Land, Archives, and Buried Black History

Author: William Leonard Felepchuk

A historical geographer with a PhD from the School of Indigenous & Canadian Studies at Carleton University

A potato field tilled by a white farmer sat, for much of the 20th century, on a country road in Grey County, Ontario. The potato field was the subject of grim jokes by white locals about its ability to produce the best potatoes. But it contained somewhat of an open secret: it was actually the burial ground of a Black community, as detailed by the documentary Speakers for the Dead.

The potato field was farmed on the Old Durham Road Pioneer Cemetery. The Black families who resided in Priceville (a village in Grey County) buried their dead in that cemetery for several decades, back when the area was only known as the Queen’s Bush. Queen’s Bush was on land coerced in the 1830s from the Saugeen Anishinaabek. Black families arrived in the area after its dispossession but before it was open to white settlement.

The story of Old Durham Road Pioneer Cemetery is one of several case studies I addressed in my doctoral thesis, as part of an effort to understand why the graves of my own white ancestors stood unharmed but the burial places of marginalized communities have faced destruction or neglect. 

Old Durham Road is just a few townships over from where my own white, Protestant ancestors had settled after travelling from what is now Northern Ireland. However, my interest in burial grounds began with my own faith, Islam, and a brief stint working as a grave-digger at my local Muslim cemetery during my graduate studies. That experience led me to reflect deeply about the importance of connection to burial sites for different communities – and the consequences when such connections are denied or disturbed. 

The Black community was the first non-Indigenous population in the Grey County region. Here, they often endured racial hostility from the local white majority. Eventually, they moved to larger towns more than fifty kilometres away, such as Owen Sound and Collingwood, for safety, more opportunity, and community. The tombstones they once lovingly placed to mark the graves of kinfolk were removed by white settlers who later claimed the land and cast the tombstones into piles of broken stone, or used them as baseball diamonds, paving stones or many other forms of desecration.

Finding what’s been lost

In the nineteenth century, many Black people who came to Ontario were escaping the enslavement and racial oppression they faced in the slavocracy of the southern U.S. Upon arrival in Ontario, however, they continued to endure ongoing segregation and discrimination.

Robin Winks is a white U.S. historian who wrote a detailed archival history of Black settlement in Canada called Blacks in Canada. In the text, he writes that Black communities at the time were challenged with what he called “the formlessness of the racial barrier,” in contrast to the more concretized and openly legislated forms of racial segregation in the U.S. Winks explains that:

“In Halifax, Fredericton, and Colchester, Negroes could not be buried in Anglican churchyards; in Toronto and Windsor they could…in many small towns, Negro musicians were welcome into the life of the community; in Owen Sound they had to establish their own orchestra…in Windsor and Niagara Falls, Ontario, and Kamloops, British Columbia elected black aldermen; in Halifax and Owen Sound blacks were told not to run for office.” 

The racial hostility Black freedom-seekers encountered in their lives extended to their afterlives. Many Black communities’ cemeteries in southern Ontario were destroyed after their living kin or descendants were displaced.

“We need protection… we are being obliterated from history.”

Carolynn Wilson, the Enterprise-Bulletin Special

Some of the consequences of burial displacements are explained by Carolynn Wilson, a descendant of these early Black settlers buried at the Old Durham Road Cemetery, who played a key role in the restoration of the site. She remarked in an article published by the Enterprise-Bulletin Special, about the state of her ancestors’ final resting places, saying, “We need protection… We are being obliterated from history.”

Black families and their allies have been working for decades to preserve their history. In another moment captured in an Owen Sound Sun Times article from 1990, the Wilson family visited the Old Durham Road and their conversation revealed their intimate connection to ancestors buried on the burial the grounds’:

“It was on a late summer evening when the committee were working on the fence, that Howard Sheffield, his sister Yvonne Wilson and [her] daughter Carolynn, all of Collingwood, joined with them. A recovered tombstone shows that an ancestral relative is buried here. They left the work group for a while. Looking down from a rise in the land at the site they were visibly very happy. Carolynn, her face wreathed in smiles, said ‘Do you hear them, Mama?’ Her mother answered ‘Yes, I hear all of our people here.’”

The Old Durham Road Pioneer Cemetery is just one example of a widespread pattern of neglect and destruction practiced by white settlers. There are many instances where Black cemeteries were turned into parking lots at a town fair, or left to decay under a pine plantation, as uncovered by a 2018 news article in The Huron Citizen.

