Why did a group of black families mysteriously appear at Yonge and Elgin Mills Road 150 years ago?

Was it murder? Riots? The underground railway?

And why did they choose Richmond Hill?

Guylaine Petrin hopes to find out — and she will be sharing what she has learned at Richmond Hill Public Library this weekend as part of Black History Month.

Petrin, a Toronto librarian, genealogist and historical researcher, stumbled upon the mystery while researching the history of black communities in Toronto.

She’d heard rumours of three brothers living in Richmond Hill who’d fought in the civil war, and contacted the public library’s local historian, Cameron Knight.

While Knight wasn’t aware of the brothers, he did recall an elderly resident, George Gould, whose father reminisced about a black family living in a cabin near Yonge and Elgin Mills. This family, the old-timer said, had escaped via the underground railroad.

When highways were being built in the area in the 1990s, archeologists uncovered remnants of a log cabin, pieces of porcelain and broken pipes dating back to a time period between 1843 and 1871.

Could these artifacts be linked to the fugitive slaves?

Petrin thinks so.

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She found the brothers — Richard, William and John Henry — in early pension files; they were born free in New York and moved to Canada in 1851 because their widowed mother, Sarah Armstrong, was afraid they’d be kidnapped and sold into slavery in the south.

The Armstrongs — mother, three sons and two daughters — along with another family and a young couple, fled north, to a cabin on the west side of Yonge, just north of Elgin Mills.

“George got it absolutely right, bless his soul,” Petrin says. “They probably thought he was a doddering old man … but his memory had been good.”

But the answers raised even more questions: why did these families move en masse to Canada? Why Richmond Hill, and why then?

Petrin is still trying to solve this mystery.

She is convinced that something violent happened to cause this group of people to suddenly flee New York to Canada.

The year of their immigration — 1851 — holds a clue. In 1850 the U.S. enacted the controversial Fugitive Slave Law and it caused great upheaval in free black communities in the north.

Organized posses began “reclaiming” black people, shipping them to the south, and whether they really were runaways or not wasn’t all that relevant, since anyone captured this way could be sold on the black market, Petrin says.

It was open season, even in the “free” place like Toronto, where blacks could be enticed with promises of jobs, knocked on the head, tossed in a boat and sold into slavery.

Some blacks rebelled, as happened in the Christiana Pennsylvania riots. Petrin wonders if something similar happened in New York causing the refugees to flee to Richmond Hill. Is this how Sarah Armstrong’s husband died?

 “Whatever event made these families all rush to Canada, it wasn’t good, definitely involved dead people… Something fairly traumatic happened. It wasn’t just ‘oh, Canada’s such a nice place’.”

They would have seen Richmond Hill as an appealing place — far enough from the border to escape the bloodhounds and slave catchers, with good farmland, saw mills and grist mills offering jobs in the winter.

Another tragedy seems to have provided these black immigrants further opportunity: the murder of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery.

The notorious murders in 1843 — that spawned the novel Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood — left Kinnear’s land in limbo. While two prominent Richmond Hill property owners wrangled over it in a lawsuit, the black settlers leased the land — probably, thanks to the stigma, dirt cheap, Petrin says.

Guylaine Petrin once panned for gold. It was a lot of work for a nugget. This research, she says, is similar, hours and hours spent pouring over a ledger, sometimes finding that bit of gold that makes story or another link in the narrative.

The story of Richmond Hill’s slave refugees needs another five years to research, she says, and at some point she hopes to return to tell us the complete tale, but in the meantime she says she’s gratified to uncover the story of average folks whose lives are easily forgotten.

Her research, specializing in marginalized people in Upper Canada, has shown her history is a lot more complex and nuanced than what is learned in school.

“What we choose to remember and forget is political.”

She wants those of different ethnic origins to see they are not “just a minority in a big white Canada” and to know that they, too, have a place in history.

Often, what’s memorialized are destructive events such as wars, “but there are a lot of cool stories out there”.

Like the story of the forgotten black settlement she is unearthing in Richmond Hill, what makes this country, Petrin says, are those who overcome the odds, strangers in a strange land, building a community.

To watch a YouTube video, go to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qQlXCKOAy_o

Fact Box

GOOD TO KNOW:

What: Richmond Hill and the Underground Railroad

Where: Central Library, 1 Atkinson St.

When: Saturday, Feb. 14, 10:30 a.m to noon

Cost: $5 plus HST

Register: 905-884-9288 ext. 321

Kim Zarzour is an award-winning veteran journalist for more than 30 years and author of several non-fiction books. She has been education reporter and feature writer with The Toronto Star and is currently investigative/analysis reporter with yorkregion.com in York Region. You can find her on Facebook or Twitter @KimZarzour

Tags: Community, News