Toronto’s black history unearthed in excavation of landmark church

2016/02/17 2 Comments

Part of our history:

It has been called “one of the most important blocks of black history in Toronto,” a place where African Americans, fleeing slavery, found refuge to live, work and worship.

On this tract of land, just north of Osgoode Hall, a handful of African Methodists built a small wood frame church in 1845. It served as the spiritual and political centre of the city’s growing black community, which was asserting its voice in the abolitionist movement and welcoming an influx of families seeking freedom via the Underground Railroad.

Eventually, the congregation outgrew the tiny church and replaced it with a handsome brick temple. But after more than a century, membership dwindled, the congregation moved and the temple was sold off. In the late 1980s, the building was demolished to make way for a parking lot and, until last fall, the church was largely forgotten.

Now, with that same lot being prepared for the development of a new state-of-the-art provincial courthouse, the rich history of Chestnut St.’s British Methodist Episcopal Church has resurfaced, along with that of the 19th-century neighbourhood surrounding it.

The British Methodist Episcopal church on Chestnut St. as seen in 1953, around the time the dwindling congregation moved to Shaw St.

J.V. SALMON

The British Methodist Episcopal church on Chestnut St. as seen in 1953, around the time the dwindling congregation moved to Shaw St.

Hundreds of thousands of artifacts have been discovered at the 0.65-hectare site — larger than a football field — near University Ave. and Dundas St. Infrastructure Ontario, the government agency overseeing construction, provided the Toronto Star with unique access to the five-month dig, considered one of the most extensive urban archeological projects in North America.

Unearthed ceramics, tools, toys and remnants of clothing are helping to compose a fascinating and largely untold story of the distant origins of Toronto’s diversity.

“Archeology often becomes the voice for the people without history,” says Holly Martelle, the consulting archeologist for the dig.

Rosemary Sadlier, past president of the Ontario Black History Society, visited the site before the excavation wrapped up in December. “It was an incredibly powerful experience,” recalls Sadlier, whose late relative, Rev. Thomas Jackson, served as a preacher at the church in the 1950s. “I was literally walking on ground that had been walked on by my ancestors.”

Karolyn Smardz Frost, a historian who has written extensively about black settlement in Toronto, describes the location as “one of the most important blocks of black history in Toronto.”

Infrastructure Ontario officials say they fully recognize the importance of the church site and its surroundings. Given the uniqueness of the archeological discoveries, the question now facing the provincial government is how will this history be commemorated, and what sort of stewardship will the artifacts require?

Source: Toronto’s black history unearthed in excavation of landmark church | Toronto Star

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Shining Light On The Underground Railroad « The Dish

2015/01/21 Leave a comment

Interesting to see how the historical interpretation has changed over the years, and how recent research essentially changes the simpler narratives for a more complex and varied narrative involving both whites and blacks:

In a review of Eric Foner’s new history of the Underground Railroad, Gateway to Freedom, Jennifer Schuessler reflects on the various ways scholars have understood the way slaves escaped north to freedom:

The first scholarly study of the Underground Railroad, published by Wilbur Siebert in 1898, named some 3,200 “agents,” virtually all of them white men, who presided over an elaborate network of fixed routes, illustrated with maps that looked much like those of an ordinary railroad. That view largely held among scholars until 1961, when the historian Larry Gara published “The Liberty Line,” a slashing revisionist study that dismissed the Underground Railroad as a myth and argued that most fugitive slaves escaped at their own initiative, with little help from organized abolitionists. Scholarship on the topic all but dried up, as historians more generally emphasized the agency of African-Americans in claiming their own freedom.

But over the past 15 years, aided by newly digitized records of obscure abolitionist newspapers and local archives, scholars have constructed a new picture of the Underground Railroad as a collection of loosely interlocking local networks of activists, both black and white, that waxed and waned over time but nevertheless helped a significant number reach freedom.

Shining Light On The Underground Railroad « The Dish.

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