The Forgotten History of Wellington County: Queen’s Bush Settlers and their Legacies

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.

Historical site plaque, African British Methodist Episcopal Church and Cemetery

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.

African BME Church cemetery with roughly fourteen headstones in varying stages of deterioration

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. 

“The ‘Colored’ Church on the 4th of Peel Township, Wellington Country.” (Wellington County Museum and Archives)

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.

Photo of the American Missionary Cemetery pictured beside Brown-Kubisch’s book

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 Canadahttps://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.

Hidden Histories: Sophia Pooley and Canadian Slavery

By Heather Escoffery

Canadians have a habit of making connections to the United States when describing our own history. One of the most insidious uses of this kind of comparison is apparent when exploring the institution of slavery in the Americas. Most Canadians’ knowledge of the history of slavery relates to Canada’s role as the “North Star” for Black people escaping slavery through the Underground Railroad. Focusing on Canada as sanctuary for enslaved Black people results in Canada’s own history of slavery is often undermined or downplayed. Queen’s Bush resident Sophia Burthen Pooley, and her first-person slave narrative, helps sheds light on the violent reality many Black people faced as enslaved subjects in early Canada.

Originally from New York, Sophia Pooley (née Burthen) “was stolen from [her] parents when [she] was seven years old” (Drew 192). She was brought to Canada and sold to the Mohawk chieftain Joseph Brant, whom she lived with for five years until she was again sold to a white man named Samuel Hatt. She lived another seven years in slavery to Hatt until some “white [neighbours] said [she] was free, and put [her] up to running away” (194). After escaping bondage, she married Robert Pooley, but he eventually left, and by the time she was in her 90s, Sophia was living in Queen’s Bush where “plenty of people [… helped her] a good deal” (195). Sophia’s story challenges a lot of preconceived notions regarding Canada’s relationship with slavery, and by investigating the ways in which her narrative undoes the separation that Canada tries to achieve by positioning itself in comparison to the United States, it is easy to see how we often minimize our unpleasant and prejudice past to maintain a virtuous reputation.

Sophia Pooley’s first-person narrative-the only Canadian slave narrative-was transcribed in Benjamin Drew’s The Refugee (1856)

Canadian history tend to gloss over our treatment of Black people, especially when discussing Canada’s involvement with the institution of slavery. Published in 1869 (just 13 years after Sophia’s testimony and 35 years after slavery was abolished in the British colonies), W. M. Canniff’s History of the Settlement of Upper Canada commends early Canada for its restraint and good treatment of the people enslaved. He states that “the record of our country is so honorable upon the question of slavery, that the fact that slaves did once breathe among us, cast no stigma upon the maple leaf” (570). He goes on to say that “Canadians are almost ignorant of the fact that the “institution” of slavery existed in Canada” and that the “principles which guided the settlers of the country were of too noble a nature to accept the monstrous system of human bondage” (570).

This historical revision of Canadian slavery diminishes the pain and hardship faced by Black people subjected to Canadian slavery and minimizes Canadian responsibility in its practice and so dismisses the historical Black experience of our country. In her 2004 book on the Queen’s Bush settlement, Linda Brown-Kubisch describes slavery in New France as “less abusive” than the United States: slaves received “relatively humane treatment, frequently adopting their owner’s surname and remaining with the family until their death” (2). While she does touch on the changes that stripped slaves of personhood when the British legal system overtook the French, Brown-Kubisch classifies Canada’s practices as the “relatively less brutal system of slavery” (4). This diminishing of the (violent) realities of slavery in early Canada, through comparisons with the peculiar institution in the “colonies further south,” in Canadian history is a long-established tradition (2).

A photograph of the back of an escaped slave named Peter (1863) galvanized public opinion against slavery in the United States.

Sophia’s story helps to combat this minimization, especially when reading about the evidence of violence presented in her testimony. When discussing her experience in slavery, Sophia mentions “a scar on [her] head from a wound [her master’s wife] gave [her] with a hatchet” and another “where she cut [her] with a knife” (Drew 149). Benjamin Drew (the biographer who recorded Sophia’s story) feels the need to add that “the scars spoken of were quite perceptible, but [he] saw many worse looking cicatrices” that were inflicted during the time she was enslaved (149). These undeniable indications of brutality and violence help combat the perception of Canadian slavery being humane and less abusive (which is often claimed in comparison to the U.S.’s history). Katherine McKittrick also notes that “black women were often purchased for sexual violence (113), which although is not noted in Sophia’s story, is another worrying possibility of her enslavement that demonstrates the atrocities done to Black women held in bondage in early Canada.

