During the late 19th and early 20th centuries Holyoke saw an influx of Franco-Americans (, "the French-American Holyokians"), predominantly French-Canadians, who immigrated to Massachusetts to work in the city's growing textile and paper mills. By 1900, 1 in 3 people in Holyoke were of French-Canadian descent, and a 1913 survey of French Americans in the United States found Holyoke, along with other Massachusetts cities, to have a larger community of French or French-Canadian born residents than those of New Orleans or Chicago at that time. Initially faced with discrimination for the use of their labor by mill owners to undermine unionization, as well as for their creation of separate French institutions as part of the La Survivance movement, this demographic quickly gained representation in the city's development and civic institutions. Holyoke was at one time a cultural hub for French-Canadian Americans; the Saint-Jean-Baptiste Society of America was first organized in the city in 1899, along with a number of other institutions, including theater and drama societies from which famed vaudevillian Eva Tanguay was first discovered, and regular publications, with its largest French weekly newspaper, La Justice, published from 1904 to 1964. The city was also home to author Jacques Ducharme, whose 1943 book The Shadows of the Trees, published by Harper, was one of the first non-fiction English accounts of New England's French and French-Canadian diaspora.

A changing industrial economy, Americanization, and emigration to the suburbs led to demographic decline, and by 1990 this population had dropped to about 16% of the population, and as of the 2010 US Census this demographic represented less than 10% of residents. In contrast, the demographic's suburbanization is reflected in 2010 Census figures as well, as Hampden County respondents who identified as French (12.7%) or French Canadian (5.5%) represented 18.2% of the population, the county's largest group by ancestry were the two taken as a whole. In 2015, the American Community Survey estimated less than 1 percent of all residents of Holyoke spoke some form of French or French Creole.

History

+ Historical Franco-American Population of Holyoke Year Residents Percent Total Pop. (%) 1865 ≈250 ≈5% 1900 ≈13,000 ≈28.4% 1913 14,279 22.9% 1936 12,900 22.6% 2010 3,657 9.2%

Quebec émigrés and early settlement The first French to settle on the shores of the Connecticut River in Ireland Parish reportedly arrived in the early 1850s, and were only identified as the "Gallaudet brothers", whose year of settlement remains unknown, and one Jean-Baptiste Boulet who arrived in 1854. Boulet would serve Mass at St. Jerome's Church from 1856 until 1859 when he went west to Oregon, to join the priesthood as a missionary.

With the rapid industrialization of the area around the Holyoke Dam, many new families arrived in search of work; among them were the Stebbins, Taces, Provosts, Viens, Francœurs, Hamels, and Proulx. Holyoke's French history largely began with one Nicholas Proulx (, anglicized as "Pru", "Prue", or "Prew"), who originally arrived with his family in Mittineague in 1852, briefly returning to Quebec before arriving in Holyoke in 1858. By this time the Lyman Mills spooling factory which had been funded by the city's original backers, the Boston Associates, had fallen into receivership with the Panic of 1857 and acquired new owners who sought to fill a labor shortage when business improved in 1858. By 1859 Proulx had won the confidence of chief agent of the mill, Jones S. Davis, who contracted a four-horse covered wagon to be built to bring laborers back from villages in Quebec such as Proulx's native Saint-Ours. For this work Davis would provide transportation costs and $4–5 for each worker. Accompanied by his sons on several subsequent trips, Proulx's first was sometime during the autumn of 1859, and lasted a week, after which he was arrived in Holyoke with 45 young women and 6 or 7 young men. While resting, he and the workers would sleep in Vermont fields by night, at one point being surrounded by villagers while staying in an unknown farmer's barn; after explaining their situation and paying the owner, they were allowed to remain for the night. Over the next 5 years Proulx would bring an estimated 500 Quebecois workers to Holyoke, until industrial demand from the Civil War led to the construction of rail directly from Montreal by 1868. Many subsequent French immigrants would arrive in the States with their first stop at the H. H. Richardson train station, built in 1884.

Mass migration and exclusion

With the continued arrival of French Canadians during the Civil War, many chose not to pursue naturalization to prevent enlistment, though stories existed of both French taking advantage of the quota system, and being taken advantage of by Union recruiters. A Springfield Republican article for January 28, 1864, reported an "order [was] issued for the arrest of the Frenchmen who could 'parley-vouz'[sic] in English as well as anybody before they enlisted on Holyoke's quota, but grew very Frenchy after they were sent to camp, and were discharged because they couldn't understand what the officers said". Conversely in cases where Québécois could genuinely not understand English, at times émigrés would sign agreements in Canada, only to arrive in Holyoke to find an officer waiting for them, having unknowingly signed enlistment papers.

