The Underground Railroad
Sadlier, president of istory Society. r parades and picnics e on Emancipation British Parliament’s throughout the Ems and whites would bbing shoulders with
Toronto, in fact, played a key role in the abolitionist movement.
In 1851, an inter-racial group including George Brown, publisher of The Globe, came together at St. Lawrence Hall on King St. E. to found the Anti-slavery Society of Canada.
As Adrienne Shadd, Afua Cooper and Karolyn Smardz Frost relate in their
book, The Underground Railroad: Next
Stop, Toronto!, even the famed U.S. abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, was among those who regularly gave lectures to packed society meetings.
That same year also saw Toronto host the North American Convention of Coloured People, at which delegates endorsed a resolution calling what’s now Ontario “by far, the most desirable place of resort for coloured people, to be found on the American continent.” Jamaica came second. Not that such history is well-known in today’s Toronto. And even in this, Black History Month, a lot of the emphasis gets placed on events south of border, concedes Bryan Prince, a slave descendant
and director of the Buxton National Historic Site and Museum near Chatham.
The Buxton area alone was home to 1,200 escaped slaves.
“When it comes to black history, in some ways the border is meaningless,” says Prince. “But on the other hand, the border is everything, the line between freedom and the threat of slavery.
“I think part of the mentality in Canada is that we don’t value our heroes as much as they do in the United States.”
JUST TO THE NORTHOF 691Markham St. lie a couple of one-storey, frame cottages, across the street from Monsignor Fraser College School. Their rooflines have sagged with age, the original level marked by the remains of tar around central chimneys.
They are very much older than the Edwardian brick homes surrounding them.
So it’s easy to imagine that Deborah Brown, fugitive slave, once lived here, street numbers tending to change over time in the city.
Even if none of these was the Brown homestead, it would have looked very much like these cottages — small wooden structures in which life was simple and close-quartered.
Although undoubtedly altered over the years, the frame homes on Markham certainly resemble the sketch of Brown’s house in John Ross Robertson’s Landmarks of Toronto, published in 1914.
Looking at them, even now, you can almost feel the presence of ghosts, of stories lingering somewhere in the cellar, perchance about the nearly 40,000 American slaves who escaped to Canada.
But there is no historical plaque anywhere nearby, no sign of remembrance or reverence — nothing to record, at the very least, that this particular street, in this city, was once a key destination of the Underground Railroad.
And that, perhaps, is not so much Deborah Brown’s loss, but ours.