Category: Black Guelph

Taylor Brown, Karlie Castle, Alexandra Gristey and Dana Share

Welcome! Thanks for joining us on this lovely day. Today, we’ll be reimagining the geography of Guelph by walking through neighbourhoods you’re probably familiar with. We’ll be visiting Essex Street, Paisley Street, Norfolk Street, Macdonell Street and Toronto Street to retrace black presence in Guelph. The purpose of today’s walk is to explore the origins of Guelph’s African-Canadian community.

The British Methodist Episcopal Church

The walk begins at 83 Essex Street. Since 1880, the British Methodist Episcopal (BME) Church has stood on this spot and has acted as the focal point for the black community in Guelph (Shelley). Many members of the church were originally fugitive slaves who reached Canada through the Underground Railroad (Shelley). As Linda Brown-Kubisch outlines in The Queen’s Bush Settlement: Black Pioneers, 1839-65, Black individuals and communities were frequently segregated from the white community and forced to create their own churches, educational institutions, and communities. The BME Church in Guelph was a “hub” for the Black community, providing a social and spiritual support network for African-Canadians within Guelph.

The Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute

From the BME church, we will walk 1km north to the Guelph Collegiate Vocational Institute (GCVI) at 155 Paisley Street. Here we will introduce the Jewell family, who are a prominent part of Guelph’s Black history. The Jewell children attended high school at GCVI. Both Melba and Ted Jewell are mentioned in the 1950 edition of the GCVI yearbook, Acta Nostra. In this year, Melba would have been 17 years old and in the 10th or 11th grade. In an interview with the Guelph Social History Project, Melba fondly recalls her high school years. She had a lively social life during this time. Along with her siblings, she was actively involved in extracurricular activities, such as school plays and sports, and her brother, Ted Jewell, was President of the Students’ Council in 1948 (Jewell 1998; “Brotherhood” 17).

Melba’s experience at GCVI was not without its issues, as she and her siblings faced discrimination throughout both middle and high school. Few Black students attended GCVI with the Jewells, who were subjected to racist comments from other students and even teachers. The Jewell children’s parents were a primary source of support against the racial discrimination that they endured. Melba’s mother made many visits to the school in an effort to educate the staff and compel them to address these issues properly. Her father taught her and her siblings how to fight, resulting in physical altercations with other students and trips to the principal’s office (Jewell 1998).

Furthermore, the city of Guelph led initiatives such as “Brotherhood Week” in order to promote “unity and understanding” in the community. As detailed in a 1948 Globe and Mail article, this city-wide event aimed to “bring the theme and the full import of its meaning into every Guelph home.” Student narratives provide examples of cooperation between children of different races and nationalities. The article also cites Melba Jewell (then age 14) as a proud Guelph citizen, and describes an essay she wrote in which she advocates for racial equality (Cole 17). Evident here is the complexity of the relationship between African-Canadians and the rest of the community. Acceptance and discrimination occurred simultaneously in Guelph. The Jewell family responded to this discrimination by advocating for themselves and others, thereby evoking positive social change.

81 Norfolk Street

From 155 Paisley Street, walk 800m east to 81 Norfolk Street. You will notice that this address no longer exists because the Family Medical Centre takes up the entire block. Before that building, a house owned by the Jewell family rested on this spot until the 1980s. The house was owned by Percy Cornelius Jewell and his wife Margaret Ada Brooks Jewell with their four children: Melba, Percy, Patricia and Theodore (Ted). Percy Cornelius’s mother, Ellen Jane Lawson Jewell, came to Guelph in the late 1800s from the Queen’s Bush Settlement. Ellen Jane’s grandfather, Henry Dangerfield Lawson, escaped slavery in the United States and settled in the Queen’s Bush. Ellen Jane is listed in the 1941 directory under this address and a directory from 1972 lists Patricia and Melba Jewell as residents. The Jewell family has been in Guelph and the surrounding area for over 150 years, marking an important presence within the black community and (noting their interracial heritage) showing ties to Guelph’s white community.

95 MacDonell Street and 22 Toronto Street

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Before we stop by our next location, we will walk 500m east to 95 Macdonell Street, where Charles Bollen’s barber shop once stood. From there, we will walk 1km east to 22 Toronto Street, the former home of the Bollen family. The Bollen family was a prominent interracial family in Guelph from the the end of the 1800s and through the 1900s. The family home was located at 22 Toronto Street, where Charles Bollen and Eveline Bollen lived with their children throughout the years (Statistics Canada 1911). All family members are documented to have been born in Ontario, but Charles’ parents were born in the United States and Eveline’s in the United States and Ireland (Statistics Canada 1911). The Bollens also identified as Baptists (Statistics Canada 1891). Charles L. Bollen owned and worked at a barber shop at the Royal Hotel block in market square, providing for his family, for most of his life, while two of his sons (Junious and John) were documented as labourers in the year 1911 (Statistics Canada 1911). To take a look at the various members of the Bollen family refer to the table below (Table 1.0).

The Bollen family also had ties to other families in Guelph. Rita Bollen, one of the children, was linked to the Stickland family when she married William (Bill) Stickland on September 13th, 1924 (Ontario Marriages). Little is known about their marriage although they are photographed in one of the pictures provided.

