Jerry Prager, formerly of Guelph and now living in Elora, has just published Laying the Bed: The Native Origins Of The Underground Railroad.
The author of three books on the local mafia, Legends of the Morgeti, Prager was asked to work on the history of blacks in Guelph and Wellington County by Wayne F. Smythe, the man who made the offer to purchase the Guelph British Methodist Episcopal Church (BME) at 83 Essex back in the fall of 2011.
Smythe also filed the papers to found the Guelph Black Heritage Society before the Society was able to raise the funds to buy the church.
Laying the Bed examines a claim by the United Empire Loyalists of Brantford, that it was Tuscarora Baptists who guided fugitives up the Grand River and into their community.
Laying the Bed is the first of what will become a four volume set.
It was, however, the last book begun, largely because its story lines lay outside the history of the BME church of Canada and how it came to Guelph.
Started in November of 2011, research on the main story lines kept skirting around the Groat family, who first entered Canadian history through Michael Grote, a signatory of the 1794 Petition of Free Negroes.
Laying the Bed traces the Groat/Grotes through the Davis-Ghent United Empire Loyalist family of North Carolina, and through the Tuscarora of the same state, to Saltfleet (Stoney Creek) and Nelson (Burlington) townships, where they bought land from Joseph Brant. They hosted First Nations on their land in the fall of 1813 while serving on the Dundas Road patrol during the war at the head of the lake and then spread out after the War of 1812 ended, moving to the Six Nations, New Credit and Caradoc reserves, Kansas and back to Guelph/Marden/Salem and to the largest black settlement in the colony/province, the Queen’s Bush.
The stories are certain to transform discussions within the Underground Railroad community on both sides of the border. The topic will also be of interest to those who either already know or who want to understand the roots of Idle No More and it’s struggles for treaty rights.
The book is also the story of North American Christianity’s finest hour, from the days when abolitionists were called terrorists by slave-owners; days when schism divided every church but one, the African Methodist Episcopal Church, precursor of the BME, its Canadian offspring.
The book gives credit where it is due.
Laying the Bed will be available at book stores and online via abolition-emancipation.blogspot.ca.
