The Legacy of Saint Croix Island: Acadia, New France and French North America

The settlement on St. Croix Island marked the start of a continuous French presence in North America. It is the first chapter in the history of the Acadian people, part of the history of Canada, France and the United States, and a turning point for the region's First Peoples, whose continuous contact with Europeans began there.

Port Royal

What the colonists learned on St. Croix Island led to a far more successful settlement at Port Royal, in the Annapolis Valley. There they were sheltered from the weather and could farm, fish, hunt and cut firewood without crossing icy water.

• 1607: the first colonists had to leave when De Mons lost his fur-trading monopoly.
• 1610: the Sieur de Poutrincourt returned to set up a fur-trading post and farming community.
• 1613: an English raid from Jamestown destroyed the settlement — but a handful of colonists stayed on in Acadia.
• 1621: they were still there when the British Crown first claimed the region.

The Acadians

Acadia's history is one of conflict. Rival factions fought over the colony and its rich fur trade with the First Peoples, and New England settlers, who saw the French colony as a threat, raided it repeatedly. Control passed back and forth between Britain and France.

The Acadians thrived anyway. They built a prosperous farming community in the Annapolis Valley, drawing on the sea and the forests too, and used a distinctive system of dikes to reclaim rich soil from the tides of the Annapolis Basin and the Bay of Fundy. By the 1750s their villages lined the Bay of Fundy and New Brunswick's north shore, with settlers on Prince Edward Island and Cape Breton as well.

The deportation — Le Grand Dérangement

In 1755 the British, who had held Acadia since 1713, decided to remove every French inhabitant to their colonies to the south, because the Acadians would not swear an unqualified oath of allegiance to Britain.

• Hundreds of families were packed onto overcrowded ships.
• Many went to New England; some later reached Louisiana, still French.
• Others escaped to Prince Edward Island, Quebec or France.
• The deportations went on through the Seven Years' War (the French and Indian War). Between 1755 and 1763, about 10,000 people across Atlantic Canada lost their homes.

Historians still argue over it, weighing Britain's real security concerns against the Acadians' suffering.

New France

St. Croix and Port Royal were steps toward the colony of New France.

• 1608: Champlain founded a permanent settlement at Quebec. Settlers gradually took up the St. Lawrence Valley; many farmed, while the coureurs des bois and voyageurs traded for furs and paddled thousands of miles across the continent.
• Explorers Louis Jolliet, Jacques Marquette and La Salle were the first Europeans to see the Great Lakes and travel down the Mississippi.
• 1642: a fur-trading and mission post at Montreal; by 1701, posts at Detroit and Michilimackinac.
• At its height New France reached from the St. Lawrence to the Rocky Mountains, and south to Louisiana and the Mississippi.
• 1763: under the Treaty of Paris, France ceded New France to the British.

French North America today

More than 16 million people of French-speaking origin live in Canada and the United States.

• In Canada, Quebec is mostly French-speaking, and there are French-speaking communities in New Brunswick, Ontario and most other provinces.
• In the United States, they are concentrated in Louisiana, Maine and the rest of New England.

Sources

Based on "The Legacy of Saint Croix Island," Saint Croix Island International Historic Site, National Park Service; a work of the United States government in the public domain.