Week 8, Migration: Georgie and the Wagon Train, As Told by Phil

It's Week 8 of 2025's 52 Ancestor Challenge. This is a little story my grandfather wrote down about his grandmother coming from Canada to Maine via wagon train. Many French-Canadians were migrant workers, journeying to the United States to work in factories during part of the year.

Georgiana Laviolette told me (Philip LaViolet, her grandson) how her family (Duchaine) came to Westbrook when she was less than a year old.  They came by wagon train through the “Old Canada Road.”  In 1860, her family spoke and wrote French and English.

To me, the wagon train could only mean going West (the Oregon Trail) or a westward wagon train that we see in movies or read about.  I could not visualize how she came by wagon train.  I thought it was a lot of old folks’ tales.

Only 60 years later while doing family research in genealogy I found out that the “Canada Road” did exist, and in fact today, historians are retracking it and will make in an historical road.  Grandmother Georgie and her father Louis David Duchaine/Duchesne and her mother Sophie Bellay came from Chicoutimi Quebec in upper Canada and Travelled about a week to get to Augusta, and then to Portland, and finally to Saccarappa (now known as Westbrook).

Many things she told me about Westbrook when she was a little girl were all true…the Indian tribe living on North Street, the 2 large gullies between Cole Street, North Street, and King Street where brooks full of water leading down to the Presumpscot River until the Great Land Slide of 1868 dried them up.  There was a foot bridge across to where the church now stands.

                                                                        ~Philip LaViolet

[written by Philip LaViolet in the early 2000s]