Written by John L. Hill

People living in large urban areas, I sense, have an idealized impression of rural living in communities such as Colborne, Ontario, about 100 miles east of Toronto, on the shores of Lake Ontario, the place in which I grew up. I suspect the reason is that people feel that life in a small town is insulation from racial discord that pervades urban areas. Residents of such communities perceive perfection and racial harmony exist and have always existed in their picturesque and tranquil communities. They have fostered much of that myth. It’s a form of “presentism,” a belief that present-day norms and attitudes have always been and will always be. A present-day belief is that slavery is wrong and must have always been considered immoral. Nonetheless, I have come to believe that slavery has deep roots in Canada; it was not always seen as a dehumanizing factor, and it has its modern equivalent in how we see prisoners.

For a boy growing up in the Village of Colborne, Ontario, Canada, a community and part of Cramahe Township in Northumberland County, my introduction to local history was, to say the least, whitewashed. In the classroom, I and my fellow students were taught that one of the early settlers was the town’s founder. His name was Joseph Keeler. We were told that the white frame house directly across the road from the southern tip of Colborne’s Victoria Park was the oldest in town and possibly built by a Keeler. The Keelers were also United Empire Loyalists. To us, the UEL label was synonymous with sainthood. After all, we have named a college and a parkway after the group: Loyalist College and The Loyalist Parkway.

United Empire Loyalists were generally wealthy inhabitants from the eastern part of the United States who lived comfortably and resented the disruption brought about by the American Revolutionary War. They fled to the British colony to the north of the United States to maintain their allegiance to the British Crown.

It wasn’t until half a century later that I became aware of the truth about the Keeler family and got a better perspective on its contribution to the local history of the community where I grew up.

The Keeler family was indeed Loyalist. Like other families who found themselves on the losing side of the American Revolution, it was necessary to pack their belongings and relocate to the British territory to the north. Some of the belongings were their slaves. Many of the loyal settlers had their slaves confiscated after the war, while others lost them to grants of freedom for those enslaved people who fought alongside the rebels. It was time for many of those arriving in the Canadian backwoods to replenish their human stock. It was convenient to do so since drovers brought enslaved people and horses north of the border for resale.

I later discovered that one of my forefathers, Nazareth Hill, was considered a hero for standing up against a group of American rebels fighting for independence. He withstood a siege of canon fire and ultimately took rebel prisoners, saving local cattle from being butchered to feed the rebel forces. Nonetheless, the rebels eventually succeeded in their independence movement, and British sympathizers such as Grandpa Naz had to escape.

He was seen in Canada as UEL and was granted 40 to 100 acres of land near Picton, another Lake Ontario community to the east. It would require considerable human labour to clear and farm that land. Although no documentation has been uncovered, it is likely Grandpa Naz was also an enslaver. The section of southern Ontario from Kingston at the eastern end of Lake Ontario and westward to Northumberland had to be cleared, cabins erected, and fields tended. Unsurprisingly, much of the work was done with slave labour. Then, what is now a large part of the Province of Ontario was known as Upper Canada.

It may be helpful to understand that the practice of slavery was a burning question as the eighteenth century was drawing to a close. Upper Canada’s first Lieutenant Governor, John Graves Simcoe, was a fierce opponent of slavery. Simcoe reported to Henry Dundas, the Home Secretary in Prime Minister William Pitt’s government in England. Dundas was a Scottish lawyer and politician and one of the most potent and trusted Ministers in the Pitt cabinet. He was supportive of Simcoe’s anti-slavery position. Yet he was also a politician. He understood that the immediate effect of a total abolition of slavery would cause economic havoc for plantations and their wealthy owners who supported the Pitt government. Dundas bowed to their pressure and amended a 1792 resolution that would have abolished the practice. The practice of owning slaves was so widespread that the bill proposing its abolition in 1793 was watered down to ban further importation of slaves and directing that all slaves be freed upon attaining the age of 25 when their usefulness for hard labour or child rearing was declining. Dundas was ridiculed for his position and called “the Great Tyrant.” The delay in slavery’s abolition caused 630,000 people to wait more than a decade for their relative freedom.

One of Simcoe’s opponents was Hazelton Spencer, who represented Lennox, Hastings, and Northumberland Counties and was a slave owner in his own right.

Nonetheless, attitudes in Upper Canada changed rapidly, even in Northumberland. Five years later, in 1798, a bill to restore slave importation was defeated. This time, one of the most vocal opponents was David McGregor Rogers of Haldimand Township, who now represented Northumberland. Rogers strove to end the practice of slave ownership. Slave ownership, though contentious, was still flourishing.

Against this backdrop, the Keeler family made their way and livelihood in Upper Canada. Joseph Keeler was wealthy and made several trips to Upper Canada with families who settled in Haldimand and Cramahe Townships, where Colborne is located. Joseph Keeler was a slave owner in Vermont but lost his slaves before heading north, probably acquiring replacement slaves in New York.

However, by the 1820s, slave ownership was largely phased out. It was cheaper to use indentured help from Europe hired for the short planting and harvesting season than to maintain a landowner’s workforce year to year.