A mass exodus of Quebec workers began after the Civil War with most in higher density textile manufacturing towns, such as Holyoke, as well as Gardner, Lowell, and Fall River. As the French-Canadians arrived in Holyoke in the 1880s, unlike many industrial cities with one or two large employers or institutions, their arrival coincided with the construction of dozens of mills in multiple industries. In less than 30 years the city population tripled in size to 35,000 residents, and with this social structures saw dramatic change. Indeed the influx of Canadian French in Holyoke was attributed to the city having an average of 12 residents per household in 1885, twice the Massachusetts average. During this period, much of The Flats (Wards 1 and 2) became known as "Frenchville." "Let's go on a beautiful summer's evening in one of the great manufacturing centers of the states, in Holyoke, for example ... Noisy bursts of laughter from all over the place warn you that this people is not gnawed by melancholy on the alien earth, in the houses we hear the gay chorus of the songs of Canada, and the windows are lined with flowers above which appear the good and frank figures of Canadian women who look and babble."—Édouard Hamon, in Les Canadiens-Français de la Nouvelle-Angleterre (1891) "French Americans have been severely criticised [sic] for years past because of their insistence that knowledge of the French language be a paramount consideration with them in the United States. There is little justice in that criticism. Any citizen who knows two languages is better equipped to meet the needs of life than a citizen who only knows one."—Anonymous letter to the editor in The Bulletin (Norwich), 1925 The influx of Québécois also led to considerable tensions between them and an Irish demographic that had born the brunt of Anti-Irish sentiment and had only seen gradual improvements in labor conditions through early union organizing, as the Canadians worked longer hours for lower wages and fractured the labor community with their language barrier. In his history of Holyoke's Franco-American immigrants, The Shadows of the Trees, Jacques Ducharme described that "many [French] were to feel the caillou celtique, or 'Kelly Biscuit,' for in the early days the Irish were not averse to violence by way of showing their distaste for the newcomers." The same could be said the English population as well, with one 1888 incident in the New York Herald describing a baseball game between Holyoke French and "American" boys ending with one of the latter running home only to return with a rifle, resulting in a French boy being struck with a non-fatal shot to the neck. In her 1957 treatise American Cities in the Growth of the Nation, Constance Green described this feud as influenced by "[Holyoke's Protestant] Americans nourish[ing] faint and vain hopes that differences between the French-speaking Catholics and the English-speaking Irish would cancel out each other's influence. The prolonged perpetuation of this feud stemmed partly from Yankee guilt." Tensions in the mills shaped contests among youth that lasted until the beginning of the 20th century, dissipating as groups integrated and gradually gained newfound acceptance. The promise of jobs higher paying than those of Quebec farms, coupled with demand for cheap labor, led the city's French to surpass the population characterizing Holyoke's traditional name of "Ireland Parish" in three decades. In 1870 their population was 40% smaller than the Irish demographic; by 1880 their total exceeded this demographic by 16%. Many remained excluded from labor unions and in turn created a system of nepotism in area mills, until new waves of lower-wage immigrants began to compete with them in the mid-20th century. Although in the French-Canadian community would become part of the labor community in the decades after its arrival, indeed eventually sharing leadership posts of the Irish-founded Eagle Lodge of Paper Makers, at one time it wasn't uncommon for three generations of a French Holyoke family to work in the same mill at the same station.

In civic exchanges the culturally dispossessed French adopted the La Survivance practice of establishing separate institutions preserving their language and culture. This led to the development of many such institutions in Holyoke's history, however this also led to backlash from both the city and Commonwealth government in the 19th century. The separation of French from English-speaking Irish parishes stood since their arrival, as few would attend the mass at St. Jerome's parish. By 1869 Irish Catholics, finding several French girls receiving tutorage in English at a Protestant congregation, ultimately pushed for the creation of the French parishes, namely the Church of the Precious Blood (L'Eglise du Précieux-Sang). In 1880 the first French school opened in Holyoke, under the auspices of the Precious Blood Church parish, but not before receiving complaints from residents that the school could not operate, due to a law mandating schools teach in English. Father Dufresne, who led the new school, ultimately convinced the city's industrialist backers to not allow it to close, stating it did teach both English and French, and that its closure would lead to an exodus of workers. This desire to open separate institutions was also met with derision by the Massachusetts Bureau of Labor Statistics in 1881, when bureau chief Carroll D. Wright published the following passage in his annual report- "With some exceptions the Canadian French are the Chinese of the Eastern States. They care nothing for our institutions, civil, political, or educational...They are a horde of industrial invaders, not a stream of stable settlers. Voting with all that it implies, they care nothing about. Rarely does one of them become naturalized. They will not send their children to school if they can help it, but endeavor to crowd them into the mills at the earliest possible age...These people have one good trait. They are indefatigable workers, and docile... they must have some amusements; and so far as the males are concerned, drinking and smoking and lounging constitute the sum of these. Now it is not strange that so sordid and low a people should awaken corresponding feelings in the managers..."