From Rural Roman Catholic to Urbane Freemason and Transcendentalist? Louis A. Surette in Nineteenth-Century Nova Scotia and Massachusetts
- Colby Gaudet
- Oct 19
- 19 min read
Updated: Nov 17
In a previous post, “Ecclesiastical Kinship at Pointe-de-l’Église,” I discussed the ‘presbyterial household’ of the Abbé Jean-Mandé Sigogne. Among the children who lived (for a time) as part of this ecclesiastical kin-unit were three Surette brothers from Argyle Township, near Yarmouth. These boys were sons of Athanase Surette and Louise d’Entremont, Acadian parishioners at Sainte-Anne-du-Ruisseau.[1] Louise and Athanase produced a prodigious family, having twelve children between 1801 and 1825, five of whom were congenitally deaf. The priest Sigogne assisted the family in raising, by turns, two of the deaf Surette sons, Jean François (b. 1802) and Luc (b. 1812). Another son, Louis (b. 1818), was also raised by Sigogne.[2] Louis Athanase Surette (named after both his mother and father) was not deaf and became Sigogne’s star pupil in the early 1830s. After studying Latin, science, and theology with his clerical tutor, Louis worked for a time as a sailor and teacher before immigrating to the United States in 1841, where he became a merchant.[3] He was soon reaping the successes of his social and commercial ventures. He married an American woman, Frances Jane Shattuck, in 1849 and started a family in Concord, Massachusetts.[4] Testifying to his personal acuity, Louis transformed himself into a leading citizen of the iconic New England town, becoming a master-level Freemason and the curator and president of the Concord Lyceum for several years in the 1860s. Meanwhile, he maintained his ties with the Acadians of his home communities in Nova Scotia.
Louis’ distinct and industrious life shifts us (the historical observer) unexpectedly far from a rural, parochial setting of Acadian Catholicism in Clare and Argyle to the urbane worlds of Freemasonry and Transcendentalism in the antebellum United States. A closer look at Louis A. Surette can illuminate the scope of his professional and intellectual accomplishments amid an otherwise well-known and well-studied ‘early America’ setting. Louis’ accomplishments certainly distinguished him from many of his fellow Acadians. His life reflected the depth of Sigogne’s early educational influence on him, especially considering the presbyterial household Louis had been a part of as a boy at Pointe-de-l’Église. His life also permits a case study of religious conversion, demonstrating that such conversions could be subtle and seldom defined by clear breakages or denunciations of prior beliefs or practices. Louis' life indicates that he benefited from a Roman Catholic education uncharacteristic of the rural context of his upbringing. Thereafter, when exposed as a young man to the cosmopolitanism of a larger urban centre, he began a personal process of cultural inquiry, networking, and acculturation, while remaining meaningfully tethered to his ancestral roots.