Examining Sophia Pooley’s story, and how her documented existence contradicts many common perceptions about Canadian history, helps to illuminate the experiences faced by Black people in Canada’s slave past; consequently, it also helps us recognize this continued minimization of the Black Canadian experience in our present through identifying how scholars continue to perpetuate a false narrative of Canadian tolerance.

Works Cited

Brown-Kubisch, Linda. The Queen’s Bush Settlement Black Pioneers, 1839-1865. Dundurn, 2004.

Canniff, W M. History of the Settlement of Upper Canada (Ontario,) with Special Reference to The Bay Quinte. Dudley & Burns, 1869.

Drew, Benjamin. A North-side View of Slavery: The Refugee: Or, The Narratives of Fugitive. J.P. Jewett and Company, 1856.

McRae, Matthew. “An Announcement of the Sale of Enslaved People. It Appeared in the Quebec Gazette in May 1785.” Canadian Museum of Human Rights, 2020.

McKittrick, Katherine. “Nothing’s Shocking: Black Canada.” Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, U of Minnesota P, 2006, pp. 91–119.

Colonial Administrative Hindrance and the Dispersal of the Queen’s Bush Settlement

By Heather Escoffery

“Map of southwestern Canada West in the 1840s, showing the location of the Queen’s Bush settlement and other major Black communities” from Linda Brown-Kubish’s The Queen’s Bush Settlement: Black Pioneers, 1839-65 (Dundurn, 2004)

Just north of Waterloo, straddling the Townships of Wellesley and Peel, a stretch of unclaimed government land would become home to a thriving group of 19th century Black settlers who demonstrated strength and community during harsh physical and social conditions. Known as the Queen’s Bush, this area was considered Crown Land, meaning it was not surveyed for sale; however, as increasing numbers of people escaping American slavery and other newly immigrated individuals came to Canada looking for opportunity, Queen’s Bush provided an open environment to establish a home and new life.

Residents who came to the area immediately began building dwellings and clearing land; while considered squatters, many hoped for future prosperity and the eventual ownership of the land they worked. For most, these dreams proved unrealized, as changing social conditions in the United States and the colonial Canadian government’s unwillingness to compromise with Queen’s Bush residents led to many people leaving for better opportunities elsewhere; however, during the time that the Queen’s Bush settlement flourished, it provided an example of a Black community that was able to blur social divisions and establish a deep sense of community.

Due to there being no intention behind settling the area with any particular group, the Queen’s Bush community was able to encourage greater interactions between black and white residents when compared to other settlements that sponsored the immigration of Black individuals. This is partly due to the random nature of their homesteads, as many people settled on the first piece of unclaimed land they came across, resulting in black and white homesteads being mingled together (Drew 216). As a result, unlike planned communities such as Oro Township, Queen’s Bush was not as segregated physically when first being settled. Along with the harsh winter conditions and lack of readily available supplies, this spatial integration led to residents depending on one another for assistance (Drew 217).

Some residents discussed this neighbourly reliance; for example, like John Little, a Black man who escaped slavery in the U.S. South, who described protecting himself and his wife from wildlife in the early days of the settlement: “we saw four bears in the cherry-trees eating the fruit. My wife went for my gun, called some neighbours, and we killed all four” (Drew 217; emphasis added). The close spatial proximity between black and white settlers resulted in less social segregation, as eventual schools in the area admitted both black and white students (which was unusual as the school system was becoming increasingly segregated due to legislation intended to allow separate schools for religious reasons) (Stamp 26).

Additionally, it was not uncommon to encounter interracial families in the settlement, like Peter E. and Elizabeth Susand, Levi and Elizabeth Jones, and Reverend Jacob Libertus and his wife Hannah (Brown-Kubisch 139). All of these factors allowed black and white settlers to prosper together; however, even though the Queen’s Bush settlement was established with these more tolerant tendencies, it can not be said that it was without discrimination or racist sentiments, especially after the interference of the government led to a shift in the demographics and social openness of the Queen’s Bush.

Increasing immigration led to greater interest in Crown Land, so in 1843 surveyors were sent out to divide Queen’s Bush for eventual sale (Brown-Kubisch 65). Although residents had petitioned the government to make accommodations that would enable them to buy the land that they had spent so much effort to clear and farm, these petitions were ignored or dismissed by government officials. In one case, Queen’s Bush residents asked that they might purchase the land in “installments” rather than in one lumpsum of “cash” or that the lots be divided into smaller sections, both of which would allow many residents to afford their land claims (Brown-Kubisch 236-237). However, this petition was ignored, along with others, and while many residents did not immediately lose their homes, predatory and discriminatory practices began to emerge as Queen’s Bush land became increasingly valuable.

