Are you going to Old Orchard again this year? Quebec's New England outpost

Inroads, Winter 2005 by Cuccioletta, Donald

THE QUESTION ASKED IN THE TITEE, TAKEN FROM THE SONG "Estce-que tu vas à Old Orchard encore cet année?' from a 1984 album by Sylvain Lelièvre, can be heard throughout Quebec as the snow melts and the sun starts to radiate on the spring horizon. For francophone Quebecers it is time to think and organize the summer holidays, ushered in on June 24 by la Fête de Saint-Jean.

The phrase "Québécois at the beach" usually conjures up images of Quebec's snowbirds escaping winter for Florida's sunny shores. But the Florida winter exodus is a recent phenomenon, reaching its peak in the 1990s and now beginning to dissipate because of the high insurance costs for fixed-income pensioners, increased transportation costs and the loss of trailer parks and inexpensive motels resulting from the boom in condominium construction along the Florida coast. To most Québécois, the seashore evokes one memory most of all - Old Orchard Beach, Maine. In every francophone family in Quebec, at some point since World War II, someone has visited Old Orchard.

Established in 1657 by its first settler, Thomas Rogers, Old Orchard was originally called the "Garden by the Sea." Its current name is taken from the "old" apple orchard which, perched high on a hill above the sandy beach, served as a landmark to sailors for many years. In 1837, a farmer named E.G. Staples began taking in summer boarders at his farm and, based on this experience, built the first hotel, the Old Orchard Boarding House. Under his tutelage, Old Orchard became a sought-after summer retreat for Bostonians, with restaurants boasting of "shore dinners." In 1842 the first steam railroad from Boston to Portland was completed, and in 1853 the Montreal-based Grand Trunk Railway extended its service from Portland to Old Orchard to accommodate the rich from Montreal who took their summer holidays there. In 1896, the first steel pier was built as well as a number of lavish resorts, nicknamed the "Velvet Hotels" because of their Victorian design and style. Over the next five decades Old Orchard was to become the summer destination for many of the new rich in Canada and the United States, with summer homes owned by Kennedys, Fitzgeralds and Molsons. Indeed, the teenaged Rose Fitzgerald, John F Kennedy's mother, met her future husband Joseph E Kennedy in Old Orchard.

It remained the summer playground of wealthy northeasterners until a massive fire in 1907 ravished Old Orchard, destroying 75 per cent of the town as well as the Velvet hotels. But Old Orchard was determined to rebuild and in so doing resurrected itself as a major summer resort for the general public. This was in line with the consumer trends of the 1920s in which the American - and, to some extent, the French-Canadian - middle class was discovering the phenomenon of the "summer vacation."

The 1920s and 1930s saw a proliferation of tourist activities including the arrival of international motor racing on the beach and the landing there of Charles Lindbergh and his Spirit of St. Louis one month after his return from Paris. It was the era of the big bands and thousands of vacationers danced at the Casino at the end of the pier to the sounds of Rudy Vallee, Duke Ellington, Benny Goodman, Count Basie and Louis Armstrong, among others. This continued through the 1950s: my mother, now 85 years young, still remembers how she and my father danced on the pier to the sounds of such famous bands every summer in Old Orchard.

The end of World War Il marked the beginnings of the invasion of the Québécois (or French Canadians as they were called then). The love affair between the Québécois and Old Orchard had begun. "The French Canadians, the ones with money, had always come here before the war, but after the war, they came in droves," Priscilla Gallant, curator of the Old Orchard Historical Museum, explained to me. She herself has strong French-Canadian connections - as well as Acadian and Native (Haché) heritage. Gallant's mother was a Roy, originally from the Beauce. She explained that today in Saco and Biddeford, towns just south of Old Orchard Beach, over 30 per cent of the population is of French-Canadian origin: "They came to work in the textile mills of Biddeford and some set up permanent residence right here in Old Orchard." She paints a picture of a community that has incorporated into it the French-Canadian population: "St. Margaret Catholic Church - just at the top of Old Orchard Street, the main street of the town - was in the twenties and thirties a French church, and even today on Sundays some sermons are given in French for our Québécois friends who take their holidays here." The ongoing presence of French Canadians is indeed strong here. In Biddeford Madame Côté, who works at the City Hall, greeted me in French. This former Quebecer from Sherbrooke, married to an American, described how the French-Canadian (now Franco-American) heritage was being preserved. Later at the presbytery of St. Margaret Church, I encountered Guenette Maheu, a woman in her sixties. As we conversed in French, her face and eyes lit up as she shared her reflections about the area. Speaking in her maternal language, her cultural roots seemed to !lower.