wealth and poverty, may have prevented some interaction.
gather for card parties and kitchen dances. A mixed assemblage of young and older people,of relatively rich and relatively poor, of good reputation and bad,went to the frequent dances at the
Bordeaux Dance Hall.
Reynoldston remained a place in which work was primary and recreation was secondary.
Beatrice Reynolds Beaman
effect …I think we got along like a family a lot. And I think most of your people(Bordeaux’s /Campbell’s) can tell you the older ones could . I can’t remember there ever being any hard feelings between or any resentment toward us. We were all taught we were the same people and no better than anybody else. That was drilled into us. Your no better than anyone else…don’t try to put on airs and make out that you are, because your not….you are the way you behave and if you don’t act like a Christian why your not as good as those others who do.”Beatrice
John LeClair
Eleon Bordeaux & Ann Desparois
Mr. Bordeaux: Oh , John LeClair.
Mrs. Desparois: LeClair.
Mr. Bordeaux: His wife and him had a cart….. Sometimes he would come alone and sometimes he would come with her. (the cart) was home made, like a rocking chair with wheels on it.
Mr. Langlois: How did people react to him? Did they help him?
Mr. Bordeaux: Oh Yeah everybody did/
Mrs. Desparois: Everybody did, they were good people… Finally he went to the county house.
Mr. Bordeaux: He had clothes that come from other people…Well they had no way to make a
living. He had St. Vitus there in the woods and with an axe sometimes in the air he would come down and he would split the god dammed rock in two. He was likely to go the other way sometimes, he was jerking so much.
Eleon Bordeaux & Ann Desparois oral history interviews 1969 Tape 2 p.3-4
Mrs. Delia Moquin
Mrs. Moquin: (laughter) ” Well he used to tell stories about the “Golden Slippers” I remember that. His father had books. It was called 1001 short stories, a thick book…night telling and reading the stories…..A lot of comfort telling those stories. His father learned them in that book and he learned them. ” (Philip Moquin) “No, all those stories from his mind. I couldn’t tell you how many he new…..Oh yes, he was intense, my goodness …. Frechette would lock him in that room and all night tell stories. (laughter) Oh they loved those stories. “
Mr. McGowan: ll in French?
Mrs. Moquin: “Yah, because people around home would gather at night to hear stories. They would sit on the floor right by and look at him. I would get so tired of it. I heard them and heard them and
heard them again.” (laughter)
Mr. McGowan: Would he sing?
Mrs. Moquin: “Yes he could sing old French songs I can’t remember. I was so tired of French, I did not learn much French.”
Mrs Delia Moquin oral history interviews1971 Tape 1 p.19
One response to “Social Life”
[…] of these tough and independent woodsmen is central to the history of Reynoldston itself. (see Social History) What makes Reynoldston “special” today is the amount of documentation available on this […]