What first set Louis Surette apart from his Acadian peers was his scholarly acumen and the scope of his education. As there was yet no public education available in the Acadian communities of Louis’ youth, occasional, private instruction was only sometimes available from the likes of educated men such as Sigogne, or the French tutor, Pierre-Louis Bunel, who worked for Captain Pierre Doucet’s family in the 1790s.[5] Surette’s training was thus a privilege, but a privilege the boy had earned through his personal dedication and his family’s connections to the priest. A pair of visitors to Church Point at the turn of the twentieth century wrote about the local public memory of Surette and Sigogne nearly sixty years after the priest had died. “Whenever he came across a promising boy, he made every effort to give him special opportunities, sometimes establishing a child of seven in his own house and bringing him up to manhood” – a reference to Surette.[6] In 1989, the Acadian priest and historian, Clarence d’Entremont, published a historical sketch of Louis’ life in a Yarmouth newspaper. He wrote that by age seven, Surette had “proved to be a very intelligent boy, so much so that Father Sigogne took him to Church Point to give him a superior education.” For twelve years (from 1825 to 1837), Louis remained with the priest, who “devot[ed] all his spare hours” to the boy. In later life, Surette himself recounted: “Every night, between 12 and 2, as regular as the clock,” Sigogne “was up preparing my lessons for the next day. I slept with him, and at 5 a.m. I would have ‘Louis, il est temps de se lever.’… I studied till 9 at night, and probably received the best education ever acquired by an Acadian youth.” Sigogne taught Louis to translate classical authors such as the historian Quintus Curtius who wrote about the life of Alexander the Great. Sequestered in the silence of the priest’s small library, the studious pair “sat by the fire on which a piece of pitch pine was occasionally thrown, so as to furnish us with light enough to enable us to read. We had not even candles in those days.” After having been gone from Nova Scotia for several decades, Louis later reflected on his clerical educator, saying, “The Abbé wanted to make me a priest, but I left him and went to the United States.”[7]
The Acadians of Clare later recalled that while Sigogne had educated Surette and fostered the young man’s ambitions, the priest was also weary of the lure of the outside world on Louis’ aspirations. “You will die a Protestant,” Sigogne used to say cautiously to Surette in light of his desire to live in America. “I am doing the best I can for you, but you will die a Protestant.”[8] As Painter and Holman’s account attests, memory of Louis’ exemplary life had subsequently lingered in the Acadian communities of Clare and Argyle. While Surette was a leading ‘native son’ for the Acadians (at the time, a deeply Roman Catholic people), his inculturation into urban American society had also necessarily brought about his gradual secularization and ‘protestantization’. In other words, Louis’ new life in 1840s industrial America would set him on a path leading away from the rural, parochial way of life of his Catholic forebears.[9] Louis always maintained, however, an intellectual interest in his Acadian ancestors.
By mid-century, many Acadian networks that stretched beyond southwestern Nova Scotia and that connected with the Boston area involved Surette as an interlocutor. His American social and commercial influences were lucrative for the Acadians back home who benefitted from his entrepreneurial connections. For instance, Surette transported letters between Cécile Murat at Church Point and her son, Étienne (alias Stephen), in Boston. In fact, the flour Stephen sent to his parents in 1849 during a period of scarcity (as noted in a previous post) was likely supplied from Surette’s store.[10] Earlier in 1849, Surette had sold more flour, along with molasses, tea, coffee, vinegar, and soap to Bénoni Doucet of Clare. Surette and his business partner, Henry Livingstone Shattuck (who was Surette’s brother-in-law), were “Wholesale Dealers in Flour, West India Goods, Groceries, &c., &c,” located at 12 City Wharf, Boston.[11] Surette thus provided the necessary links for the Acadians back home to trade in the goods he imported to Boston. He also made loans to his Acadian clients. When Théodore Bonnenfant of Clare died intestate in a shipwreck in 1861, he owed Surette $73 that had been lent the previous year, plus $12 of interest. Surette recuperated what was owed from Bonnenfant's estate.[12]
