Town celebrates Underground Railroad history
North American Black Historical Museum celebrates blacks who fled to freedom
Some blacks escaped the United States and headed for Amherstburg, Ont., by boat across the Detroit River. Some tried to swim in the quickmoving waters. Others walked across the river when it froze in the winter.
All of them were looking for one thing — freedom.
In the 1850s, as many as 30 blacks a day sought to escape slavery by crossing the Detroit River for Amherstburg, said Terran Fader, the curator and administrator of the North American Black Historical Museum in Amherstburg.
“Amherstburg was the chief crossing point for the Underground Railroad,” said Fader.
She said it’s “a vital part of our history,” but it’s not something that everyone knows is associated with the town, which is about 30 kilo- metres from downtown Windsor.
Amherstburg was incorporated as a town in 1878 and has a population of just over 21,000 people. But the community was first settled in 1784 by the British and was a key site in the War of 1812 and the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837. It’s also along the narrowest point on the Detroit River, between Canada and the United States.
Efforts to found the North American Black Historical Museum were spearheaded in the 1960s by Melvin (Mac) Simpson with fundraising carried out by members of the Nazrey African Methodist Episcopal Church. The museum, incorporated in 1975 and opened in its present form in 1981, has a permanent exhibit on the main floor and travelling exhibits upstairs.
“You can actually see artifacts like shackles that actually restrained the slaves,” she said.
Slavery was abolished in Can- ada in 1833, decades before it was abolished in the U.S., so “that’s really the period, the ’30s through the ’60s, that we were the stop on the Underground Railroad,” she said.
The church, which sits next to the museum, was built by former slaves and free blacks in 1848. In 1999, the church was designated a National Historic Site of Canada. It was the first black historical site in Canada, said Fader.
Attached to the museum is also a log cabin, which Fader said has been on the site since about 1855.