Since the 19th century, Rhode Island has been a state populated by immigrants. Woonsocket stands as one of the best examples in the United States of a predominantly French-speaking city. Its French-Canadian immigrants began to arrive in the Blackstone Valley in the years around the American Civil War. Beginning in the 1880s and continuing through the 1920s, men, women, and children from Quebec came to the Valley, leaving unsustainable family farms behind them, and flooded into the Valley looking for factory work in the region