We do have some sense of Louis’ life from his own perspective. While writing an autobiographical sketch in 1859, he reflected on the value of his childhood education. Having been “placed in the charge of the Rev. Abbé Jean Mandé Sigogne,” Louis wrote that he had thus enjoyed “advantages of education not usually attainable by the Acadian youth.” Surette (writing in the third person) then illustrated the progress of his life in New England. He “first came to Boston, in a small coasting vessel, and upon his return to Nova Scotia he obtained the consent of his parents to leave the parental roof and seek his fortune in the commercial metropolis of New England. He at once secured a situation as clerk with a firm – Messrs. Ladd & Hall.” In 1846, he “began business on his own account, chiefly with the Acadians and the French settlements in Nova Scotia.”[13] According to Clarence d’Entremont, Surette’s mercantile ventures flourished in the late 1850s under the Treaty of Reciprocity between the United States and British North America.[14]
Surette’s business with Acadians from his ancestral region was documented and commented upon by the French sociologist François Rameau de Saint-Père who visited Boston in July 1860. Rameau was interested in the history of France’s former North American colonies, and had recently written about the Acadians and their dispersion in his book La France aux colonies (1859). Rameau arrived in Boston by way of Quebec, where he had been on a tour of the Eastern Townships. He wrote that at Boston “j’y fus cordialement accuelli par un jeune négociant actif et intelligent qui appartenait lui-même à la malheureuse race Acadienne, l’objet de mes recherches.” Rameau observed that Louis Surette, “le neuvième d’une famille de douze enfants, est lui même l’auteur de sa fortune. Il a commencé par être pêcheur, puis matelot et caboteur puis garçon de magasin à Boston. Aujourd’huy il est à la tête d’une importante maison de commerce et il a 4 ou 5 navires qui naviguent jusque dans la Méditerranée.” At Surette’s warehouse on the Boston waterfront Rameau encountered “un grand nombre d’Acadiens capitaines de barques.” Among these Acadians were several men from Clare: “deux Commeaux, et un LeBlanc. Les deux Commeaux sont de grands hommes admirablement taillés, et l’un d’eux a l’air très intelligent.” Rameau also met a Deveau, a Maillet, and two Saulniers among Surette’s Acadian acquaintances.[15]
Attention to Rameau’s time in Boston also reveals Surette’s social connections to the intellectual elite of Concord, including none other than the father of Transcendentalist thought, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose famous essay, Nature, was published in 1836. Rameau committed interesting details to his journal. “Le soir je vais chez Mr Surette à Concorde. Cet excellent monsieur fait pour moi des Frais me mener promener.” Surette took Rameau to see key historical sites in the area tied to the outbreak of the American Revolution: “Je vais voir le monument où a eu lieu la première rencontre des troupes Américaines et Anglaises, et le premier soldat Anglais tué et enterré [Old North Bridge].” After strolling about the town, Surette appealed to Rameau’s naturalist interests by introducing him to Emerson (with whom Surette was clearly acquainted): “Visite à Mr Emerson et à un Mr qui cultive le vigne” [the latter, unidentified man was likely Ephraim Bull, creator of the Concord grape].
Louis' wife, Frances, was a "bonne et simple mère de famille." She was the daughter of Colonel Daniel Shattuck, President of the Concord Bank. In a comment that suggests the Shattuck family's intellectual and moral stamina, Rameau described Frances as "toute à son intérieur" – all inward-looking, or introspective. The next day, Surette and Rameau visited Concord’s Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, one of America’s first landscaped garden cemeteries: “Promené le matin avec Mr Surette. [Le] cimetière de Concorde trop joli pour un cimetière.” Sleepy Hollow had been consecrated just five years earlier, in 1855, when Emerson himself delivered a dedicatory address. Surette had likely attended the event of the cemetery’s opening. Rameau noted that Louis had purchased a plot in the cemetery where his first two children, who had died of illness, were buried, and where Surette had plans to erect a monument commemorating Acadian history. Rameau jotted the following notes on his visit to Sleepy Hollow: “Terrain Surette, son projet d’un monument Acadien, ses deux enfants enterrés sous des rosiers.”[16] Following this sojourn in Concord, Surette escorted Rameau back to the Boston port, where the French visitor embarked for Yarmouth from whence he would tour the Acadian communities of Argyle and Clare.
Rameau sailed for Nova Scotia on July 18. Little could he know that in just a few weeks, in early August 1860, another child of Louis and Frances – three-month-old Evangeline –would take ill and die of cholera infantum, adding another premature grave beneath the rose bushes on the Surette-Shattuck plot in Sleepy Hollow.[17] The stately family plot, complete with a gate and fence, had been mapped in 1857 by Henry David Thoreau (another leading Transcendentalist), who surveyed much of Concord.
