Van Ruymbeke on French Migrations to America, 1 May

On 1 May, the French Cultural Center in Boston will host a talk by Dr. Bertrand Van Ruymbeke, Professor of American History at the Université de Paris, on “French Migrations to America Before 1800.”

The description of this lecture says:

French and Francophone migrations to America before 1800 were very diverse. First the Huguenots arrived in the 1680s. They were Calvinist refugees. They settled mostly in New England, New York, Virginia, and South Carolina. Arriving in the colonies in a very auspicious time they quickly and thoroughly integrated.

Seventy years later, in the mid-1750s, the Acadians were deported from Nova Scotia to all the British seaboard colonies. Poor and Catholic, these refugees were unwelcomed and went through a very difficult time before either returning to Nova Scotia or going to Louisiana after the Seven Years War in 1763.

In the 1790s three types of French migrants arrived in the United States: the refugees from Saint-Domingue; the émigrés, often part of the nobility, from Revolutionary France; and a handful of Catholic priests also from France. Settling in American port cities (Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Charleston), these Catholic émigrés and refugees for the most part did not remain in the United States.

Prof. Van Ruymbeke’s books include From New Babylon to Eden: The Huguenots and Their Migration to Colonial South Carolina and L’Amérique avant les États-Unis: Une histoire de l’Amérique anglaise, 1497-1776, which won the Prix France-Amériques in 2013.

The French Cultural Center is at 53 Marlborough Street in Boston. This event is scheduled to run from 6:30 to 8:30 P.M., including a question period and reception afterward. It is free to members of the center and $5 for others. Register for the event here.

[The picture above shows Father Francis Matignon (1753-1818), who arrived in Boston in 1792 and stayed for the rest of his life.]

Mary Lobb: divorced Catholic church lady

Being a widow with young children didn’t make Mary Lobb unusual in eighteenth-century Boston. Even living apart from her second husband probably wasn’t that odd, especially after the disruption of the war. What makes Mary Lobb notable is that she became a stalwart Catholic.

It’s quite possible that Mary Lobb had long thought of herself as a Catholic. The 1944 History of the Archdiocese of Boston says Mary Lobb was “Born in 1734, the daughter probably of Patrick Connell, mariner and sea-captain,” but it’s also possible she came from Ireland. Though she was married and saw her children baptized in Boston’s Anglican churches, those might simply have been her best choice before the 1780s. Up until the Revolution, after all, Boston was a site of violent annual anti-Catholic parades.

In November 1788 a priest named Abbé Claude F. B. de la Poterie, who had arrived in Boston as chaplain to the French fleet, celebrated the Roman mass in what had been the Huguenot Church on School Street. He was soon joined by another priest named Louis Rousselet. This was the beginning of a formal Catholic presence in the town. It wasn’t a smooth start—both men had scandals in their past, and the new bishop for the U.S. of A., headquartered in Baltimore, dismissed each after a short time.

The Rev. John Thayer took up duties as Boston’s priest in June 1790. He was a native of the town, born in 1755 and raised Protestant. In 1781 he had traveled to France to learn the language, then did more study in Europe. In May 1783 Thayer was in Rome, where he chose to convert to Catholicism, as he described in a memoir published five years later.

Samuel Breck, who had met Thayer in Europe during a brief period of being a Catholic himself, described the reopening of the church:

We fitted up a dilapidated and deserted meeting-house in School-street that was built in 1716 by some French Huguenots, and it was now converted into a popish church, principally for the use of French Romanists. A subscription put the sacristy or vestry-room in order, erected a pulpit, and purchased a few benches. A little additional furniture and plate was borrowed.

Thomas H. O’Connor’s Boston Catholics says:

One of the first and most active members of Father Thayer’s little congregation was Mrs. Mary Lobb (née Mary Connell), widow of a sea captain…

Thayer was a bit of a loose cannon; in 1790 the bishop in Baltimore wrote that he had “proved turbulent, ambitious, interested,” and combined “much ignorance with consummate assurance.” The bishop sent him to do missionary work in Kentucky. Thayer then had the better idea of starting a Catholic school for American girls, and went to Europe to raise funds. He died in Limerick in 1815.

The Rev. Dr. Francis Matignon (1753-1818) arrived in 1792, first serving as an assistant to Thayer and then taking over. He had been driven out of France by the Revolution. Abbé Jean-Louis Lefèbvre de Cheverus (1768-1836), Matignon’s former student, arrived in October 1796 to assist him. And their landlady was Mary Lobb.

That 1944 history of the archdiocese says, “Father Matignon lived at the house of Mrs. Mary Lobb, in Leverett’s or Quaker Lane (now Congress Street), in what was a small Catholic section.” Lobb donated money to help build the new Church of the Holy Cross, which stood from 1803 to about 1862 (shown above late in its existence). As late as 1810, Mary Lobb was a subscriber to a book by John Milner answering an anti-Catholic tract.

TOMORROW: Mary Lobb and her family get involved in a landmark lawsuit.