Nineteenth-century Burlington was home to numerous French Canadian immigrants, so many that the area around Elmwood Avenue was once known as “Little Paris.” These French-speakers lived in modest homes set on quiet roads north of Pearl Street. On Sundays they attended a Catholic church where mass was offered in French: at St. Mary’s on North Prospect Street, overlooking the Winooski river, then in later years at St. Joseph’s on Allen Street. Their livelihood was the textile mills—they would cross the Winooski River to fabricate cotton and wool.
This once-large Francophone community is dispersed or assimilated. Today, as you walk around the North End, you come across few physical traces of it, mainly in street names and in inscriptions on Catholic churches. The memory of these hard-working people seems mostly to reside in the family lore of their Anglophone descendants.
After 1894, a new generation of French-Canadians immigrated from Québec to Burlington, where they found work in a new cotton mill, in the area known today as Lakeside. There they formed a new community of immigrants, in an enclave bounded by Lakeside Avenue on the north, Harrison Avenue on the south, the railroad tracks to the east, and Lake Champlain to the west.
The Queen City Cotton Mill
Lakeside’s story began in 1893, with George Draper & sons, the largest manufacturer of power looms for the U.S. textile industry. Draper operated in Hopedale, Massachusetts, for over a century. In the late 1880s a mechanic and foreman at Draper, James Northrop, designed a new automatic loom, with an innovative shuttle-charging mechanism.
The company decided to build a brand-new, state-of-the-art mill that would put the new loom design to work. For the site, the owners looked northward to Vermont, where railroad freight was cheaper than in Massachusetts. They settled on Burlington, where the labor force was not unionized. They found a lot on Lakeside Avenue, near rail lines that could transport finished textiles relatively cheaply to the large markets in New York and Boston.
The Burlington city government supported the mill—in May 1894 it gave the company a five-year tax exemption for it and even subsidized it contingent on its hiring 200 workers. Construction was speedy, and the Queen City Cotton Mill opened at 128 Lakeside Avenue in January 1895, when its enormous coal-fired steam engine roared to life.The Northrop looms were twice as productive as earlier looms, requiring fewer workers to churn out sateen and cotton twill.
Still, the first workers there were quickly dissatisfied, and as early as six weeks into production, they went on strike. Labor unrest would plague the owners throughout the mill’s history. But overall the mill was a financial success, and the owners expanded the its manufacturing capabilities numerous times. At peak production the mill would use 1,300 Northrop looms to weave about 21 miles of fabric per day. That scale of production far surpassed that of the mills in Winooski; Queen City was the largest mill in the state.
The Workforce
At first the mill provided no housing for the workers, who “likely lived wherever they could,” writes Kyle O., “staying in tenements, with friends, or with family, often stuck in dirty, noisy, crowded, dangerous, and unsanitary conditions.” But in 1899, once the mill proved successful, the company planned and built a housing development exclusively for them and their families.
It laid out a square of streets on land near the factory and built duplexes on Conger, Harrison, Wright, Central, and Lakeside. By 1900 about 100 French-Canadian families lived in the Lakeside Development, as it was known. The development was self-enclosed, observes the architectural historian Kyle Obenauer: “Lakeside Avenue functioned as the only means of ingress and egress, with railroad tracks to the east and Lake Champlain to the west each effectively acting as boundaries.”
That year the Queen City Cotton Company published a promotional pamphlet to attract more workers, written both in English and French. The pamphlet highlighted the development’s charms, with photos of a school, a beach, shaded sidewalks, a park, and many amenities.
The reality was less bucolic: workers could be injured or killed crossing the nearby railroad tracks, and the drinking water, drawn from Lake Champlain, was often unsafe, due to industrial dumping and sewage. Moreover “it is safe to assume,” observes Obenauer, “that many of [the workers’] children also worked in the mill. Numerous accounts and pictures can be found of children under the age of 16 working at the Queen City Cotton Mill.”
But by 1905 the population of Lakeside—all employees at the mill—numbered about 600 French Canadians. By then the neighborhood had become a virtual French-speaking village. In 1903 a Catholic church, St. Anthony’s, was constructed on land donated by the mill, on present-day Flynn Avenue. (It re-used bricks from the city’s first Catholic church on North Prospect Street.)
Around the same time the Union St.-Jean-Baptiste founded the St. John’s Club, on Central Avenue, as a social club for French-Canadian mill workers.
Today the mill and the immigrants are long gone, although Lakeside is still home to many hardworking families. Here too Burlington’s Francophone past is a matter of historical memory. But as you walk through the neighborhood, it’s easy it imagine French-Canadian workers on their daily trek to 128 Lakeside and back, stopping off at the St. John’s Club to begin to restore themselves after a day of toil.
—Janet Biehl
Sources: This article is based on the work of the architectural historian Kyle Obenauer. You can find his “The Queen City Cotton Mill” and “The Lakeside Development: Factory Housing for the Queen City Cotton Mill,” if you scroll down the PDF at Mills & Factories: Manufacturing Heritage Sites in Burlington and Winooski, Vermont (2014). These articles are lavishly illustrated. You can also watch Obenauer give a presentation on this subject, “The Manufacturing Past of Burlington’s Lakeside Avenue” (2016), on Town Meeting TV, where it is archived.