![“Ground Plan of Louis A. Surette’s Cemetery Lot made by Henry D. Thoreau Mar. 31st [18]57.” Image courtesy of Concord Free Public Library.](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/0d0423_52397376c3d349e48f3b4d5fc3ce88b0~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_147,h_185,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,blur_2,enc_avif,quality_auto/0d0423_52397376c3d349e48f3b4d5fc3ce88b0~mv2.jpg)
Surette’s connections had evidently fully incorporated him into Concord society. Louis and Frances would have eleven children in all, five of whom died young. Not long after marrying, Louis became a Freemason, being initiated into the Corinthian Lodge in Concord on 20 October 1849. He became a Master Mason in 1851 and was “Worshipful Master” of Corinthian Lodge from 1851 to 1858, and from 1863 to 1867. Louis was also a member of Boston’s Masonic Lodge, the Red Cross, and the Knights of Malta. He was inducted into the New England Historic-Genealogical Society and the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and he was chairman of the Concord school committee for three years.[18]
Once in Massachusetts, Surette climbed to a high position in the fraternal ranks of Freemasonry, and, after a decade with the Masons, he published a history of the Concord lodge, supplemented by a general history of Masonry: By-Laws of Corinthian Lodge, of Ancient, Free and Accepted Masons. While not many Acadians were known to have become Masons, Surette’s involvement with the fraternity certainly aided his social ascent and his incorporation into influential coteries. For well over a century, Freemasonry had been a popular organization among many prominent, Protestant men in New England and in Nova Scotia. Masonry, while not inherently religious, advocated through its rituals a universal belief in God as a Creator and Great Architect. Masons fostered an ethos of brotherhood and benevolence among the educated men who constituted its many interconnected lodges. During the eighteenth century, masonic organizations had spread rapidly throughout the British colonies and the new United States.[19] At first glance, Surette’s advanced position in Freemasonry may seem awkward or at odds with his Roman Catholic upbringing – many Catholic clerics preached against laymen joining the Masons, perceiving Freemasonry as a heterodox secret society antithetical to respectable Catholic morality. However, as Kenneth Loiselle has pointed out, many members of the enlightened French Catholic intelligentsia saw no such conflict between the Church’s catholicity and Masonic cosmopolitanism.[20] Surette was likely of the latter opinion. Sigogne surely wouldn’t have approved of Surette becoming a Mason, but Louis was initiated into the Corinthian Lodge several years after the priest’s death.
It was through Surette’s involvement with the Concord Lyceum (of which he was appointed Curator in September 1859) that he developed a relationship with Emerson and others of the Transcendentalist set.[21] Transcendentalism was a school of thought that had evolved out of New England's liberal Protestantism, and – as expressed by Emerson and others – it saw the divine as inherent in everyday life and in nature. Surette would have heard these ideas discussed in Concord. During the autumn and winter of 1859–60, Emerson gave a lecture at the Lyceum titled “Manners” and Henry David Thoreau spoke on the topic of “Wild Apples.” As curator, Surette would have been responsible for organizing the schedule of these lectures, including the social overtures necessary to ingratiate himself toward such intellectual figures. Surette was re-elected Curator in 1860, and in 1861, he was elected President and Curator. He continued to hold these positions until 1866. Between 1860 and 1863, Emerson gave several further lectures, including those with titles such as “Classes of Men”, “Progressive Forces”, and “The Fortune of the Republic.”[22] In October 1860, Surette invited Nathaniel Hawthorne – a key figure in the American literary scene and a resident of Concord – to speak at the Lyceum. Hawthorne, evidently a shy man, kindly declined with the following reply:
My dear Sir,
I should consider it my duty, as a good townsman, to lecture before
the inhabitants of Concord, if it were in my power to do so. But I am
quite unaccustomed to appear before the public, and feel it to be too
late to begin.
Very truly & Respectfully Yours,
Nathl Hawthorne
L.A. Surette, Esq.
Curator &c.
Concord Lyceum.[23]
Throughout Louis' presidency, Concord’s Lyceum hosted other prominent American thinkers, including Henry Ward Beecher, Theodore Parker, Orestes Brownson, and Louis Agassiz. Surette's involvement with the lyceum movement shows that he highly valued adult education. The philosophy that had propelled the lyceum system sought to make 'useful' knowledge (especially of the natural sciences) publicly available to working-class men and women. Such education was considered a civic duty for social improvement.
