The King’s English ruled in the Upper Valley for a century until industrialization began to lure hundreds of people speaking French, Italian, Polish, Russian, Greek, Yiddish and Finnish to migrate into the region to build workforces in textiles, machine tools, woodworking, shoemaking, and other basic manufacturing activities.
Following the Civil War, the steady infusion of new languages would lead to decades of tension, discrimination and civic unrest. The ability to speak English would become the primary route to social acceptance and economic advancement for the legions of immigrants arriving by train and wagon from Quebec, southern New England, and overseas. The languages they were born with were the most important elements in forming structures that supported immigrants trying to adapt to life in environments that were often, for many, hostile, exploitative and menacing.
Surely the most important institutions nurturing and comforting immigrants were the faith communities that sprang up in mill town after mill town. Roman Catholic, Italian, Greek and Russian Orthodox, Jewish and Lutheran congregations answered spiritual needs, but they also were enormously important in providing social contact and enjoyment to their flocks.
The waves of immigrants would subside by the time of World War I, and the assimilation process would move steadily forward, paced by growing mastery of the English language. But language and the cultural traditions that surround it didn’t fade overnight. As late as the 1950s, Mass in Lebanon’s Sacred Heart Roman Catholic Church was still sung in Latin, with the priest offering his homily first in French and then in English.
St. Joseph’s Catholic Church in Claremont was founded as the “Polish” church and more than a century later, it is revered throughout the city for its festivals and community dinners. The church long ago spun off the Polish-American Club, a lively social organization that continues today, inviting membership to folks of Polish and non-Polish extraction alike.
Finnish immigrants arrived in Newport in the late 19th century, bringing with them the Lutheran faith. They organized their community around their native language and set up two “Finnish halls,” which were the centers of spiritual and social interaction. Later, they became divided over politics, with one being oriented toward socialism and the other centrist.
Meanwhile, Greek immigrants came to work in the town’s mills, and they were resolute about preserving their language and cultural traditions, to the point of hiring teachers to make sure young people were grounded in the native Greek tongue. The Greeks hired Finnish carpenters to build their place of worship. Dr. Bob Scott, a descendant of Newport Greek families, proudly asserts that though his lingual community is now “100% assimilated” the native language still can be heard in the town, and that the Greek congregation today is actually attracting worshipers, in contrast to most other Christian denominations in New England, now considered the most unchurched region of the United States.
Construction of church buildings was the primary goal as the various new faith communities of the Upper Valley took root. Initially, structures were of wood, and later masonry became the norm for most congregations. During this period, easily the most interesting religious architectural achievement in the Upper Valley was the Holy Resurrection Orthodox Church on Sullivan Street in Claremont, built in 1941 by a substantial Russian community that sprang up 1907-10. Famed Russian novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, when he was living across the Connecticut River in Cavendish, Vt., in the early 1980s, was a frequent worshiper at the Claremont church, defined by its distinctive onion-shaped steeples.
Erecting church buildings was the first priority, but then came schools.
“That’s the other side of the story,” said Lisa MacFarlane, professor of English and American Studies at the University of New Hampshire. “All over America it was the same, a common phenomenon. Every immigrant culture would have representatives that would go out and draw in more people.
“Faith communities would form, and very soon they would pursue the ideal of education, including mastery of the English language. People would come together and build on the American ideal of community. And often it would be the younger people who would bring the elders along,“ MacFarlane said. She also adds that family history becomes more important as people age, with language always the centerpiece of lived experience.
People who attended Lebanon’s Sacred Heart elementary school two generations or more ago often relate how the nuns who managed and taught in the school forbade pupils from speaking anything but English from the moment they stepped in the door. That was when there was a large French-Canadian enclave on the north side of the town, and French was readily spoken in grocery stores and businesses. Felix Lague, proprietor of Lague’s meat market on Court Street, was competently bilingual, but if he got excited about something he frequently would shift into French laden with colorful expletives.
As was true in many New England mill towns, there often were divisions between Irish people and those in other ethnic groups. The Irish were native to the English language, and many in other language categories would think they were looked down upon because of their accents and lack of fluency.
