Finding Thomas Green: Freedom Seekers in the Archaeological Record

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Bridging Connections and Communities: 19th-Century Black Settlement in North America" , at the 2020 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The City of St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada has a long history of African-Canadian settlement that began in the early 19th century. As an Underground Railroad stop, St. Catharines was home to Harriet Tubman for a time in the mid-19th century; visited by abolitionists John Brown and Frederick Douglass. A CRM project completed in 2015 in St. Catharines near the British Methodist Episcopal Church helped to reveal vestiges of an early black community in the archaeological record. This neighbourhood emerged in the early 19th century and was largely populated by freedom-seekers from the southeastern United States, many of whom arrived in St. Catharines via the Underground Railroad. Artifacts recovered from the site indicated a Euro-Canadian settler occupation and required in-depth research to reveal the historic occupants of the property that could not be learned from the material record alone.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2020   •
• Bridging Connections and Communities: 19th-Century Black Settlement in North America

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Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 846