Many sites were and continue to be systematically disregarded or neglected by municipalities, who, under provincial legislation, are responsible for cemetery upkeep. There are many burial grounds in need of care. Some of the historical Black communities’ cemeteries include those on the Niagara Peninsula, the Windsor-Essex area, Grey and Bruce Counties, areas around Lake Simcoe, and in Chatham-Kent, including the community of Dresden. But this list is incomplete. 

In rural Ontario, Black presence on both land and in the archive is often obscured by white-majority populations and institutions. Though some cemeteries, like the one on Old Durham Road, received significant attention, others have remained largely unknown.

Protecting what is found

Local history societies and private citizens have often painstakingly gathered newspaper clippings and carefully compiled lists that point to local burial grounds. These hyperlocal archives-within-archives were invaluable to my research. However, they can be difficult to access because these records are usually not digitized, and therefore, they can only be found in-person at the archive.

If we were to create a map of historic Black burial places that need protection, the archive that also needs to be examined is the land itself. During a September 2019 visit to Grey County, my wife and I searched for several hours to find the hidden cemetery of the Gant family.

This Black family was the centre of a small community in what was historically known as Normanby Township. Their tombstones were reduced to just a few decaying stones hidden by a pine plantation and accessible only from a narrow, unmarked opening off the road. This cemetery also was ploughed over; most of the stones were moved to a fencerow. Absentee landowners wanted the graves removed because of their supposed effect on property values. No plaque honours these families, and our attempts to ask locals their whereabouts yielded no results. We found the site virtually by accident. We looked at the road’s edge and eventually found a narrow pathway through the pines.  

Cemeteries like this one are places of magnified importance to human communities. They are part of the intimate stories we tell about the places both the living and the dead inhabit, as well as our relationships to those who have departed. But they’re also integral to our understanding of life, as scholar Robert Pogue Harrison argues in The Dominion of the Dead. He writes that “we cannot understand the…institution of places on the earth independently of the institution of burial.”

“A burial ground is, in these cases, the last vestige of presence on the land; it’s a kind of archive.”

William Felepchuk

This is apparent in the pattern of destruction, and then reclamation, of Black burial places in Ontario. First, the desecration of a burial ground, a site which is so universally recognized as central to our humanity, means that those to whom a site belongs were already dehumanized. Similarly, for those pushed from the land, such as the Black settlers who left the Old Durham Road, their dispossession is completed when the burial grounds, or any identifiable traces of their historic presence, are erased. Though outside the scope of this article, this is also true of countless Indigenous burial places across the continent, including in Saugeen Anishinaabek territory. A burial ground is, in these cases, the last vestige of presence on the land; it’s a kind of archive.

Burial places such as these are symbols of continuity and of presence. Burial grounds are archives of historic placemaking and ongoing connection, often in places where the living may no longer be a daily feature of the landscape.

We must be diligent about preserving documentation of historic Black cemeteries in Ontario. In the U.S., there have been calls for the inauguration of “a national park network of overlooked gravesites” and an African American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, similar to the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act .

My research argues the importance of establishing similar legislation in Canada to recognize the special status Black historic burial grounds have for contemporary Black communities and society as a whole. A first step is to support citizen-led efforts to preserve sites important to Black history in Ontario. These include ongoing initiatives for Negro Creek Road, the Old Durham Road Black Pioneer Cemetery, at least 18 cemeteries in Essex County, and protests related to sites in Haldimand County. The identification of these sites and others like them needs to be coordinated and publicly supported. Private citizens and local communities should not be entirely responsible for the difficult work of preservation. These burial grounds should be part of a provincially or nationally preserved archive of the land, before they are lost forever.

When a Black cemetery is destroyed or left to decay, it furthers the erasure of Black communities in Canada. It reinforces the mythology of rural Canada as being, in the past and even today, solely inhabited by white settlers. To preserve these sites is to tend to a physical archive on the land, a place to which present-day communities can point and say, we were here too.

About the author

William Leonard Felepchuk is a son, father, husband, brother, and neighbour from Ottawa, in the watershed of the Kichi Sibi, on unceded Algonquin territory. His ancestors came from Ukraine, Russia, England and Italy, and from Protestant communities in what is now Northern Ireland. He is a historical geographer with a PhD from the School of Indigenous and Canadian Studies at Carleton University. William is a co-founder of Archipel Research and Consulting, an Indigenous-owned social science, historical and equity research company, where he is currently a senior research advisor. He is a member of the Black | Indigenous 100s Collective and a co-author of their recently published volume Say, Listen: Writing as Care.

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