Le Progrès, like its main competitors Le Courrier d’Essex / de l’Ouest and Le Courrier, considered itself to be the voice of the people. To bolster this view, the editors made sure to include a wealth local news items concerning ordinary people who lived in what Le Progrès always referred to as “Town and County” , , , , . In 1886, Le Progrès put out a call for regular correspondents who could gather news in the various localities around Essex and Kent counties . The response seems to have been positive and soon weekly reports from the various French parishes began to appear. For the most part, these contain are no earth-shattering news; rather we find various announcements, rumours and gossip that nevertheless give us a fascinating snapshot of daily life in many of these small communities.

At the end of the 19th century, French Canadians were well established on both sides of the Detroit River and Lake St-Clair. On the north shore, Detroit - established as a French fort in 1701 - still had a significant French-Canadian element (Detroit : , , , . On the south shore (the Canadian shore), the first permanent settlement took place in 1749, at Petite Côte, which would later become Ojibwa and finally LaSalle (Petite Côte, Grande Côte, Ojibwa : , , , . The first settlers along the Detroit River had been drawn to fishing, hunting and trapping to make a living. But at the time of Le Progrès, farming - particularly market gardening - had become the main occupation of the Petite Côte area. Families from this initial settlement had spread south all the way to Amherstburg (Amherstburg, Malden : , , ). Other families followed the Canard River and settled in Sandwich West Township well before the end of the 18th century. Anderdon Township, on the south side of the Canard, was a Huron reserve until 1837, although several French-Canadian families lived there as well. St. Joseph’s parish was established to serve residents of this area in 1864 (Rivière-aux-Canards / Sandwich West / Anderdon : , , , , , , , , ,, . A few miles upriver, St. Clement’s parish was established in McGregor in 1881 (McGregor : , , , . By the time Le Progrès came along, some of these families had been living on the Canadian shore for nearly a century and a half.

Descendants of the first group of settlers also lived in Windsor and Tecumseh, where St. Anne’s parish was established in 1859 (Tecumseh : , , ; Rivière à Peck , ). But here the local French population was bolstered by a second wave of French-Canadian immigration that began arriving around 1840 as a result of an economic and agricultural crisis in Lower Canada. This movement really took off with the arrival of the Great Western Railroad in 1854, with hundreds of families leaving the Saint Lawrence River Valley to come farm the fertile lands on the south shore of Lake St. Clair. The new settlers established villages and parishes all through this area. Some settled in Belle River, where a few old French families from Detroit had lived since the end of the 18th century and where St. Simon and St. Jude parish had existed since 1834 (Belle Rivière : , , , , . Further east, the growing number of settlers led to the founding of Annunciation parish in Pointe-aux-Roches (Stoney Point) (Pointe-aux-Roches: , , ); the rapid growth of this settlement led to yet another parish - St. Joachim - on the Ruscom River in 1881 (St. Joachim / Ruscom : , (photo of construction of church), , , , , , ). Francophones also settled further inland, along the Canada Southern rail line, founding St. François-Xavier parish at Trudelle, which would later become Tilbury , , , . Staples (, , ) and Comber , also had significant French populations. In 1900 Holy Redeemer parish in Staples was formed by members of St. Joachim. Comber remained part of Annunciation parish in Pointe-aux-Roches until the founding of its own parish in 1951, Notre-Dame-de-Lourdes.

Immigration from Lower Canada also led to the birth of two new communities north of the Thames River in Kent County : Pain Court (parish of the Immaculate Conception, established in 1851) and Grande Pointe (St. Philippe, 1886) (Pain Court : , , ) (Grande Pointe : , , ). Chatham, the main city in this area, also included a significant French population (Chatham : ).