The Black Past in Guelph engages in a dual approach to the telling and retelling of stories of marginalized Black figures and institutions in Guelph, Wellington County, and beyond. By the 1840s, approximately 1,500 Black people, formerly enslaved and free persons, lived in Peel Township, Wellington County. Some of these early Black pioneers of Queen’s Bush settled in Guelph. By 1861, a small Black neighbourhood was forming along Essex, Devonshire, Manchester, and Durham streets. While “others gravitated toward the central business district and elsewhere in working class areas of town” (Nash-Chambers). During the late nineteenth century, most Black Guelphites lived near the BME church; built in 1880, the Essex St BME church, now named Heritage Hall, was and still remains the institutional heart of Guelph’s Black community.
The Black Past in Guelph explores the lives of young Black people in the City of Guelph and Wellington County during the decades between 1830 and 1969. Since 2018, University of Guelph undergraduate and graduate students have pieced together scraps of archival traces of Black social life to map Black homes, businesses, and institutions and imagine the place-making of Black individuals and families. Through remembering and reclaiming these untold stories of Black life and longing, we seek to disrupt the erasure of the historical and contemporary Black presence in Wellington County and raise awareness about Black people in Guelph and their vibrant communities, diverse voices, and cultural narratives.
The Black Past in Guelph is a university-community research collaboration between University of Guelph, the Guelph Black Heritage Society, and the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute.
Guelph is situated on the ancestral homelands of the Anishinaabek Peoples, specifically the traditional territory of the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation. Treaty 3: Between the Lake Purchase (1792) is an agreement between the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation and the Crown, and covers the municipalities now known as Guelph, Brantford, St. Catharines, Hamilton, Waterloo and Cambridge. We recognize the significance of the Dish with One Spoon Covenant to this land and offer our respect to our Anishinaabe, Haudenosaunee and Métis neighbours as we strive to strengthen our relationships with them. We invite others to think about the past and present-day realities of these communities, and to holistically question colonial practices that disrupt connections to families, homes, and lands.
Thanks to our community and university partners: Denise Francis, Kween Gerber, Kerry Ann Cornwall, Dan Maitland, Jerry Prager, and Heena Mistry from the Guelph Black Heritage Society; Melissa Tanti and Lindsey Thomson from the Community Engaged Scholarship Institute; Kathy Grant, founder of The Legacy Voices Project; Kate Hoad-Riddick, Experiential Learning Partnership Developer in the College of Arts; Luke Stempien, Collections & Research Coordinator, and Dawn Owen, Curator, at Guelph Museums; and Karen Wagner, Archivist at Wellington County Museum and Archives.
Header Image: B/W photograph of six young Black people—identified as Elsie, John, Fred, Erica, Harold, and Alice Duncan—in 1920s Guelph. Courtesy of the Guelph Museums (1998.34.9)