Yarmouth, Maine, is not generally considered a “Franco-American town” – and with good reason. The US Census Bureau estimates the Franco-American population of the community at about 630, or 11% of the total. But, small as it may be, Yarmouth’s Franco-American community has an interesting story to tell.
Apart from its diminuitive size, one distinguishing characteristic of the Franco-Americans of Yarmouth is their origins. The vast majority, if not all the early French-Canadians to settle in Yarmouth were Acadians from Prince Edward Island. Communities of Islander emigres are not common in Maine, or elsewhere in New England, for two reasons – firstly, PEI has never had a substantial population; today it is home to a mere 140,000 inhabitants, of whom one in five are of French descent. Secondly, PEI has been geographically more isolated than the other Eastern provinces of Canada. While French Canadians from Quebec, Ontario and New Brunswick could easily emigrate to Maine and elsewhere by rail, there was no fixed link from PEI to the mainland until the Confederation Bridge was opened in 1997.
What precisely induced the first Islanders (or “PIs” as they were often referred to at the time) to come to Yarmouth is unclear. However, early census records indicate that around 1890, several families came to the town, probably to work in one of two factories – the Royal River Manufacturing Company’s cotton mill, or the Forest Product Company’s pulp and paper mill. Yarmouth’s small body of local history states (without evidence) that half the employees of the mills were Franco-Americans. By 1910, there were, at most a couple of hundred working-age Franco-Americans in the town, so this seems unlikely, but it speaks to the importance of this group in the local industrial labor force.
Like immigrants everywhere in this period, the first Franco-Americans in Yarmouth tended to live in boarding houses. In an oral history conducted in 1992, Mary DeRoche and Catherine “Kitty” Arsenault, described conditions in those company-owned accommodations, on Bridge Street, in the 1930s:
We lived there about 10 years. There was my father and mother and there was eight kids living there. We had at least two beds in every room. The front part of the house was the big living room and through a double doorway there was another big room. We used all the rooms for bedrooms, and we did all our socializing in the kitchen in those days. We had a couch in the living room, but we used them as bedrooms. There were two other bedrooms, one on each side of the kitchen, and we also had a couch in the kitchen, we used that for sleeping…
Five apartments were in that house. There was two rents downstairs and two rents upstairs and an apartment on the third floor. This was the house in the back, and then there was one in the front that didn’t have as many families in it. There used to be a shack on the side, there was a family living in that, too. We didn’t even have electricity in the house when we went there, no bathrooms at the time, either.
Overcrowding, a lack of running water, and no electricity were not the only hardships faced by factory workers. The October 1903 issue of a trade journal, the Paper Mill and Wood Pulp News, contains a rare public announcement of two industrial accidents, both at the Forest Paper Company:
Even if the work was dangerous, immigrants continued to be drawn by the promise of employment. In fact, the Islanders had been preceded, in larger numbers, by Irish immigrants, either via Boston or the Canadian Maritimes. As early as 1847, Irish families had settled in the town, and, by tradition, the first mass was held in a private home in 1856. The first Catholic Church, the Church of the Sacred Heart, was not constructed until 1879. Although initially proposed for the corner of Elm and Main Streets, a less conspicuous site on Cumberland Street was chosen, for fear the church would be a target for vandals. 
When the Islanders began to follow the Irish, they followed a distinct pattern. Sociologists are well aware of the phenomenon of “chain migration,” in which someone immigrating to a new home will soon be followed by friends and relatives from their old hometown. Maine’s Franco-Americans follow this pattern to such an extent that it is possible to connect certain Maine towns with regions and towns in Quebec (e.g. most Lewiston Francos came from La Beauce; most in Brunswick from L’Islet). Yarmouth’s Franco-Americans appear to be an extreme example of this. As best I can tell, of the 15 identifiable Franco-American families in Yarmouth in the 1910 census, nearly all of them are related by marriage or blood. In the oral history interview referenced earlier, Kitty Arsenault’s maternal aunt was Jane Chiasson; and fellow interviewee Mary DeRoche was a cousin on Kitty’s father’s side.
This helps to explain why, on their arrival, the Franco-Americans of Yarmouth remained close to each other. Aside from the mill housing, Yarmouth’s Franco community occupied two distinct mini-neighborhoods in the town. Click on the pins on the map below to see the Franco households listed in a 1912 Yarmouth directory.:
Although they were tightly-knit, Yarmouth’s Franco-Americans do not seem to have developed any of the institutions found in larger communities, like social clubs, to keep their language and culture alive. The children even attended a public school in the “upper village,” which was apparently among the last to be heated and electrified. As a result, Yarmouth never became known as a Franco-American center, despite its proximity to both Lewiston and Brunswick. Nonetheless, Yarmouth is a good example of the Franco-American reality all across Maine – even when its presence is small, there’s a community with a story to be told.
 William Rowe, “Ancient North Yarmouth and Yarmouth, Maine” (Yarmouth, ME, 1937), p292.