Marlborough’s industrial growth, especially in shoe manufacturing, depended on successive waves of immigrant labor. Before 1850, the town’s few factories employed only descendants of English Puritan families, but their numbers were too small to support expansion. In the late 1840's, the Irish potato famine, in which over a million people starved to death, pushed nearly a million people to America seeking work, and by the 1860's the Irish were the largest ethnic group in Marlborough. With abundant cheap labor, shoe factories multiplied, multi-apartment housing on small lots was quickly built in and near downtown with financing from shoe manufacturers, and Main Street filled with small shops. Labor demand continued, and another wave of immigration from French Canada followed, driven by limited opportunity and growing debt and drawn by opportunity at the end of the Fitchberg Red Line from Montreal; French Canadians settled around the “West” village, where a second shoe manufacturing center was growing rapidly. By the end of the century, French Canadians were the largest ethnic group in the city. In the early years of the 20th century, substantial immigration from Italy and Greece continued this pattern, and today large groups from Bazil, Latin America and Asia contribute to the city’s dynamic life.