Beginning in 1833, a stream of African American refugees, primarily freed Blacks from the northern states, settled in what was then known as the Queen’s Bush.
The area later constituted portions of Peel and Wellesley Townships, including present day Glen Allan.
The Black settlers were squatters, and preceded the formal opening of the townships by a decade. Though central to the early history of those two townships, the significance of those settlers is much broader.
The Queen’s Bush settlement was the second or third largest single grouping of Black refugees in Canada West. And in the context of other clusters of Black settlements, this one was unique. Other settlements were established agricultural areas or urban centres. The Queen’s Bush was then an isolated area, and during its first decade, well beyond the fringe of settlement. Reliable transportation facilities to the area did not begin to appear until the mid 1850s.
With the emergence of the so-called Underground Railroad in the 1830s, fugitive slaves entered Canada at the border towns on the Detroit and Niagara Rivers. Many tended to remain close to the border, seeking employment as labourers or semi-skilled workers.
Canadian residents at first welcomed the fugitives, but during the 1830s an ambivalence to their presence developed.
Most Canadians vehemently opposed slavery and welcomed the labour the new arrivals provided. On the other hand, they were wary of a potential massive Black migration, and of integrating so many Blacks into their own communities.
As a consequence, anti-slavery groups on both sides of the border organized self-contained communities for new arrivals to settle, where they could learn to cope with freedom and a life much different than they had previously known. Various religious groups, primarily Methodists and Baptists, were prominent in that movement.
The first Black migrants to the future Peel-Wellesley boundary area came from an ill-fated Black settlement 18 miles to the south in Woolwich Township, near the present hamlet of Winterbourne, and known as Colbornesburg. It had been founded in 1829 by Paola Brown, leader of a group of fugitive slaves and free Blacks from the Cincinnati area of Ohio.
Soon known as the Queen’s Bush Settlement, the Peel-Wellesley area attracted more refugees during the 1830s and 1840s. Blacks in border areas were aware of the settlement, and it appealed to new arrivals who were not able to secure immediate employment, or who had ambitions to own a farm of their own. In their new location they maintained tenuous but continuous networks of communication with other Black migrants across the province.
All the Queen’s Bush settlers were squatters, and hoped to establish themselves by scratching out a living, and accumulating a sufficient surplus to afford down payments on their land when the government offered it for sale.
The adjustment to subsistence agriculture was a difficult one for the settlers, most of whom were unaccustomed to cold winter weather. Their knowledge of agriculture came from work with labour-intensive crops, but they quickly acquired the skills to clear the ground and plant a grain crop, using hand labour entirely. Occasionally they were able to borrow equipment from Mennonite farmers to the south, who assisted them in other ways as well.
By 1840, the Queen’s Bush settlement covered an area some 12 miles by eight miles in size, though settlement there was widely dispersed. Settlers were concentrated in what would later be the southern lots of Concessions 1 to 6 of Peel Township.
American abolitionist groups took an interest in the Queen’s Bush settlement from about 1839, with the arrival of missionaries William and Eliza Raymond.
Though he stayed only a year, Raymond began the heavy involvement of the settlement with religious missionary groups. During the early 1840s several members of the African Methodist Episcopal church preached intermittently in the Queen’s Bush settlement at a church constructed in 1840.
Missionaries with the American Baptist Free Missionary Society also visited the settlement. Among their activities was the first attempt at formal schooling for the settlers’ children.
Beginning in 1842, the settlers began petitioning for grants of land, citing their poverty and inability to pay for their land. The provincial government was then in the process of opening up the Queen’s Bush to settlement. Surveys of the land occupied by the Queen’s Bush settlers ignored the existing homesteads. The consequence was a spate of disputes and general confusion, but the government refused to make any accommodation for the existing settlement.
A constant stream of new arrivals came to the Queen’s Bush settlement during the 1840s. As well, missionaries continued to be active. One was Fidelia Coburn, who ran a school during the mid and late 1840s. Eventually there were four churches serving the Queen’s Bush settlement and two schools.
The formal opening of the township to settlers created problems for the Black settlers. Even after years of struggle, they still only managed a subsistence living, and therefore could not afford the down payments required to gain legal possession of their land.
Despite the economic problems they faced, the settlement persisted, with new arrivals replacing those who moved elsewhere. The challenges for most, though, in acquiring sufficient money to buy land, farming equipment, and livestock, were too great to meet.
By the 1860s, most of the Blacks in what had then become Peel worked as labourers or domestic help for nearby farmers, or in one of the small shops or mills set up by white settlers.
Over the long term, the Queen’s Bush settlement was not a sustained success, but it was a viable community for more than 30 years. Descendants of those settlers, who pioneered settlement in Peel Township, remained in the area until the 1990s.
More important was the place of that community in the overall picture of Black refugees migrating to Canada in the years before the American Civil War.
Being isolated from major towns, the Peel settlement never was as well known as the Black settlements nearer the border. Further, it lacked a high-profile leader such as Josiah Henson.
The efforts by so many fugitive slaves and free Blacks to homestead in what was then the midst of a wilderness was a remarkable one.
It deserves to be better known and officially recognized in order to gain a richer and more accurate picture of the founding of old Ontario’s social dynamic in the 19th century.
