Sometime in the late 1880s, probably in 1888, a young man named Abraham Joseph left the village of Choueir in Lebanon and came to the United States. He made his way to Bangor, Maine, where he earned a living as a peddler, selling clothing door to door. He peddled his way south to Waterville, where he stayed and opened a store, apparently the first Lebanese immigrant to settle there. Soon relatives and others from his native village, and nearby villages, followed. By the time the first restrictive immigration laws were enacted in the 1920s, there were about three hundred Lebanese immigrants and members of their families in Waterville. They settled there because they could find work.
Around the turn of the century Waterville was the fastest-growing city in Maine, growing from a rural town to a small industrial center. In 1876 the Lockwood-Duchess cotton mill opened; in 1900 the Riverview (later Wyandotte) Worsted woolen mill; in 1892 the Hollingsworth and Whitney paper mill in Winslow. Waterville became a rail center as well, with the expansion of Maine Central Railroad’s maintenance and repair shop. Immigrants from Lebanon streamed into the factories. Although the work in the textile mills was hard, hot, noisy, and low-paying, to most of the immigrants it provided a level of income previously unimaginable and, above all else, the chance to become an American. In addition to the two textile mills in Waterville, there were several others (as many as a dozen at the industry’s peak) in the Central Maine area. It was common practice for workers to move from one mill to another as work at one slowed down and work at another picked up. My mother worked at most of the mills at one time or another. Today there are no textile mills in the area.
The three hundred immigrants from the Middle East and their families living in Waterville in the 1920s were known as Syrians. They did not describe themselves as Lebanese, nor did anyone else, until later, when the independent nation of Lebanon was created. Over time, as a Lebanese identity became established in the Middle East, the name began to be used more frequently in this country and the name Syrian fell into disuse.