“Let’s Talk” on February 18th

Please join our friends at Bolton United Church on Friday Feb 18, 2022, for another “Let’s Talk” session. The event starts at 6:30 for dinner via Zoom. At 7 pm, we’ll listen to Guest Speaker Karolyn Smardz Frost, PhD, on the topic of “Digging the Underground Railroad in Canada“.

Canadians are proud that our nation was the main terminus of the fabled Underground Railroad. Yet we know little about the lives of the African Americans who chose to become African Canadians in the years before the US Civil War. Many had been denied literacy while enslaved in the American South. Others remain voiceless in the historical record for reasons of poverty and underemployment, systemic racism and sometimes a lack of descendants to carry the tale of their courage and sacrifice on to later generations.

Archaeology helps peoples of the past speak to us, through clues to their experience that they left behind. In 1985, archaeologist Karolyn Smardz Frost and her team discovered the first Underground Railroad site dug in Canada. Excavations in a downtown Toronto schoolyard brought to light evidence about freedom seekers Lucie and Thornton Blackburn, who started Toronto’s first taxi business. Their 1831 quest for liberty had inspired Canada’s first, articulated refugee reception policy, and remains foundational to our extradition laws to this day.

It was thirty years before another dig would investigate Toronto’s role in the Underground Railroad. In 2015, the foundations of the Toronto home of freedom seeker Cecelia Jane Reynolds were recovered at the site of the new Ontario Courthouse. Cecelia was just 15 years old when she fled American slavery via the elegant Cataract House hotel in Niagara Falls, New York. Karolyn, who has written award-winning biographies of both the Blackburns and Cecelia Jane Reynolds, is now working with University of Buffalo archaeologists to recover evidence at the site of the former Cataract House hotel. There, a seasonal staff of African American and African Canadian waiters, chambermaids and porters once operated the busiest Underground Railroad station on the Niagara frontier.

All welcome!

See link details below, or visit www.boltonunitedchurch.com

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