Jerry Prager, of Elora, recently published Blood in the Mortar: Freedom In Stones.
This is his third book on the anti-slavery movement in Ontario and Wellington County. It was released in time to celebrate Emancipation Week from Aug. 1 to 6.
Locally, the Heritage Hall run by the Guelph Black Heritage Society, hosts an event on July 28.
Prager sold and signed books at that event.
The first book in this series, Laying the Bed: The Native Origins of the Underground Railroad, was published in 2014. It established the role of First Nations in helping fugitives to freedom in Upper Canada.
The history was told through the lens of the loyalist Groat family of Saltfleet and Nelson townships; and through the Tuscarora Groats of the Grand River and of the Mississauga of the New Credit; beginning with William Groat of Guelph, Marden and the Wellington County House of Industry, who died in that institute in 1900.
The second volume, Exodus and Arrival: Fugitive Roads to Guelph and Beyond, was published in 2015.
It established the ways and means by which 1,500 or more former slaves and free blacks took refuge on former Saugeen Ojibway lands, farming in an Anglican clergy reserve known as the Queen’s Bush Settlement.
The stories of those former slaves and free blacks, and their friends and allies were told using the focal points of:
– Quaker abolitionists on both sides of the Niagara River including John Wetharald of Puslinch;
– the Scots Presbyterian and Congregationalist political reformers and activists of the Canadian Anti-Slavery Society and the South Wellington Reform Association, including Thomas Sandilands, VP for Guelph, and the man who built the stone structure than now houses the Cornerstone Cafe;
– the Methodist Saugeen and Coldwater Ojibway whose annual travels to and from the Niagara frontier on their ancient trails were opportunities for guiding former African Americans and their Canadian-born children to the Queen’s Bush and other settlements; and
– the genealogical narratives of the first traceable African-Americans in Puslinch, Guelph and related locales – up to and including – the first local loyalist blacks in the Pierpoint settlement where Fergus now sits.
Blood in the Mortar: Freedom in Stones ends the series where it began: with the stone church at 83 Essex Street, saved from destruction through purchase, by the Guelph Black Heritage Society in 2011-12.
Prager was part of the original steering committee that oversaw the creation of the society, and the bid to purchase the building.
This third volume uses the lens of the cornerstone setting ceremony held on Sept. 17 1880, to bring into focus the history of the local black population, through their relationships to the Queen’s Bush settlers and through their on-again, off-again relations with the American-based African Methodist Episcopal church, and its child, the British Methodist Episcopal (BME) church.
The goal is not to bring the story up to the present. The last 100 years or more of the Guelph BME’s existence are best left to family historians whose passed-on, living memories, still form the community’s sense of self, as told to the new generations of primarily Caribbean and African immigrants.
