Manchaug, a one‑square‑mile village in southwest Sutton, Massachusetts, was born in 1826 when the Manchaug Company dammed the Mumford River, erected three cotton mills, and ringed them with company tenements, store, farm, and school; after B. B. & R.  Knight—later famous for the Fruit  of  the  Loom brand—bought the complex in 1872, the town blossomed into a classic company enclave and “petite  Canada,” its mills powered by waves of French‑Canadian immigrants who filled St.  Anne’s Parish and kept French the language of home and worship. At its 1890s peak, self‑sufficient Manchaug held more than half of Sutton’s population and famously survived a three‑week blizzard blockade in 1917 on its own resources. The idyll unraveled after financier Frederick  R.  Rupprecht acquired Knight’s empire in 1920: the mills were dismantled and, in 1922 and 1927, the entire village—mills, houses, woodlands, even livestock—was auctioned, slashing the population to 400 by 1924. Many workers bought their tenements and, along “the  Flats,” opened shops and small industries that carried the community through depression, floods, and fires while preserving its French‑Canadian culture. Thanks to that resilience, Manchaug’s largely intact turn‑of‑the‑20th‑century streetscape was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2018, and the former mill village endures as a celebrated gem of the Blackstone Valley National Heritage Corridor.