The once close community began to crumble: the increased interest in the now cleared and farmable land in Queen’s Bush brought land agents who targeted Black families with lies and intimidation to get residents to flee or undersell their property. A Black man named John Francis described the agents’ behavior as ruining “a great many poor people here in the bush” and that he himself was intimidated into selling “two cows and a steer, to make the payment that [he] might hold the land” (Drew 196). Some white arrivals interested in the valuable land took it upon themselves to bully Black families into selling or fleeing (Brown-Kubisch 97-98). These increasing tensions and the rise in land prices lead to a mass exodus of the Black community out of Queen’s Bush between the 1850s and 1860s.

By 1864, only a few Black families were left in the Wellesley and Peel Townships, and the Queen’s Bush settlement became a quiet farming community of mostly white settlers. However, the memories and written histories of the Queen’s Bush reveal that even with racial prejudice, an indifferent or actively hostile government, and the continuing erasure of Black narratives in Canadian history, Black lives that prospered and worked together existed and carved a space in the Canadian landscape.

Works Cited

Benjamin Drew. A North-side View of Slavery: The Refugee: Or, The Narratives of Fugitive. J.P. Jewett and Company, 1856.

Brown-Kubisch, Linda. The Queen’s Bush Settlement Black Pioneers, 1839-1865. Natural Heritage Books, 2004.

Colton, Joseph Hutchins, Colton’s Canada West or Upper Canada, 1855. Digital Archive, Toronto Public Library, Toronto. https://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca, Nov 2020.

Stamp, Robert. The Historical Background to Separate Schools in Ontario. Ontario Department of Education, Toronto. 1985.

The Struggle for Education in the Queen’s Bush Settlement

Rooda Lee, Scott Parker, Elizabeth Broderick

The formation of the Queen’s Bush settlement is a hidden story in Canadian history; however, detailed accounts of the Black settlement in Wellington County have been told by local historians, Jerry Prager and Linda Brown-Kubisch, in recent years. First, historians believe the settlement formed some time in the early 19th century, around the year 1820 (Ontario Heritage Trust). The settlement itself encompassed a 12 by 8 mile section of land located between the Waterloo County and Lake Huron area, more specifically, in the area which would become Woolwich in later years (Thorning). It was largely composed by fugitive slaves and free Blacks who fled the United States. Census data suggests that at its height roughly 1,500 Black pioneers settled in Queen’s Bush. In The Queen’s Bush Settlement, Brown-Kubisch argues that these “Black pioneers” had little to no expertise in surviving in such a forbidding climate and landscape; however, they were able to create a thriving, independent and self-reliant community (32).  The Queen’s Bush settlement was not a rare occurrence either; black settlements such as the Oro settlement, Owen Sound, and Collingwood also provided a space for Black Canadians, former slaves and free Blacks, to make homes and build communities in Ontario (Rickards 17).

This image shows a family outside of their home within the Queen’s Bush Settlement. The photo was taken around 1920. Source: Waterloo County House of Industry and Refuge

John Little experienced the many hardships of slavery before successfully escaping to Canada. Little was subject to the harsh violence of slavery: he was sold and separated from his wife and regularly beaten and tortured by his owner after he tried to escape. After escaping and reuniting with his wife, the Littles runaway to Ohio to seek freedom and from there they made their way to Queen’s Bush. Due to white owners fear that Black literacy would threaten the slave system, laws were passed forbidding slaves to learn to read or write. John Little states, “I was never sent to school a day in my life, and never knew a letter until quite late in life” (198). Little’s lack of education exemplifies the constraining of Black education as a method to suppress Black agency and rebellion. He says, “but being a slave, I did not know my age; I did not know anything” (199). Education was essential to how the Littles imagined a future of freedom and independence for their children in Queen’s Bush: in Mrs. Little’s testimony, she states, “one little girl is all that is spared to me… I intend to have well educated, if the Lord lets us” (233). The Littles’ slave testimonies reveal the efforts of former slaves to obtain education, which they viewed as an essential means of achieving racial equality and equal access in Canada.

The Littles understood that the education of African Canadian children was central to the social development of Blacks in Canada. However, Black settlers in early Canada faced a number of obstacles limiting and denying black students access to state-run schools. As Awad Ibrahim and Ali A. Abdi write, “In the country’s early days, many Canadian towns and villages did not have public school, and….towns that did have schools often refused to let black children attend. This was the case especially in Nova Scotia and Ontario, which passed laws to keep black children in separate schools” (4). Wanting to educate their children, Black parents across Upper and Lower Canada fought to create their own schools and train their own teacher. They opposed the “under-funded, poorly equipped, inadequately staffed and segregated schools” that were available to Black children, “demanding that their children receive educational opportunities equal to everyone else’s, and that they be allow to send their children wherever the saw fit” (4).

