There are many nationalities of immigrants that settled in and around Dane County, one being a unique group of French immigrants, all from the Haute-Soane region in northeastern France. Beginning in the 1850s and spanning into the late 1870s, thirty-two families immigrated to Wisconsin, most settling northeast of Belleville in Montrose Township. This rural area came to be known as "Frenchtown." By the early 1900s, this group numbered nearly 500 people.

Early on, many of the immigrants' sons and daughters married within the close-knit "French settlement," but as years passed, they would m...