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Originally Posted by dc_denizen
Interesting, I imagine has something to do with Boston's industry (mills) being located on rivers away from the Bay, thus the secondary cities grew up very early around these industrial nodes...while Montreal was a port/fur trading terminus initially where most activity would have been concentrated near the port/waterfront with no reason for secondary cities to emerge.
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Quebec just didn't industrialize as quickly, and remained more agricultural.
In the second half of the 19th century, the good farmland in Quebec was all taken, but you still had very high birth rates. The fur trade was winding down, but the cities weren't that industrialized. Some went into forestry and farming of marginal lands, but every decade about 10% of Quebec's population migrated to the US (many only temporarily), much of them to the mill towns of New England.
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Around 1900, a list of the twenty five North American towns containing the most francophones would have included Fall River, Massachusets (33 000 Franco-Americans), Lowell, Massachusets (24 800), Manchester, New Hampshire (23 000), and Woonsocket, Rhode Island (17 000). In these large cities, they frequently constituted a sizeable proportion of the total population, sometimes as much as 25% to 60%. The importance of these figures will be grasped when it is remembered that, if they are compared to the cities of Quebec, then Fall River was the third largest French Canadian city in importance, after Montreal and Quebec City; Lowell would be in fourth place, etc. In fact, in 1900, the New England area contained ten cities with a French Canadian population in excess of 10,000, while Quebec only had five, most of them barely above 10,000. During the same period, there were roughly as many daily French newspapers in New England as in Quebec; an author estimated that 195 Franco-American newspapers were founded between 1838 and 1910.
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http://faculty.marianopolis.edu/c.be...gs/leaving.htm
The biggest towns in Quebec after Montreal and Quebec City were all under 15k and much of Quebec's urban population back then was Anglophone. Many of them were basically mill towns, like Valleyfield and Sherbrooke.
Some also moved to Ontario, up the Ottawa Valley and eventually into the Abitibi and Temiscaming regions. The main phase of industrialization in New England took place in the second half of the 19th century, while in Quebec was more from 1900 and the economy really began kicking into gear in the mid-20th century. As Quebec became more industrialized and prosperous, the cities finally started to really take off and emigration slowed.
A lot of the development in the Montreal wasn't just limited to the waterfront, but also followed the Lachine Canal, such as Saint-Henri and Verdun, although those are essentially contiguous with Montreal's urban core. The town of Lachine is a bit more separate though. But since a lot of the industrialization took place later, by that time you had railways, so you had industry in areas like the Mile-End as well as following highways (Autoroute Metropolitaine).
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