You know those ghost signs on old brick buildings? Faded paint for a shop that closed a century ago, still readable if you look up at the right moment.

Our region's Black history is like that. It has been here the whole time. Most of us just never looked up. I started reading about it this week because August 1 is Emancipation Day, and I realized I could not have told you what that had to do with us. Turns out the answer is a lot.

Slavery existed here. Not only in the American South, not only in the Caribbean. The Quebec historian Marcel Trudel counted roughly 4,200 enslaved people in what is now Canada between 1671 and 1831, about two thirds of them Indigenous and one third of African descent.

On August 1, 1834, the Slavery Abolition Act took effect across most of the British Empire. That included us. Ontario recognized August 1 as Emancipation Day in 2008. Canada made it official in 2021, and August is now widely marked as Emancipation Month.

So it is not a borrowed holiday. It is ours.

North of Elmira, past St. Jacobs, there used to be a place called the Queen's Bush Settlement.

Back then the land between Waterloo County and Lake Huron had not been surveyed. Nobody had drawn lines on it or put a price on it. Starting around 1820, freedom seekers came up from the United States, picked a spot, and cleared the forest by hand.

By 1840 there were somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 Black people living there, one of the largest Black settlements in Upper Canada. Today it is farm fields and three small villages: Glen Allan, Hawkesville and Wallenstein. You have probably driven through them without knowing.

They built their own churches. Reverend Samuel H. Brown came from Maryland, took the oath of allegiance in 1842, was assigned to the Queen's Bush in 1844 and preached there for more than forty years. He put up a church on his own farm. By 1862 it had 165 members and about 60 children in Sunday school. There was a cemetery in the churchyard, and that is where he was buried when he died in 1881. The last service in that church was held around 1918. The building stood abandoned for decades before it was torn down.

They built their own schools too, with help from American missionaries. This is the detail I cannot stop thinking about. One school, called Mount Pleasant, was a log cabin eight feet by fourteen. That is smaller than a parking spot. It worked as a classroom, a home and an orphanage all at the same time. A teacher named Fidelia Coburn came all the way from Maine to start it in 1843.

In one school year in the mid 1840s, 225 children were enrolled across the settlement's two little mission schools.

On August 1, 1863, about 2,500 people gathered in Hawkesville to celebrate Emancipation Day. Black residents of the Queen's Bush came down, and they were joined by people and dignitaries from across Waterloo County.

There was a sermon in the town hall, then a procession through the village led by the Berlin Band, which is Kitchener's own. At Temperance Island there were speeches, and they served 1,500 meals.

Hawkesville is tiny. Picture 2,500 people in it.

And it was not a one off. Elmira, Waterloo, Wallenstein and Hawkesville held Emancipation Day celebrations regularly into the late 1890s. The Waterloo one in 1894 drew people from all over southwestern Ontario.

Sophia Pooley was stolen from her parents when she was seven years old. She was held by Joseph Brant, and at twelve she was sold for one hundred dollars to a man in Ancaster. She lived with him seven years, then ran. When Benjamin Drew interviewed her in 1856 she was over ninety. "Then I lived in what is now Waterloo," she told him. She married a man named Robert Pooley here. By the end she could not work anymore, and she said she found plenty of people in the bush to help her a good deal.

Peter Edward Susand was born in 1802, escaped slavery in the American South, and farmed fifty acres in the Queen's Bush with his wife Elizabeth Liddicoat. He was known as a speaker. In 1847 he chaired a committee on the education of Black children, and his line survives in the abolitionist paper The True Wesleyan: "Let us cherish the means of education."

In the 1850s he moved his family to Berlin and became the town's first barber. His shop was on Ontario Street, then called Foundry Street, near the Red Lion Inn. He later ran the Meridian Coffee Salon and a grocery. He loved Shakespeare enough to name two of his children Lavinia and Othello, and in 1856 he published The Prose and Poetical Works of Peter Edward Susand. No copy is known to survive.

Levi Carroll was born into slavery in Maryland and came here on the Underground Railroad. His wife Lucretia and their young son Charles joined him. The family lived in an old log schoolhouse on King Street, and after seventeen years in it he bought the land under it in 1860. That schoolhouse was built in 1820. It has been sitting in Waterloo Park since 1894, and it is the oldest surviving log schoolhouse in Ontario. You have almost certainly walked past it.

John Brown ran from Virginia and settled in north Wellesley in 1843 with his wife Lucinda Green, who had been born free around 1818. By the 1851 census they had eleven children. He farmed 120 acres. He died on May 1, 1872. In September 2019 one of his descendants, Keith Bell, travelled up from the United States to stand on the land his family cleared.

This is the hard part.

In the 1840s the government ordered the district surveyed and then put the land up for sale. The settlers had spent decades clearing it. Now they were told to buy it, and they had no cash.

There was pressure on top of that. Norman Hisson, a descendant who lived in Glen Allan into the 1970s, told the Kitchener-Waterloo Record in 1979 that land agents and others moved the surveyors' stakes at night, and that only a couple of the original settlers came out of the land deals without being cheated one way or another.

Residents sent four separate petitions asking for easier payment terms. It mostly did not work. The exodus started around 1850. Families scattered to Guelph, Berlin, Owen Sound, Collingwood, Niagara, St. Catharines, Chatham and Buxton. Mount Hope school closed in 1849, Mount Pleasant in 1853. By 1864 only a few Black families were left in Wellesley and Peel townships.

That is how a community of 2,000 people becomes a field you drive past.

Cambridge has its own version of this. More than 50 Black residents lived in Galt in the mid 1800s: a preacher, several barbers, firemen, and women working in Galt households. An abolitionist and freedom seeker came to lecture there in 1857. A lot of people assume Cambridge's first Black residents arrived in the 1960s. Off by more than a century.

Drive to the Hawkesville plaque. Corner of Broadway Street and Temperance Road, put up in 2023 by the Wellesley Township Heritage and Historical Society for the 160th anniversary of that 1863 picnic. There was also a provincial plaque for the settlement itself at Glen Allan Park, unveiled in 2008, but it went missing in July 2025, so do not drive out for that one yet.

Walk in Waterloo Park. Go find the log schoolhouse and think about the Carroll family living in it.

Take a tour. Stroll Walking Tours runs two Black history walking tours in August, on purpose, because August is Emancipation Month. "Black Presence in Berlin" covers downtown Kitchener with Peggy Plet. "Black Cambridge: Footsteps to Freedom" covers historic Galt with Dawn Gill.

Rhythm & Blues Cambridge. This Black women led nonprofit has an annual Emancipation Day celebration, registration closed as of now.

Read the local history. Linda Brown-Kubisch wrote the definitive book, The Queen's Bush Settlement: Black Pioneers, 1839-1865 Kitchener Public Library has copies.

The sign was always up there. This weekend is a good excuse to look up.

written with love by,
your friendly neighbourhood goose