Connected by the Underground Railroad
Escaped slaves’ descendants remember their roots through biennial reunions
One hundred and sixty-four years ago, William Henson Holland left his family behind in Maryland and risked his life to travel the Underground Railroad to Canada. His brother Thomas John wasn’t far behind.
The brothers, escaped slaves from a plantation in Maryland, were meant to blaze a path to freedom for their family to follow. But instead, their departure caused a cross-border rift that took 130 years to heal.
This weekend, eight generations since the Holland brothers headed north, family from both sides of the border will come together in Toronto. It was Sandra Smith’s mother who helped reconnect the two halves of the family when she was invited to a small gathering in Maryland by a cousin in San Francisco in 1948.
“I just thought that my mother was going to visit a few family members. But when she came back, she was so proud,” Smith said. “She was so proud to see this large group of American cousins that live close to each other in the Silver Springs area.”
After that first connection, Smith said family members on both sides of the border started researching their family history more actively.
Digging through archives, a cousin south of the border found copies of their ancestors’ bills of sale and other documents that he sent north to Smith.
“I remember opening that package and seeing these documents and finding the names of my forebears and it just, it just gave me chills,” she said.
“It made me proud to know that we had a history that was documented and that we’ve come this far and survived, and that my great-grandfather was brave enough to make that journey to Canada and never see his fam- ily again,” she said.
Smith’s family tree starts with Jack and Polly Howard, workers in bondage on a plantation in Maryland in the early 1800s. They had eight children: Leatha, Enoch George, Eliza, Greenberry, Maria, Brice, Martha and Suzanna.
Leatha married William Augustus Holland. Their sons, William Henson and Thomas John, eventually made the arduous journey north to freedom. Risking capture and possible death, the two boys relied on the charity of abolitionists along the route to evade bounty hunters.
Thomas John eventually settled in Hamilton and William Henson in Amherstburg, Ont., near Windsor. The plan was to set down roots and prepare for the rest of the family to follow, but the American Civil War ended and slavery was abolished before the others could make the journey.
After her mother made the first connection with family in the U.S., Smith said, things started to pick up pace. The first cross-border reunion happened in Windsor in the late 1980s.
“It was a teeny, tiny reunion. There was not much planned or anything. We just sort of went to a picnic area and sat around and met each other for the first time,” Smith said.
Since then, the biennial gatherings have ballooned. Smith is this year’s planner-in-chief, helping to co-ordinate the logistics.
“See that pile of papers over there?” she asked, pointing to a two-foot- high stack on a side table in her living room. “Those are just the registrations.” She’s expecting nearly 200 guests for the three-day gathering at Toronto’s Don Valley Hotel.
“It’s been an amazing journey,” said Rev. Thomas Pumphrey, with a slight chuckle in his smooth Maryland accent.
“To see someone you have never met before and realize how closely they resemble maybe a father or mother or even yourself,” he said. “It’s an amazing piece (of history).”
Pumphrey is one of the American cousins. At 71, he’s been going to the reunions since they started. At one in Maryland, he helped arrange a tour of the old plantation grounds.
As the afternoon wore on, the tour group began to get a little turned around on the expansive estate, Pumphrey said.
“As we were coming back out, one of the Canadian cousins asked, ‘How do you get out of here?’ So I said ‘I don’t know. You guys are the ones who escaped to Canada. You should know the answer to that,’ ” he said, laughing.
Pumphrey and Smith’s family is part of Toronto’s rich history of freedom-seeking slaves helping to build the city that exists.
In 1826, 12 fugitive slaves, led by Elder Washington Christian, founded First Baptist Church after being barred from joining existing churches in the city. It’s now the city’s oldest black institution.
“You can imagine the racial tension at that time,” said Rev. Wendell Gibbs, who leads the congregation now.
He sees a direct connection between his church’s history and the struggles still facing not just black people, but anyone from a marginalized group.
“Whether it’s Black Lives Matter or First Nations people or LGBTQ people, every community has its own struggles,” Gibbs said.
All these communities have faced historic oppression, Gibbs said, in the form of residential schools or growing up under anti-gay laws or the colonial slave trade.
“It’s all tied together. The connection is the emotional pain we still suffer,” he said. “You still have to go all the way back and tie it to those original pains,” he said.
For Sandra Smith and her cousin Yahya (Juan) Gairey, Gibbs’s message is part of the reason the family takes its reunions and its history so seriously.
“My daughter’s part of Black Lives Matter,” Gairey said. “Sandra’s mother tried to start the Martin Luther King Day here in Toronto. Our family has always been at the forefront of speaking for things that affect our people, having a voice and being heard,” he said.
“I think it’s really important that the younger generations hear about the struggles of the older generations,” Smith said, “because it’s so easy to forget.”
“It’s all tied together. The connection is the emotional pain we still suffer.” REV. WENDELL GIBBS FIRST BAPTIST CHURCH