Originally posted by Lin Rhea:
What does "L'Erable" mean Karl?
Good stuff guys!
I know - too much stuff.
This is all right where I spent about 60% of my life.
This is my stompin' grounds:
Sometime around 1825 a French-Canadian fur trader, Francis Bourbonnais, arrived in Illinois. He married a Pottawatomie squaw who had been given 640 acres as a reservation along the Kankakee River. As a result of the marriage, the town of Bourbonnais was founded. Noel LeVasseur, a voyageur who had set up a trading post among the Pottawatomie Indians, settled at Bourbonnais in 1832. Sometime after 1837, LeVasseur returned to Canada to encourage the emigration of his compatriots to Illinois. Several families came in 1844, and more in 1848 and 1849. The new arrivals settled in Bourbonnais, buying or renting from fifteen to forty acres of farmland, some of which they purchased from LeVasseur.
n September 1845, in a letter addressed to Bishop Bourget of Montreal, Mgr. William Quarter (the first bishop of Chicago), requested a priest to "labor with apostolic zeal for the salvation of the souls of these excellent and deserving [French] Canadians." Other requests followed, and Bishop Bourget finally responded in May 1847 when he sent Rene Courjeault as the first resident priest. When Courjeault arrived in the Kankakee Valley he counted 59 French-Canadian families; in the fall he reported 108. In the 1850 population census, 248 families (total population 1,720) were enumerated in Bourbonnais Township. Of these 201 were French Canadians (81 percent). A handful of other French-Canadian families were scattered in other townships of Will and Iroquois counties.
It was, however, a visit from French-Canadian priest Charles Chiniquy in the spring of 1851, and his resolve to organize a group of French-Canadian colonists to settle to the south and east of Bourbonnais, that gave new impetus to this westward migration. Chiniquy published a letter about Illinois in several French language newspapers in Quebec in August of 1851. Beginning with the premise that the flow of emigration would not stop until the government of the province initiated certain changes in social and economic conditions, Chiniquy proposed to turn these French-Canadian migrants away from the towns of New England, which were the "tombs of all that is dear to a Canadian: his religion, his language, and his nationality," and lead them instead to the midwest. "Nothing," he continued, "is more discouraging than to see with what ease our youths (in New England) are exposed to the contagion of heresy, impiety, and indifference." He contrasted the miserable conditions he had witnessed among his compatriots on the east coast with the happiness and prosperity of those living in the Midwest. He concluded by recommending that those with the penchant to emigrate, as well as those already in the eastern United States, join him in Illinois where land was cheap and plentiful, and where a "sober and religious man" can thrive.
Despite Chiniquy's clearly stated desire to assemble a Catholic community in the Midwest, the Quebec Catholic Church did not respond in a wholeheartedly favorable manner. Neverthless, during the three years after Chiniquy's arrival in Illinois in November 1851, it was estimated that between nine hundred and one thousand families left Quebec and some of the New England states to settle on forty square miles of land in central Illinois.
The New Settlements: St. Anne, St. Mary, Papineau, and L'Erable
The prairies of central Illinois to which the French Canadians came in the early 1850s were different from the land in Quebec they had left behind. Illinois remained relatively unsettled, and while considerable acreage was already in the hands of speculators, federal government lands were still available at $1.25 per acre. Only about 4 percent of the available acreage in the central counties of Illinois in 1850 was improved in farms. The price of that land varied from $5 to $25 per acre according to its location, quality, and distance from stations and settlements.
The French Canadians took advantage of these opportunities. Riding through the area in 1859, a Scot named James Caird described "passing through a settlement of French Canadians ... Each settler has about forty acres and their farms are laid out along parallel roads at right angles to the railway. They exhibit signs of careful cultivation."
