By Raphaela Pavlakos
The archives are full of ghosts—or at least that is what it felt like wading through dusty files and wrinkled tomes in the Wellington County Museum and Archives in Fergus, Ontario. One of fifteen Black settlements in Ontario, Queen’s Bush was established in the 1830s and dispersed by the 1860s. Over 1,500 Black people lived in the Queen’s Bush. The first group of settlers, both formerly-enslaved and free Black people from the United States, arrived in 1833 and began dividing up the land and clearing it. They knew they were squatting illegally on the land, but it was not yet surveyed, so they could not purchase it. The land was finally surveyed in 1843. An influx of immigration spurred the government to open up the Clergy reserves of land they had sectioned off for settlers to purchase. About 66,000 acres of the Queen’s Bush were surveyed and mapped. The government planned on giving the settlers of the Queen’s Bush priority, offering the land to them first before opening up to other settlers, but the land that was made profitable by the hard work of the Queen’s Bush residents was being sold to them for exorbitant prices—very few could afford to keep living there, even with the instalment payment plan, and most left for places like Guelph, Owen Sound, and Hamilton.
Since the 1860s, the site of the Queen’s Bush settlement has been divided into different regions within Wellington County, like Fergus, Yatton, and Glenallen, and comprised of many commercial farms and Mennonite residences (Krassoc). Like other historical Black communities in Canada, evidence of this once thriving Black community of over 1,500 residents is thin or destroyed. For Black life and Black history, the archive is a tabula rasa, another colonized space erased and replaced with Black shadows. My task, here, is to catch a glimpse of Black life from the past in the long-forgotten Black settlement in the Queen’s Bush, Wellington County through attending to the ways that “landscaping blackness out of this country,” as Katherine McKittrick notes, “coincides with intentions to put blackness out of sight” (96). If the archives were not where I would find the information I needed about the Queen’s Bush, I would have to use some other archive—the archive of the land.
About a twenty-minute drive from the Wellington County Museum and Archives, there is a cemetery; a small square of yellowed grass bordered by a copse of dense trees was inlaid within another farm. A small blue plaque marks this resting place as the African British Methodist-Episcopal Cemetery. It consisted of a neat row of about a dozen Cemetery disintegrating headstones. Some stones were in pieces, and over the years restoration attempts were made. While the intention was well-meaning, in practice these attempts did more harm. Iron bars bolted to some stones held them together, but the bolts obscurred the names, overlayed with orange blooms of rust.
This was once the site of the American Methodist-Episcopal church which later became the African British Methodist Episcopal church. The land originally belonged to Reverend Samuel H. Brown, a resident of the Queen’s Bush who donated his property to build the church, and was also the past of the church. The African BME Church was an important facet of the Queen’s Bush. It was a place to congregate, learn, commune, and create both fellowship and friendship. At one point, the African BME had a parish size of over 50 families (Voice of the Fugitive). The last service was held around 1918, but the building was left abandoned for several decades before it was torn down.
Because information is so sparse on the Queen’s Bush, there is only one book about the settlement by Linda Brown-Kubisch, called The Queen’s Bush Settlement: Black Pioneers, 1839-1865. Parsing through this book was helpful in putting events into context. I examined the cover: a neat cemetery in front of a mottled blue and white sky. It was the cemetery I visited and payed my respects at, but it was not the cemetery of Black settlers, the cemetery on Reverend Brown’s land where the African BME church once stood. Brown-Kubisch’s book on “Black pioneers” that settled and built the Queen’s Bush had another cemetery on its cover, one that was about a kilometer away from the African BME. cemetery. This cemetery was also from the time of the Queen’s Bush settlement, but it was a cemetery for white, American Missionaries.
If the African B.M.E. cemetery only has about a dozen headstones, where are the rest of the residents of the Queen’s Bush laid to rest? According to Brown-Kubisch, the Black pioneers who shaped and transformed this region are probably in unmarked graves under what are now commercial farms. There is no blue plaque or collective memorial to remember the vibrant Black community in the Queen’s Bush, their courage, sacrifices, and hard work, but ultimately, to remind us of their contributions to the past, present, and future of Wellington County. If we do not remember the Queen’s Bush settlement and all its Black residents, who will?
Works Cited
“A.M.E. Conference for the Canada District.” The Voice of the Fugitive. 12 August 1852, pp. 1.
“Provincial Address—Of the Colored Inhabitants of Hamilton to His Excellency, the Earl of Elgin.” Guelph Herald, 2 November 1847.
Brown-Kubisch, Linda. The Queen’s Bush Settlement : Black Pioneers, 1839-1865. Dundurn Press, 2004.
Krassoc. “Queen’s Bush Settlement.” Fadedgenes: A Chronicle of the People of the Methodist Church in Canada, https://krassoc.wordpress.com/2012/09/03/queens-bush-settlement/
McKittrick, Katherine. “Nothing’s Shocking: Black Canada.” Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, U of Minnesota P, 2006, pp. 91–119.