In addition to his involvement in the American Renaissance, Louis Surette also cultivated a recognized historical interest in all matters Acadian. “[W]ith commendable enterprise and much care,” Isaiah Wilson (an early chronicler of Digby County) wrote that Surette “collected a mass of tradition and records” relevant to Acadian settlements in Nova Scotia.[24] In 1866, Surette’s research led to the planning of a centennial celebration in rural Clare to mark the township’s founding Acadian “pioneers.” Surette’s brother-in-law, Clement Mandé Melanson, was one of the key funders and organizers of the event that took place at the old Acadian cemetery at Pointe-à-Major. The day included a procession from the church, followed by a large community picnic, speeches, a grand marshal in Bonaparte costume, "and sports of merriment ... viz., canot racing, foot facing, etc."[25] Surette's intellectual and material support partially enabled the organization of this civic celebration, among the first of its kind for the Acadians, and coming a year before Canadian Confederation.
Surette even donated some of the historical documents he had acquired to institutions. To Concord’s Antiquarian Society, he gave a passport owned by his ancestor, Jacques d’Entremont. The passport had been issued in 1748 by the French colonial government at Cape Breton, granting d’Entremont permission to travel between British mainland Acadie and the port of Louisbourg.[26] In donating such an item to the Concord society, Surette was appealing to the growing popular interest among New Englanders in Acadian history, as spurred by the commercial success of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s epic poem Evangeline, A Tale of Acadie (1847).[27]
We can’t know the nature of Louis Surette’s personal commitment to the Roman Catholic faith of his upbringing. In May 1849, when Louis was 31 years old, he and Frances Shattuck were married by the Unitarian minister, Rev. Barzillai Frost, at Concord's First Parish Meetinghouse. It appears that the couple's children were not raised as Catholics – Frances was not Catholic, and there wasn't a Catholic church in Concord until 1863. The career of one of Louis' sons, Thomas Whitney Surette (b. 1861), indicates the family followed the Shattuck religious legacy of Unitarianism at Concord's First Parish. As a young man, Thomas taught piano and was the organist there before going off to study at Harvard. He went on to become an influential American musician.[28]
From the Catholic parish registers of Sainte-Anne-du-Ruisseau, we do know that Louis Athanase Surette was baptized by Sigogne when he was four months old. In the priest’s absence from Sainte-Anne at the time of Louis' birth, the boy had been ‘ondoyer’ (given a lay blessing) by his family’s neighbour, Joseph Babin, and he had yet other neighbours, François and Marthe Pothier, as his godparents.[29] Otherwise, we know Louis would have had an acutely observant experience of Catholicism as a child growing up in the Church Point presbytery. Under the watch of Sigogne and Scholastique Bourque (an Acadian woman from Sainte-Anne who oversaw the children in the priest’s charge), Louis would have learned his catechism and prayers, and he likely served as an altar boy. He would have taken his First Communion from the hands of his clerical instructor, who had provided Louis with a privileged classical education, cultivating in him from an early age an interest in higher learning. Further to his natal French, Louis learned English and Latin – and it's possible he read Emerson's essay, Nature, as a young man.
Surette wasn't the only Acadian boy Sigogne had endeavoured to train for the priesthood. Louis Quentin Bourque, Paul Théodule Maphre, and Frédéric Armand Robichaud were also mentioned as personal students of Sigogne in the priest's records. Despite his efforts, however, Sigogne did not succeed at propelling these young men into the Catholic priesthood. Each of the Acadian protégés eventually married and started families, but Louis Surette was the one who established himself most successfully abroad. After leaving Nova Scotia, Louis’ personal drive, professional ambitions, and thirst for knowledge led him beyond the Catholicism of his youth. Louis' expansive pursuits inducted him into the fraternal rites of Freemasonry, and acquainted him with the Transcendentalist vogue of his new home in Concord. Following the path of Louis’ life, we can also directly trace Sigogne’s educational influence from the priest’s small library at Church Point to the lecture halls of Concord’s lyceum.