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Table 1.0 – The Bollen Family Names and Birth Years

Name	Year of Birth
Charles L. Bollen	1858
Eveline Bollen	1860
Annie Bollen	1878
Frederick Bollen	1882
Eva Bollen	1884
Gertrude Bollen	1886
Louis Bollen	1888
Edward Bollen	1888
Edwin Bollen	1889
Kate Bollen	1880
Rita Bollen	1904
Warren Bollen	1908
Ella Bollen	1899
John Bollen	1893
Junious Bollen	1894

Final Thoughts

The Bollen/Stickland family and the Jewell family were both interracial. The two families represent a connection between the Black community and the white community in Guelph. While there was clear racial division between Blacks and whites between the 1880s and 1960s, there were also moments of exposure and integration between the two communities. While African-Canadians lived close to each other in certain wards, they were very much a fabric of everyday life in Guelph.

This concludes our walk today.

We hope you learned something new about African-Canadian presence in Guelph. We encourage you to consider the spaces we inhabit and reflect upon their origins and the traces of former inhabitants.  

Remember, some historical narratives are more represented than others; we shouldn’t be hesitant to explore “hidden” histories.

By Anja Binkofski, Chloe Utting, Sydney Wildman

In “Nothing Shocking: Black Canada,” Katherine McKittrick writes that the discovery of a Black presence in Canadian history often leads to a sense of surprise, which is “is followed by an experiential curiosity, wonder” (93). This sense of wonder is “inevitably attached to new sensations, new ideas, that were previously unavailable” (93). We applied this notion of “wonder” to our research on the Bollen family in Guelph, which revealed them to be an upper-class, interracial family who has resided in Guelph since the 1800s. This unexpected discovery of the Bollens demonstrates a different narrative of Black life in Guelph from 1860 to 1960 that counters assumptions of Black identity and experience.

We first discovered that Charles Bollen –the oldest known generation of the family to live in Guelph – owned around 5 properties on Toronto Street and owned his own barber shop. An interview with Shirley Heal, a descendant of the Bollen family, in 1997 discussed how Charles himself was Puerto Rican, and therefore the Bollen family was interracial from the 1880s. In the next generation, his daughter Evelyn married John Duncan, a black man, which lead to a generation of Bollens that were visibly interracial rather than passing as white. In the interview, Heal discusses a dispute between Evelyn and her family regarding her marriage with a visibly Black man which led to her exclusion from the family. This discovery of an interracial family in this time period led us to uncover an unexpected narrative of interracial mixing and cooperations shaping Black life in Guelph.

Charles’ profession as a business owner, with multiple properties, led us to discover that in addition to being an interracial family, the Bollens had an upper-class status which seems to have continued through generations. This contrasts with the data we found in the Guelph census of 1861, 1871 and 1881 (above) which shows a majority of Black people were working-class, employed as labourers, servants, whitewashers, butchers, and barbers. We can infer that because of the Bollen family’s ability to be business owners, they were economically better off than the rest of the Black community in Guelph.

The Bollens’ class status is further shown in the family portraits we found in the Guelph Civic Museum archives. These photographs situate the Black family in a manner that echoes 19^th century upper-class, British portraits. These portraits assert the sophistication and luxury of the family, as signified through their formal appearance and the background of the home they were taken in. These photos allow the family to visually assert their Black and upper-class status – two notions that are not typically linked in the 1900s in Guelph and beyond.

We discovered a fascinating photo of Bill Stickland, a close family friend to the Bollens and the husband of Rita Bollen. The photo shows Bill in 1930, standing in front of an airplane he built himself. We found this to be an unexpected – and interesting – discovery. For Bill to build this plane he would have had money to purchase the materials, access to a mechanic shop and high technology tools, and knowledge of mechanical engineering. This photo further implies the class privileges and social status of the Bollens and, again, highlights the contrast the life experiences and opportunities between the Bollens and the average Black individual and family in Guelph. A life story like Bill’s challenges the view of a single shared Black experience in Guelph.

With our collected data from the directories of 1975-1960 we mapped out the addresses of black families in Guelph and found the Bollens’ properties on Toronto street were across the river from the rest of the Black community’s residence. Most of Guelph’s black residents’ homes were on Essex, Durham and Nottingham Street, surrounding the BME church which was a community hub. This special discrepancy leads us to wonder why the Bollens were separate from the Black community. One possibility is that their financial, and interracial, status allowed them to assimilate or integrate with the white Guelph community, while other Black individuals were marginalized or segregated to the same, specific neighbourhood. This visual map helped us to further situate the Bollens’ narrative in relation to the other Black members of Guelph.

We believe that retracing the forgotten histories of Black lives is important to challenge the stereotypical view of Guelph as a predominantly white, rural space. Families such as the Bollens show how blackness has always been present, and integral, to Guelph’s community. In addition, the Bollens offer an unexpected narrative of Black life in Guelph and demonstrate there is no monolithic narrative of black experiences as each family is unique. With our research we have uncovered a potential way of reading one family’s incomplete history. We now ask you to consider what else can be uncovered about this family. What other histories could be discovered if more people engage with the recovery of black history in Guelph? Start wondering!