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- The cemetery was sold as part of farmland and the site was ploughed into a potato field in the 1930s. In 1989, the four headstones making up the current monument were recovered from a pile of discarded rocks in the field, after descendants of the farmer gave a local committee permission to recover whatever they could of the cemetery.
www.thestar.com/news/canada/grey-highlands-committee-working-to-turn-black-pioneer-cemetery-into-national-historic-site/article_18ac7820-5ae2-5ebb-88ae-6627c1cec9a3.html
Jul 2, 2021 · The Old Durham Road Black Pioneer Cemetery that sits along Grey Road 4 just outside of Priceville in Grey Highlands consists of several memorial plaques and a monument that depicts the...
- Ontario's Priceville was a small, thriving Black community ...
In 2015, the headstones became part of a permanent monument...
- Ontario's Priceville was a small, thriving Black community ...
- A Stop on The Underground Railroad
- Once-Thriving Black Community Gone
- Debate Over Priceville's Namesake
- Disturbing Revelations
- A History Not Known to Many
- Hiding Black Heritage
- 'Honour That History and Lift It Up'
- A Success For A Short Time
In the 19th century, Collingwood — like the town of Owen Sound, about 65 kilometres to the west — was a terminus for theUnderground 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, ...
According to the census of 1851, every 50-acre lot along Durham Road in Priceville was settled by a Black family with parents born in the U.S. but most children born in Upper Canada, says Nancy Matthews, chair of the heritage committee of the municipality of Grey Highlands. The road was a key settlement route surveyed in the late 1840s that ran fro...
According to Black oral history, Priceville took its name from Colonel Price, a Black Loyalist soldier credited with having founded the settlement who was most likely a private but went by the first name Colonel. Price brought with him a group of Black settlers, but there's disagreement as to when exactly he arrived — and there have been questions ...
Most Canadians were introduced to the Priceville story in 2000, when the National Film Board documentarySpeakers for the Deadwas released. The film, by Black Canadian filmmakers David (Sudz) Sutherland and Jennifer Holness, shone a light on the desecration of Priceville's Black cemetery and revealed other inconvenient truths. In addition to the sto...
For Priceville residents Doug and Mary Harrison, watching Speakers for the Deadprovoked complicated feelings. On the one hand, they were disturbed to learn about the extent of their community's racist past, but they were also troubled at the way in which the village they loved was being maligned. After raising their family in the Greater Toronto Ar...
Over the decades, the erasure of Priceville's Black past led the remaining descendants of the Black settlers to deny or obscure their bloodlines and try to blend into the white community. Today, there is still a Black community in Priceville; it's just mostly white. "There are Black descendants in the Priceville area who aren't Black," said Norquay...
In the years since the release of Speakers for the Dead, Norquay has played an increasingly active role alongside other residents in trying to tell the story of Black Canadian settlers. "The film galvanized me," she said. "Speakers for the Deadis absolutely crucial to Canada's story." In the years following the film, an annual Black History Month e...
For Natasha Henry, president of the Ontario Black History Society, Priceville is an example that disrupts the myth of Canada as a welcoming refuge for Black people fleeing slavery. "Black settlers did find a measure of freedom," she said, "[but] there's a question as to whether it measured up with their vision of freedom." Harding-Davis says that a...
Jul 3, 2021 · It is estimated that in 1849, 16 Black families claimed lots on Durham Road and buried their dead at the corner of Larkin Alverson’s 50-acre lot, which is where the cemetery site sits today. In the 1930s, a farmer buried the tombstones of the Black cemetery to make way for a potato patch.
Feb 25, 2022 · Priceville’s Black settler history was nearly lost to time. The settler community’s cemetery, or burial ground, had been created in the sandy corner of settler Larkin Alverson’s 50-acre plot, which he received around 1850. There had been as many as 80 graves in the burial ground.
The Old Durham Road Pioneer Cemetery, in Artemesia Township, is the final resting place for some of the first black families to settle in this farming community, around 100 miles north-west of Toronto, Ontario. Located south-east of the village of Priceville, the cemetery is surrounded by rolling fields that have changed little over the years.
Jun 2, 2021 · Located just east of Priceville in Grey Highlands, the cemetery and the Old Durham Road School across the road from it mark what was once a vibrant and successful Black settlement from the late 1840s.
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Feb 28, 2021 · Pieces of the area’s Black history had to be unearthed and rescued from a pile of rocks more than 30 years ago. They were headstones discarded on the side of a farmers field that had once been a pioneer cemetery used by a nearby Black settlement.
