Ontario's Priceville was a small, thriving Black community — until it wasn't

Carolynn and Sylvia Wilson have been on the front lines of preserving and keeping alive Black history in Canada for a good part of their lives.

Born and raised in Collingwood, Ont., where they still live, the sisters are active members of the Heritage Community Church, established 152 years ago in the historically Black working-class district of the southwestern Ontario town.

"We've become a place of refuge," Sylvia said. "A lot of people of colour from different cultures or countries have arrived in Collingwood, and people will say, 'Have you been to the little coloured church?' Well, we're not just a coloured church. We're a beautiful grey brick. But inside, we accept everyone, because we know what it's like not to be accepted."

Carolynn, a jovial 73-year-old retired elementary school and special education teacher, is a few years older, but the bespectacled 67-year-old Sylvia, an artist and music educator, is several inches taller. Warm, vivacious and comfortable in their own skin, the two women exude grace. 

The Wilsons see themselves as speakers for the dead, committed to unearthing Black Canadian stories. For decades, they've served as caretakers of the church their ancestors built, and they now own and curate the Sheffield Park Black History and Cultural Museum in nearby Clarksburg.

The museum, founded by the sisters' uncle, Howard Sheffield, in 1990, contains an extensive collection spread over 16 buildings that showcases the history of Black settlers in Grey and Simcoe counties and throughout southwestern Ontario.

The sisters are proud of their family's roots in the region. 

"Richard Sheffield, who is our great-grandfather, was born in 1855 here in Collingwood before the town was incorporated," Sylvia said. "We are the seventh generation of direct descendants of Black Canadians in this area."

Some of their family ties are in Priceville, a village of 200 people located on Saugeen Ojibway territory about 60 kilometres southwest of Collingwood, in Grey County. In the 1850s, Priceville was home to a vibrant Black community, but it had all but disappeared by the 1880s. Then, decades later, its Black cemetery was desecrated and its Black history receded farther into the past, forgotten and unacknowledged.

In the 19th century, Collingwood — like the town of Owen Sound, about 65 kilometres to the west — was a terminus for the Underground Railroad. The secret network, made up of Black, white and Indigenous volunteers, helped between 30,000 and 40,000 formerly enslaved African Americans escape to Canada — where slavery remained legal until Aug. 1, 1834, when it was abolished by the British Empire.

Following the War of 1812, Black veterans who fought with the British were given land grants in Oro Township, near Lake Simcoe, in recognition of their service. Black folks also founded communities across Upper Canada (Ontario), in Amherstburg, Chatham, the Dawn Settlement near Dresden, the Wilberforce Settlement near Lucan and the Elgin Settlement in Buxton.

Between 1820 and 1850, around 1,500 free and formerly enslaved Black people settled in the vast area called the Queen's Bush, which stretched from Waterloo County to Lake Huron. One of the other places in the Queen's Bush that was settled by Black freedom seekers like the Wilsons' great-great-great-great grandfather, James Handy, was Priceville.

"They were coming [to Canada] for hope. But you have to remember, too, Canada had slaves as well," Sylvia Wilson said. 

"So, when we think about freedom seekers coming from the American states across the border to the Canadian provinces and that they were free with no more worries or tribulations — not true. Some of the treatment they received here in Canada was harsher than what they received in the northern free states of the United States."