A historic Alberta cemetery is being reclaimed to honour the Black pioneers who are buried there

Decades after a historic Alberta cemetery was reclaimed from the forest, a group of volunteers is preserving both the graves and the stories of the Black pioneers who were buried there.

Headstones will soon be placed to mark the burial plots of 13 men, women and children interred at the Bethel Baptist Cemetery, one of the last remaining traces of the once-thriving Black settlement of Campsie, Alta., about 135 kilometres northwest of Edmonton.

Descendents of the settler families are supporting the efforts of the Barrhead Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter-Day Saints and the Barrhead and District Family Community Support Services in restoring the cemetery and fundraising for the stone markers.

"I feel honoured," said Christine Beaver, whose father James was the community's last living descendant. "Because of their efforts, we're able to tell our story.

"If that cemetery had been allowed to ... become reclaimed by the forest, we wouldn't even be having this conversation." 

Her great-grandparents, James Moses Beaver and Hattie Beaver, were among the first Black settlers to arrive in Campsie. They donated the land where the cemetery now stands; a handful of original outbuildings still stand on the nearby property.

Her uncle, George Kenneth Beaver, is buried there. He died in 1940 a few days after being born. 

Campsie is an overlooked part of Alberta's past, said Deborah Beaver, Christine's sister. But its story deserves to be told as part of the contributions of Black settlers on the Prairies, she said. 

"This community hasn't really been given a whole bunch of recognition," said Beaver, the founder of Black Settlers of Alberta and Saskatchewan Historical Society. 

"Now, finally, it's coming to light. It's being recognized." 

Campsie was settled in the early 1900s when hundreds of African-Americans, fleeing escalating violence of newly enacted Jim Crow laws, left the United States and settled in the Canadian Prairies.

Enticed by the promise of free land, they came north by the hundreds. By 1911, about 1,000 had crossed the border.

They settled primarily in five isolated, rural communities closely connected by kinship and trade: Campsie, Junkins (now Wildwood, Alta.), Keystone (now Breton, Alta.), Pine Creek (now Amber Valley, Alta.), and Maidstone, Sask. 

About 40 settlers, many from Texas and Oklahoma, settled on homesteads in the Campsie area. Soon after arriving, they set to work building the Bethel Baptist Church. The cemetery was established the following year on a two-acre plot.