But Ann Fecteau LaFlam, who grew up in Claremont in the 1950s, said in her youth the various language communities had gotten past the divisions that were rife in the early 1900s. She attended St. Mary’s elementary school and recalls French still being spoken all around her outside of the classroom.
“By my time the ethnic groups in Claremont supported each other. I remember when St. Joseph’s got a new Polish-speaking priest, we St. Mary’s people were thrilled. But my father used to say if you tried to speak two languages, you probably wouldn’t speak either one very well,” LaFlam, who taught St. Mary’s grade schoolers later in life, muses.
Another Claremont native, Nancy Shulins, recalls Yiddish being spoken in her household by grandparents in the 1960s, and common words from the language used by all relatives all the time. She’s now retired after a long career as a national correspondent for the Associated Press. Her family was part of a then-extensive Jewish community in the city complete with its own synagogue, Temple Meyer-David, which once also served Jewish worshipers up and down the Valley from Hanover to Walpole, N.H.
Here in 2026 the Upper Valley is again in the midst of a major influx of people whose native language often isn’t English. This time, it’s people drawn here, likely as not, by job opportunities at the ever-growing Dartmouth Health. The medical colossus has a voracious need for employees ranging from physicians and research scientists to technology specialists to dietary service workers to housekeepers.
Dartmouth Health and its member Alice Peck Day Memorial Hospital in Lebanon are now conducting English language teaching programs to get new hires fluent enough to succeed in the hospitals’ workforce.
Other elements of the region’s economy are welcoming potential employees lacking English-language skills, and some enterprises are being purchased by non-English speakers, also. Restaurants, maintenance companies, contractors and warehouse operations are ready to hire amid the Valley’s tight labor market. But the continual national tension over documentation of foreign nationals and mass deportations casts lingering uncertainty over hiring and retention of workers.
Evidence of the in-migration by people with limited or no English proficiency can be heard all over the region. Go to one of the larger dairy farms and it’ll be Spanish, mixed with lively Latin pop music rolling out of a boom box. Hindi can be heard at many of the Valley’s convenience stores, as Indian and Pakistani entrepreneurs continue to buy locations. The array of food establishments with foreign linguistic ties keeps growing; Korean, Mandarin, Spanish, Portuguese, Vietnamese, Laotian, Thai, Turkish, the list goes on. Buy a new clothes dryer and the delivery guys may well be bantering in a Caribbean-accented Spanish.
But one of the best windows into the dynamics of in-migration in the Valley right now is in the statistics for Lebanon’s school language education programs. Some 250 students in the Lebanon school system come from multi-lingual backgrounds, with at least a third of them being served by an English Language Learner (ELL) program. ELL teaches students in speaking, listening, reading and writing, leading to language proficiency comparable to their peers. Current ELL students include speakers of Punjabi, Cambodian, Afrikaans, Arabic, Hindi, Gujariti, Portuguese, Spanish, Filipino and Vietnamese.
Then there is the English as a Second Language (ESL) program run by Lebanon’s Adult Education section. It offers classes for most of the same language groups as the ELL program, plus Mandarin, Korean, Indonesian, Japanese, Pashto, Farsi, Russian, Ukrainian, Polish and Haitian. Spanish is the most common language among ESL students, followed by Mandarin.
No discussion of the Upper Valley’s ever-changing language patterns can be complete without mention of how the region’s distinctive English-language dialects have been disappearing and making common English more and more what linguistic scholars term “General American.” The influence of television, travel and household mobility are wearing away what might be called “Connecticut Valley Yankee.”
Even within the towns of the Valley there were once variations in dialects between, say, Strafford and Thetford, Cornish and Plainfield, Sharon and Royalton, or Lyme and Piermont. Sharply attuned ears might tell the difference, but that’s rare today.
A lot of Upper Valley people still fiddle with letters at the end of words, like “My truck needs a new motah” or “I love vaniller ice cream.” One of the best gauges of the division between what was and what is now comes with the word “cow.” Merriam-Webster’s dictionary says it is pronounced “’kau” to rhyme with plow. True Valley Yankee would be apt to come out as “kah’ou.”
Steve Taylor of Meriden occasionally contributes to the Valley News. He admits he can read some French but is lost when it’s spoken faster than 2 mph.