Our History

The Dominicans arrived in Quebec in 1873 and in Lewiston in 1881. Anticlerical measures of the French government had motivated the Dominicans to migrate to North America (Lewiston Evening Journal, 4 February 1882; la Chronique du couvent I, 1-2). They chose Saint-Hyacinthe as their North American base in 1873 and looked for missions in the United States. When Catholic prelates in Boston and Providence rejected their offers to serve, they approached Bishop James Augustin Healy of Maine (Plourde 1973, 51-52). In 1881, Healy appointed them to the growing French-Canadian community of Lewiston, where Alexandre-Louis Mothon succeeded Saint-Hyacinthe native Pierre Hevey as pastor of Saint-Pierre parish (Plourde 1970, 11, 21-22).

French Canadians had migrated to Lewiston as part of the Quebec diaspora in which nearly one million persons took up residence in the northeastern United States by 1930 (Lavoie 53). They concentrated in the textile mill towns of New England, such as Lewiston, where they succeeded the Irish as the predominant source of unskilled labor after the Civil War. French Canadians and their descendants comprised nearly one-fourth of Lewiston's population by 1880, approximately one-half by 1900, and about three-fifths by 1930 (U.S. Census, 1880; Vicero 343; Bernard 6). Immigration dwindled with the U.S. immigration restrictions after World War I.

The French-Canadians became active in the Catholic Church, where they tried with little success to challenge its domination by Irish clerics. They founded such newspapers as 'Le Messager' and 'La Justice.' The first hospital in Lewiston, Maine, became a reality in 1889 when the Sisters of Charity of Montreal, the "Grey Nuns", opened the doors of the Asylum of Our Lady of Lourdes. This hospital was central to the Grey Nuns' mission of providing social services for Lewiston's predominately French-Canadian mill workers.