is an exception. My wife is the first woman I ever dated who introduced me to her mother in French. We raised our son in French. He and his wife, a former student of mine, are doing likewise, the seventh generation of French-speaking Perreaults living on U.S. soil.

To us and to a minority of Franco-American families in our region, the French language and our Franco-American culture are gifts we lovingly pass on from generation to generation.

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