Black pioneers in the Queen’s Bush held a deep commitment to education. American missionaries travelled to the settlement to provide educational and vocational training that could help Black pioneers to live independent and self-reliant lives. In her discussion of education and the Queen’s Bush Settlement, Linda Brown-Kubish concludes that while Black leaders “urged them to obtain an education and to be industrious and thrifty, in order to prove to whites that Blacks were their equals….Blacks quickly realized that this alone did not guarantee assimilation into white society; nor did it eradicate discrimination and resentment” (23). Educational discrimination guaranteed white supremacy and subordination of Blacks in Canada in the present and persists into the present.

The life of Sophia Pooley and the Queen’s Bush Settlement

Carly Holmstead, Kayla Hefford, Jennifer Williams 

Who is Sophia Pooley? 

Sophia Pooley’s story may be the only existing first-person narrative of someone who was a slave in Canada. The daughter of Oliver and Dinah Burthen, Sophia was a born a slave in Fishkill, New York. At the age of five, Sophia and her sister were taken to Niagara Falls, where they were sold to Mohawk chieftain Joseph Brant. The sisters were brought back to the Mohawk reserve in Upper Canada, joining the thirty other slaves Brant owned. During her time with Brant, she was often the victim of the barbarous and violent nature of his mistress. After several years on the reserve, Brant sold Sophia to Samuel Hatt:  “at twelve years old, I was sold by Brant to an Englishman in Ancaster, for one hundred dollars, – his name was Samuel Hatt, and I lived with him seven year.” (Ontario Ministry of Government and Consumer Services). Separated from her family at an early age, Sophia’s early life was spent in isolation and fear, under the mental and physical brutality of her owners. 

This image is a female version of Josiah Wedgwood’s 1787 antislavery medallion depicting a black woman enslaved in chains. “Previous Chapter Chapter 5: Resistance to Slavery and Black Nationalism Next Chapter.” 
This is an image of Mohawk chief Joseph Brant, Sophia Pooley’s (then Burthen) slave owner.Les Archives Publiques De L’L’honorable Lincoln Alexander .

During the time Sophia was enslaved by Samuel Hatt, legislations had passed marking the end of slavery; unbeknownst to Sophia, she continued to live under the confines of slavery. Thanks to the interference of neighbours, Sophia was informed that she was being held illegally and she was able to safely escape. Soon after, Sophia married Robert Pooley, a black farmer in Waterloo, but their marriage didn’t last long. Robert ran away with a white woman; Sophia would later state with great certainty that “he is dead.” It was in her old age that Sophia settled in Queen’s Bush, where she boarded with various families (Kubish 62). 

What we know about the Queen’s Bush Settlement?

This is a map of the Queen’s Bush Settlement, showcasing the area in which it covered. Right near the Grand River, Hamilton, Guelph, and Waterloo area. Kubish, 2004. 

Queen’s Bush refers to a vast unsettled area between Waterloo County and Lake Huron. Beginning in the early nineteenth century, the area of Waterloo County and Lake Huron became a haven for more than 1,500 free and formerly enslaved Blacks. This group of Black pioneers cleared the land for farms that were scattered across the Peel and Wellesley Township border, with Glan Allan, Hawkesville and Wallenstein as important centers. The Queen’s Bush settlement was a fully-functioning and self-reliant community. However, in the 1840s, the government ordered the land to be surveyed; many of the Black pioneers could not afford to pay for the land they had worked hard to labor and were forced to abandon their farms or sell them at below value. Queen’s Bush pioneers moved to villages and towns in the surrounding areas, including Guelph. Although Black population in Queen’s Bush began to dwindle after the land was surveyed, a significant number of them remained and prospered, well into the latter half of the nineteenth century.

Sophia Pooley’s Queen’s Bush 

The Queen’s Bush settlement offered Black people an opportunity to create a community made by and built for them; a place where Black people could find belonging among neighbours who helped and supported one another. This Black community stood for courage, strength, and perseverance, as it continued to exist after the surveys forced many to leave. Sophia arrived in the settlement in the years after the land surveys forced so many others like her to leave the community that was their home. Sophia’s story of charity and care in the Queen’s Bush settlement reflects the persistence of a community that existed against all kinds of odds. In the Queen’s Bush settlement, Sophia, for the first time in her life, was able to join a community that took care of their own. Before she found this sanctuary, Sophia’s life was one of isolation, dislocation, and violence.  While in the settlement, she found the unending support of the community through the people who boarded, supported, and cared for her until the end of her life. Sophia’s Queen’s Bush was a strong black community that thrived and withstood the many pressures that tried to break it apart. It was a place where Black people could find a sense of belonging and home within the space of Canada.