While Louis’ commitments to Masonry are clear, we can’t know how extensively he imbibed the Transcendentalist thinking of Emerson and company. Louis' career at the Concord Lyceum would indicate a depth of interest in the Transcendentalist philosophy. Upon his eventual death in October 1897, Surette had his body buried in the Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in the plot he purchased forty years earlier. His (and his family’s) interment in this landmark American cemetery truly solidified his transition away from the Catholic parishes of his Surette and d’Entremont ancestors. Rather than being buried back home, at the place of his birth, near his parents, siblings, grandparents, cousins, and other kin, in Nova Scotia, Surette was laid to rest in the same hallowed (yet nondenominational) ground as an entire cohort of monumental nineteenth-century Americans: Emerson, Hawthorne, Thoreau, Elizabeth Peabody, Louisa May Alcott, William Ellery Channing, and others. Interred in the eternal company of these renowned figures, Surette too celebrated and invested in the sublimity of the natural landscape that had so inspired the Transcendentalists to sense God in verdant leaves and pastoral vistas.
“In this quiet valley, as in the palm of Nature’s hand, we shall sleep
well, when we have finished our day. … I think sometimes, that the
vault of sky arching there upward, under which our busy being is
whirled, is only a Sleepy Hollow, with path of suns, instead of foot-
paths, and milky ways, for truck-roads.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, address at Sleepy Hollow Cemetery, 1855
[1] Marriage of Athanase Surette and Louise d’Entremont, 21 October 1800, Sainte-Anne-du-Ruisseau (SAR) parish register, Nova Scotia Archives (NSA), RG-1, SA1.
[2] Registre ou Catalogue des Familles des Paroisses de Sainte-Marie & de St Mandé de Clare, 1818–1823, Centre Acadien, Université Sainte-Anne (CAUSA), MG-9, Fonds Sigogne, boîte 1, dossier 1; Registre des familles de la paroisse de Ste-Anne et de St-Pierre d’Argyle, 1816–1819, NSA, reel 12,160. In 1846, Athanase Surette petitioned Nova Scotia’s colonial government to assist him in supporting his five adult deaf sons and daughters, then ranging in ages between 32 and 44. See Petition of Athanase (alias Thomas) Surette, 2 January 1846, NSA, RG-5, Series P, v. 83, no. 6.
[3] As with the example of Étienne-Rémi (alias Stephen) Melanson discussed in a previous post, Louis Surette’s 1841 immigration to the United States was part of a much larger migration of Acadians (and Maritimers in general) to New England, beginning in that decade, and accelerating in subsequent decades. See, Neil Boucher, “Acadians and Emigration: The Case of the Acadians of Southwest Nova Scotia,” trans., Madeleine Rivard Bérard, in Steeples and Smokestacks: A Collection of Essays on the Franco-American Experience in New England, ed., Claire Quintal (Worcester, MA: Assumption College Institut français, 1996), 52–68; Betsy Beattie, “The ‘Boston States’: Region, Gender, and Maritime Out-Migration, 1870–1930,” in New England and the Maritime Provinces: Connections and Comparisons, eds., Stephen Hornsby and John Reid (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2005), 252–263.
[4] Richard Fortin and Jean Pellerin, “Un notable franco-américain, Louis A. Surette (1818–1897),” Les Cahiers de la Société historique acadienne 25, no. 1 (January-March 1994): 44–47. Shortly after their marriage, Louis and Frances were living with Frances' parents and youngest sister, see 1850 United States census, Concord, Middlesex County, Massachusetts. Their first child was born in December 1850.
