New Boston Historical Society

New Boston Historical Society
New Boston, New Hampshire
mill girl
Malvina Lacourse of New Boston was the same age as this "spooler" when she went to work in the Amoskeag Mills.
(Library of Congress photo)

A French-Canadian Family in New Boston
by Dan Rothman for the May 2024 issue of The New Boston Beacon

An email correspondent named Dennis Deziel asked the Historical Society to find information about his great-grandmother who was born in New Boston in 1884. Malvina Lacourse was the daughter of French-Canadian immigrants Caroline Auger Lacourse and her husband Alphonse, who went by the name Louis.

I was intrigued by Dennis's inquiry because prior to the 20th century almost no one appears in our town's history who was not of British or Irish descent except for Joe English, a Native American, and Samantha Plantin, a Black woman. French-Canadian immigrants are of particular interest to me because my wife's grandfather was one; Ernest Perron emigrated from Canada to Vermont exactly one hundred years ago. My wife's mother Martha Perron Alexander, who lived with us here in New Boston for six years, spoke French before she spoke English, and her cousin George Perron, who lived for many years on River Road opposite the Fairgrounds, was born in Quebec.

baptism record
1855 record of the baptism of Alphonse Lacourse in Nicolet, Quebec

Based on birth and death records for the Lacourse family, it seems that they lived in Riverdale, also known as Oil Mills, from 1884-1893. Riverdale may be found in the northeast corner of New Boston on the far side of Route 114; the tiny village is bisected by the Weare town line. Malvina's father Louis Lacourse was a wood chopper and laborer. Two of his children died young while the family lived in New Boston.

Louis Lacourse also died young in New Boston, when he was 38 years old. His body was found in what's now called Still Pond on June 23, 1893, the day after the New Boston Railroad was dedicated. The event on the 22nd had been celebrated by thousands of people with food and drink and a speech by the governor — did the celebrations contribute somehow to Louis's death, or had the young man jumped in the pond to cool off on a hot summer's day?

railroad dedication
The New Boston Railroad was dedicated June 22, 1893.

Curiously, Louis Lacourse's name is not listed under "Births, Marriages, and Deaths" in the New Boston Town Report as his daughter Rosanna's name had been when she died in 1888. There is only a notation under Selectmen's Services that J.N. McLane was paid $2.00 for "taking the body of a Frenchman out of water" on June 24. We have no copies of the New Boston Argus for June 1893, and the Farmer's Cabinet of Amherst did not mention Louis's passing amidst all the excitement about the railroad.

What became of the Lacourse family after Louis died? The U.S. Census reveals that in 1900 his widow Caroline Lacourse was living in Manchester, NH, with her daughter Malvina and a younger son Arsène. The two children could speak English, the census tells us, but Caroline could not. Caroline was working as a weaver in one of the cotton mills and 16-year-old Malvina was a "spooler," which meant that she tended a spooling machine that wound thread around wooden bobbins, thousands of which were needed to keep the big factories humming.

Amoskeag Mills c.1900

It cannot have been pleasant to work long hours in a mill, so I'm not surprised that Malvina Lacourse married a barber named Joseph Deodat Gamache in 1901, when she was 17. Joseph had been born in Quebec and at 34 was twice Malvina's age when they married. The Gamaches had four children, all born in Manchester. The one address I could locate for the Gamache lodgings is now a parking lot on Chestnut Street. Malvina later lived on Pennsylvania Avenue in Manchester with her daughter Cedulie, who had married Amorose Severe Deziel in 1927. Malvina died in 1947.

The history of New Boston is one of rapid growth from its settlement in the 1740s to a peak in 1830 followed by a long period of decline as young people moved to the cities to find work or went west where the farmland was less rocky. I am grateful to Dennis Deziel for drawing my attention to his great-grandmother Malvina Lacourse, a young woman from New Boston who went to work in the mills.

POSTSCRIPT

newspaper article
The Weekly Union, June 28, 1893, page 1

Dennis Deziel and I corresponded about the Lacourse family a couple times a year for six years. We also had help from Charles Skillings at the historical society of Holden MA as Alphonse and Caroline lived there before they moved to New Boston. I thought we'd learned all we could about the death of Malvina's father Alphonse (or Louis) Lacourse so I submitted my story to the Beacon and it was published on May 1, 2024. About 10 days later(!) I found a new-to-me archive of the Manchester NH newspaper The Weekly Union which happened to include the year Alphonse died. I looked up the issue following June 23 and found on the front page the story "Drowned at New Boston" that I've reproduced above.

I immediately contacted Dennis who asked a good question — why was his great-great-grandfather fishing at 10:00 PM? Our best guess was that he was night-fishing with a lantern to catch eels or hornpout. I could find little about his companion Fred West except that the two men worked together on the road crew in Weare.

Editor's note: I changed the name of the pond in which the men were fishing from the offensive nickname in the article to the name "Still Pond" that appears on maps. -- Dan R.