Joseph Keeler’s extended family included a brother or cousin, Eli Keeler. It was Eli who, in 1824, sold a young mulatto boy named Tom, about fifteen years old, to William Bell of Belleville. Like so many other Loyalists, Bell had taken up occupancy in New York State before heading north. He settled in Kingston but moved to Belleville, where he opened a store in Quinte, taught school, and held municipal office. When Bell was sixty-six, advancing age necessitated help around the home. Bell’s daughter, Amelia, who ran the Grafton Inn a few miles west of Colborne, likely alerted her father that Eli Keeler was willing to sell Tom. Eli had trained Tom with several marketable skills and could be counted on to help bring extra income to the Bell household. A deal was struck. It was likely the last slave sale in Upper Canada. It took place in Cramahe Township. Bell purchased Tom for seventy-five dollars. In today’s dollars, the price seems low, but in 1824, a small log house could be built for forty dollars. Tom was seen simply as an item of property.

Tom would have been emancipated on turning twenty-five in 1834, but in 1833, slavery was abolished throughout the British Empire. History does not tell us what became of Tom. The Keeler family had conducted, if not the last, at least one of the last slave sales in Canada.

Tom’s sale may have been a “last” for Cramahe, but the Village of Colborne, now due to reorganization part of Cramahe Township, can also claim a “first’”

In the 1950s, Colborne had a baseball team participating in the Lakeshore League with other towns. The league consisted of players representing several other towns in the vicinity. Because of the village’s small size and limited talent pool, Colborne enhanced its league standings by hiring young athletes from the American South, usually two per summer season, to join the team. It was a summer job for these young black men who were paid and housed at the Brunswick Hotel on Colborne’s main street.

My father, Lorne, joined the executive of the baseball club, importing talented young athletes. It was seasonal employment, allowing the recruits to profit from playing a sport they loved. Those young ballplayers must have felt very alone being the only black men in a white rural community. My dad invited the imported talent to our home for breakfast on Sunday morning. I recall sitting across the table from these impressive athletes, listening to their tales of growing up in the Jim Crow South and being fascinated by their accents. At the end of an extended meal that was mostly conversation, I would request the men to autograph my baseball. I recall the impressive penmanship of “Carl Higginbottom” and “Leo Myles.”

The last of these “imports” was an exceptional athlete named Bob Turner. Turner was born in South Bound Brook, New Jersey in 1926. Before coming to Colborne in 1950, he earned a Bachelor of Physical Education degree from New York University. Most Colborne residents had probably not finished high school. He had also racked up an impressive resume of athletic achievements – playing with the Harlem Globe Trotters in 1946 and signed by the Chicago White Sox in 1948-49. During a four-year stint in the US. Army, he became a recreation director. It was expected he would play only one season with Colborne. But Bob Turner decided to stay on after his summer contract and was hired to become the municipality’s first Recreation Director. Indeed, he became the first black Recreation Director in Ontario and Canada.

Bob Turner organized athletic events for the village youth and was instrumental in forming the Colborne Band and Baton Corp., dressed in blue and gold marching uniforms. The Corp developed a glowing reputation in southern Ontario. It marched onto the field on the opening day of a Toronto Maple Leaf ball game, the precursor to today’s Blue Jays. The Band and Baton Corp even received an invitation to march in the Rose Parade in Pasadena, California.

But as the 1950s drew to a close, old racial resentment surfaced. Some residents were critical of the fact that Bob Turner, a black man, had a wife who was white. The sentiment against miscegenation was not widespread, but it was clear that the racist sentiments we identified with the United States South had local adherents. We were not so far removed from the slave-holding days as we gave ourselves credit for. Turner packed his bags and moved to Cornwall, Ontario, where he became Recreation Director in a much larger centre. Bob Turner died suddenly while undergoing a minor operation at a Cornwall hospital in 1960. His heart stopped beating during surgery. When he left for Cornwall, people in Colborne and Cramahe forgot his significant contribution to town sports.

Years later, Colborne built a new skating, hockey, and sports arena. The town needed a name for its new sports facility. One would have thought that the name would honour a local sports figure. Not so. It settled on “The Keeler Centre”. Portraits of the Keelers are proudly displayed on the walls of the Keeler Centre complex.

Some will consider the Keeler family, the founders of the village where I grew up, to be slave owners and slave traders and consider them racists. Is racism systemic? Was it part of the culture commonly accepted in their day? Racism is another type of dehumanization. It may be so commonplace in society that no one sees it as wrong.

Today’s “cancel culture” would have us judge those who came before us by the social norms and mores accepted in modern society. We forget that those we regard as heroes may have a checkered past. Even the “great emancipator” Abraham Lincoln would not likely pass muster. In 1858, he said, “I will say then that I am not, nor ever have been, in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the black and white races.”

A century and a half ago, it was not considered deplorable to be a slave owner. The crime was allocated to those enslaved people who ran away from their servitude. Times change, and so do our attitudes. Owning another human as a piece of property would today be considered intolerable. Escaping enslavement would be regarded as noble. An ongoing problem is that many expect present-day conditions and attitudes to be the same in the past as they are now and ever shall be.

There is no demand to change the name of the sports complex in Colborne because the Keeler family were slave traders, nor should we try to erase history. Dehumanization continued in the past and will continue if we are bold enough to see it.

The Keeler family will be regarded as instrumental in turning a heavily forested settlement into a rural community. Bob Turner, the first black recreation director who invigorated sporting life in the community, is all but forgotten. The fact that UEL families were heavily involved with slavery and that a Keeler was involved in the last slave sale is just a dirty little secret.

Text © John L. Hill