Although Bourbonnais was the first community in central Illinois to be settled by French Canadians who ventured to the Midwest in the 1840s, the focal point of Chiniquy's migration effort was to the east and south, in and around an area known as Beaver Creek in Iroquois County. Sometime in 1850 a French Canadian, Michel Allain, moved from Bourbonnais to Beaver Creek with his wife, his two sons (Ambrose and Antoine), and their families. He clearly stimulated the rapid growth of the settlement in 1851 and 1852. By the end of January 1852 forty cabins were built. In a November 27, 1851, letter to Bishop Bourget, Jacques Olivier of the Chicago diocese described Chiniquy's intentions to build a church at Beaver Creek in the spring. This building was indeed completed�a forty-square-foot chapel�and in April of 1852 it was dedicated to St. Anne, the patron saint of the Province of Quebec. St. Anne was organized as a parish of the newly formed Kankakee County in 1853, and in October of 1855 a Catholic school for boys was started. St. Anne Township was created in 1857 from parts of Aroma and Momence Townships. In April of that year the first town officers were elected. Three were French Canadians.
As increasing numbers of French-Canadian immigrants moved into St. Anne Township, some settled in adjacent Iroquois County communities. To the immediate south, they settled in Papineau. Papineau Township was originally settled by Dutch immigrants who had arrived in the 1840s. The township was originally called Weygandt after one of the major immigrant families. Life for the earliest residents of Weygandt Township was harsh. Farming was difficult because the soil was sandy. In 1855 half the population, which by this time also included Yankee and German settlers, died in a severe cholera epidemic. As the region was increasingly settled by French Canadians it was renamed Papineau after the great Quebec nationalist hero of the 1830s.
A sawmill was soon built by a settler, Joseph Delude. The first school was opened in 1861, and a Methodist church was built in 1867. The village was finally incorporated in 1874. A Catholic church was erected in 1872, and attending priests came from nearby St. Mary and St. Anne. Eventually the Papineau church was demolished and never rebuilt. The majority of Papineau residents-whether Protestant or Catholic-worshipped in the churches at St. Anne.
Adjacent to Papineau Township was Beaver Township. The southern part of Beaver township, around the community of Donovan, was a Swedish immigrant stronghold. The northern part had been settled by Norwegians in 1835, but a cholera epidemic in the following year wiped out half the population, and the survivors moved to Wisconsin. The French Canadians moved into the northern part, founding the village of St. Mary (platted in
1859 and renamed Beaverville in 1905) along the border between Beaver and Papineau townships. The first settlers arrived in St. Mary in the spring of 1853, and the first house was built in 1857 by Joseph Caillouette. The village was originally platted on land belonging to a French-Canadian, Charles Arseneau. By 1858 roughly fifty families were worshipping in the church built in the community on twenty acres of land also donated by Charles Arseneau. In 1872 the Cincinnati, Lafayette and Chicago Railroad linked St. Mary's to the Chicago markets. The Lambert family owned and operated a bank, a grain elevator, and a lumberyard. In the early 1900s H. L. Lambert started a tile factory that eventually employed twenty-five men. In 1895 six sisters of the Holy Heart of Mary came from Paris to direct a parish school that became Holy Family Academy. The Academy, which opened with sixty pupils, boarded children from the country. The enrollment grew rapidly, necessitating a new building that was completed in 1905, four years before the cornerstone was laid for the new church of St. Mary's. By 1915 there were three hundred students. The school remained active until 1969, and the buildings were razed in the mid-1970s.
The final village in the area founded by French Canadians was L'Erable settled in 1853 and 1854 as a mission of Maternity Church in Bourbonnais.
The name L'Erable, is derived from the sugar maple, many of which were planted by the original settlers. Peter Spink, Chiniquy's adversary in a famous slander lawsuit, was a resident of L'Erable in the early years. He acquired large tracts of lands that he later sold to newcomers. In 1854 a chapel dedicated to St. John the Baptist was built on land donated by Spink, and St. Jean Baptiste day was celebrated on June 24th, as it is to this day in the province of Quebec. In 1875 the wood frame church that still stands was completed. In 1857 L'Erable was platted but never incorporated. By the end of the 1850s the French Canadians in L'Erable and the surrounding acres of Ashkum Township were soon outnumbered by French-speaking immigrants from Belgium and a few from France. Many descendants of these Belgian and French families still remain in the area.
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