FREEDOM SEEKER
George Brown College puts on two-day event to commemorate former slave who escaped to Toronto,
When Cecelia Jane Reynolds’ home was torn down and turned into a parking lot at Dundas St. W. and University Ave., her belongings — and her story — were sealed in the pavement.
The American fugitive slave from Kentucky, who died in 1909, was outlived by the foundation of her redbrick home in Toronto, along with a white porcelain pin box found at the residence and other personal items.
While the Louisville native is no longer around to share her tale of being owned at birth by a prominent white family, her escape to freedom via Niagara Falls and her new life in Toronto’s St. John’s Ward neighbourhood, researchers Karolyn Smardz Frost and Molly Martelle are reviving her story.
A two-day event, A Freedom-Seeker’s Toronto, runs Wednesday and Thursday at George Brown College and includes art, music and the display of artifacts from a piece of Toronto’s rich multicultural history.
“For us to move forward, it is important to learn about our past and know who we were,” said Nikki Clarke, president of the Ontario Black History Society which, along with George Brown College, is hosting the event.
“These stories are all relatable. These people’s courage and resilience in risking their lives for the betterment and security of their families is the same idea of our immigrants today.”
About 12 years ago, while researching her book in Kentucky about the slave-turned-Toronto-freedom- fighters Lucie and Thornton Blackburn, Smardz Frost stumbled upon five letters written by a woman from a prominent Louisville family, Fanny Thruston, to a Toronto woman by the name of Cecilia Jane Reynolds.
Through references in the letters to Reynolds’ attempt to purchase back her mother and younger brother from Thruston’s family, Smardz Frost figured the Toronto woman must have been a freedom-seeker who made her way to Canada through the Underground Railroad.
After finishing her Governor General’s Award-winning book, I’ve Got a Home in Glory Land, Smardz Frost dove into her next project to trace the life of Reynolds through archived street directories, marriage certificates, birth and death registrations, census data and tax records.
“There’s clue to clue to clue,” Smardz Frost, who teaches at Acadia University in Nova Scotia, said of her investigation into Reynolds’ life.
Finally, she hit the jackpot when she located Reynolds’ pension records, which contained a trove of documents detailing the woman’s life because of her 20-year fight to prove who she was and that her deceased second husband, William Larrison, had fought in the Civil War.
It turned out Reynolds, at 15, fled to Toronto in 1846; married Benjamin Holmes; had two stepsons; lived on the old Centre St. in the Ward; sent her stepchildren to train as barbers in Lowell, Mass.; moved briefly to Liverpool, England, in the 1850s; stayed in Rochester, N.Y., in 1859 and ’60 before returning to Louisville; had three kids with Holmes, all deceased as children; kept her Toronto home and rented it out before selling it in 1880s; and finally died in Kentucky in 1909.
While Smardz Frost was writing her book about Reynolds, Steal Away Home, news broke in 2015 that a yearlong excavation by Infrastructure Ontario at the site of a new Toronto courthouse unearthed relics — including shoes, boots, clothes, nail polish bottles and toys — dating from before the 1930s or 1940s, when old homes were demolished to give way to the parking lot.
Smardz Frost was thrilled with the finds and worked with Martelle, who was licensed by the province to take charge of the dig, to complete Reynolds’ story with physical evidence.
“It was the most exciting time of my career,” said Martelle, who has more than 20 years of archeology experience.
“The site was very well-known for early Black settlement.”
Martelle and her team took a year to do testing on the site, washing and processing the artifacts in the collection, which she said were superbly preserved because whoever demolished the old homes simply took the buildings down along with whatever the residents left behind and sealed it underneath, instead of discarding the items.
“They completed the written record,” Martelle said. “These artifacts help tell the history of people who were not written or recognized in history.”
Smardz Frost agreed: “I would like to use Cecilia’s life and my book as the vehicle through which we can provide the infrastructure about the Black community in Toronto that people didn’t know about.”
Admission to A Freedom-Seeker’s Toronto is free. The event runs from 6 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. at George Brown’s Lucie and Thornton Blackburn Conference Centre on Cooperage St.