[5] See Pierre-Louis Bunel to “Mr Le Cap. Dousset,” 4 April 1797, CAUSA, MG-3, Fonds Famille Dousett (Doucet), boîte 4, dossier 17. Also, Report of the Special School Commissioners, Western District (1824), in Family, School, and Society in Nineteenth-Century Canada, eds. Alison Prentice and Susan Houston (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1975), 61–65; Gérald Boudreau, “«L’ignorance est une vice»: une démarche de scolarisation en Acadie,” Études d’histoire religieuse 59 (1993): 125–141; D.C. Harvey, “The Intellectual Awakening of Nova Scotia,” The Dalhousie Review 13, no. 1 (1933): 1–22.
[6] Florence Painter and Edna Holman, “The Restorer of Acadia,” Putnam’s Monthly 3, no. 2 (November 1907): 141.
[7] Quoted in Clarence-Joseph d’Entremont, “The Rise and Fall of Louis A. Surette,” The Yarmouth Vanguard (14 November 1989).
[8] Quoted in Painter and Holman, “Restorer of Acadia,” 141.
[9] As the nineteenth century progressed, and as French Canadian and Acadian immigration to New England increased, Roman Catholic parishes were created in many New England towns. Such an increasing presence of Catholic infrastructure would help later generations of Acadians living in New England maintain their ties to the Catholic Church, although conversions to Protestantism certainly occurred. On Catholicism in New England, see Patrick Lacroix, “A Church of Two Steeples: Catholicism, Labor, and Ethnicity in Industrial New England, 1869–90,” The Catholic Historical Review 102, no. 4 (Autumn 2016): 746–70; Mason Wade, “The French Parish and Survivance in Nineteenth-Century New England,” The Catholic Historical Review 36, no. 2 (July 1950): 163–189; Thomas O’Connor, Boston Catholics: A History of the Church and Its People (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998).
[10] Cécile Melanson (née Murat) to Stephen Melanson, 22 June 1850, CAUSA, MG-4, Fonds James Valentine Stuart, boîte 6, dossier 43.
[11] Facture de Louis A. Surette & Cie. à Bénoni Doucette, 31 July 1849, CAUSA, MG-3, Fonds Famille Dousett (Doucet), boîte 4, dossier 17.
[12] Estate settlement of Théodore Bonnenfant, 31 May 1861, NSA, Digby County Probate, A-449.
[13] Louis A. Surette, By-Laws of Corinthian Lodge, of Ancient, Free and Accepted Masons, of Concord, Mass. (Concord: Benjamin Tolman, 1859), 94–95.
[14] D’Entremont, “Rise and Fall.”
[15] Ronnie-Gilles LeBlanc, ed., Le Voyage de Rameau de Saint-Père en Acadie, 1860 (Quebec City: Septentrion, 2018), 108–110. And, Joel Belliveau, "Rameau de Saint-Père: Passeur des idées du «printemps des peuples» en Acadie?" in Clint Bruce and Gregory Kennedy, eds., Repenser l’Acadie dans le monde: Études comparées, études transnationales (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2025), 290–321.
[16] LeBlanc, ed., Voyage de Rameau, 112–113. Also, Ronald Bosco and Joel Myerson, “‘In the Palm of Nature’s Hand’: Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Address at the Consecration of Sleepy Hollow Cemetery,” Markers: Annual Journal of the Association for Gravestone Studies 21 (2004): 149–173. Frances Shattuck (1829–1912) and her father, Daniel (1790–1867), were descendants of a respected Congregationalist family with colonial roots in New Hampshire and Massachusetts. Daniel Shattuck was one of Concord's most successful merchants and financiers. His "store at the northwest corner of the common facing the central square had on offer the largest assortment of English, American, and West Indian goods in town." One historian called Shattuck among "Concord's leading venture capitalists." See Robert Gross, The Transcendentalists and Their World (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2021), 88 and 91. Daniel's father, John Shattuck III (1757–1816), was described by Daniel's brother Lemuel as bearing “the character of an intelligent, industrious, honest, upright, Christian man, eminently a peacemaker in his family and among his neighbours,” see Lemuel Shattuck, Memorials of the Descendants of William Shattuck, the Progenitor of the Families in America That Have Born His Name (Boston: Dutton and Wentworth, 1855), 171, and 300–302. At the time of Rameau's visit, the family of Louis and Frances consisted of four children and two female Irish servants (aged 24 and 21), see 1860 United States census, Concord, Middlesex County, Massachusetts. In addition to their daughter Evangeline (b. 1860), whose name evoked Longfellow's Acadian heroine, Louis and Frances named two of their sons after Louis' early Acadian ancestors: Louis d'Entremont Surette (b. 1854) and Daniel La Tour Surette (b. 1856).
[17] Deaths Registered in the Town of Concord for the Year Eighteen Hundred and Sixty, p. 89.
[18] See George Stayley Brown’s biography of Surette in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia: A Sequel to Campbell’s History (Boston: Rand Avery, 1888), 484–86.
[19] Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Jan Jansen, and Elizabeth Mancke, “The Fraternal Atlantic: An Introduction,” Atlantic Studies 16, no. 3 (2019): 283–293; Jessica Harland-Jacobs, Builders of Empire: Freemasons and British Imperialism, 1717–1927 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Steven Bullock, “The Revolutionary Transformation of American Freemasonry, 1752–1792,” The William and Mary Quarterly 47, no. 3 (July 1990): 347–369.
[20] Kenneth Loiselle, “Freemasonry and the Catholic Enlightenment in Eighteenth-Century France,” The Journal of Modern History 94, no. 3 (September 2022): 499–536. Also, Pannill Camp, “The Stage Art of Brotherhood: Sentimental Dramaturgy and Mid-Century Franc-Maçonnerie,” Philological Quarterly 93, no. 1 (Winter 2014): 117–138. We might think of the ‘awkwardness’ of Surette (a Catholic by birth, and British subject) becoming an American Master Mason along the theoretical lines examined by Dana Logan in Awkward Rituals: Sensations of Governance in Protestant America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022), 21–48.
[21] On the Transcendentalist ‘world’ of Concord, see Gross, The Transcendentalists and Their World; Barbara Packer, The Transcendentalists (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2007); Ralph Black, “From Concord Out: Henry Thoreau and the Natural Sublime,” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 2, no. 1 (Spring 1994): 65–75. And, Leah Stambler, “The Lyceum Movement in American Education, 1826–1845,” Paedagogica Historica 21, no. 1 (1981): 157–185.
[22] Kenneth Walter Cameron, ed., Emerson and Thoreau Speak: Lecturing in Concord and Lincoln during the American Renaissance – Chapters from the Massachusetts Lyceum (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1969), 175–180.
[23] Thomas Woodson, et al., eds., The Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne, vol. 18, The Letters, 1857–1864 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1987), 329.
[24] Isaiah Wilson, A Geography and History of the County of Digby, Nova Scotia (Halifax: Holloway Brothers, 1900), 28.
[25] Wilson, Geography and History, 262–64.
[26] Clarence-Joseph d’Entremont, Histoire du Cap-Sable de l’an mil au Traité de Paris (1763), v. 4 (Eunice, LA: Hebert Publications, 1981), 1833.
[27] N.E.S. Griffiths, “Longfellow’s Evangeline: The Birth and Acceptance of a Legend,” Acadiensis 11, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 28–41. According to tradition, Longfellow had first heard a story of an elderly Acadian woman – a victim of the deportation, living in exile in New England – at a dinner party in 1840 attended also by Nathaniel Hawthorne. This woman's evocative story inspired Longfellow, who then commenced researching the Acadians before publishing his famed poem Evangeline in 1847.
[28] See Thomas Whitney Surette and Concord Summer School of Music Collection: https://concordlibrary.org/special-collections/fin_aids/surette.
[29] Baptism of Louis Athanase Surette, 19 April 1819, SAR.