Book shines a light on the Dawn Settlement

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Local author Marie Carter showcases her latest book, “In the Light of Dawn, The History and Legacy of a Black Canadian Community” that focuses on the Dawn Settlement in North Kent.

By Pam Wright
Local Journalism Initiative Reporter

Marie Carter was only six years old when she started to wonder what was going on down the road.

Now, more than half a century later, the child who grew up beside Uncle Tom’s Cabin has penned a book showcasing the pivotal role Dresden and the surrounding community played in Black and Canadian history.

Carter is currently preparing for the official launch of “In the Light of Dawn, The History and Legacy of a Black Canadian Community,” set for Feb. 8. It’s taking place at the Josiah Henson Museum of African Canadian History at Dresden, formerly known as Uncle Tom’s Cabin. She’ll be accompanied by Black historian Dr. Afua Cooper for a discussion about the community’s 200-year legacy of resistance to oppression.

“Some of the book is personal history,” Carter said in a recent interview with The Voice. “Some of it is history of the community and some is Black history. What I tried to do is make my experience of the land and people into a story that made sense to me.

“I’ve been interested in it all my life.”

The Josiah Henson Museum of African Canadian History in Dresden, formerly known as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, drew Marie Carter’s interest from a young age.

As the daughter of immigrant Flemish parents, Carter heard the story about Henson from her father Gus DeBruyn who had read Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin when he was a boy in Holland.

But as a youngster, Carter felt that pieces of the story didn’t quite fit with her experience. At the original site on what has been renamed Freedom Road, a white neighbour of Carters’ named William Chapple had purchased the Uncle Tom’s Cabin site. He turned it into a museum, charging 25 cents admission.

As children do, Carter kept pestering her parents with questions, so one day her mother slipped her a quarter and she went with her brother to see Uncle Tom’s Cabin for herself.

The experience of visiting the site and holding some of the artifacts in her hands, sparked Carter’s life-long quest to explore and subsequently write about local history.

What she discovered after more than 20 years of research differs from the Underground Railroad story that’s traditionally told.

Not every Black person who came to the Dresden area was a formerly enslaved person escaping in the night. Carter found out that early Black settlers – some of them prosperous Freemen – arrived years before Henson, the supposed founder of Dawn. The free people settled alongside white and Indigenous neighbours.

In the beginning, there was a co-existence of this diverse population, Carter said, until, with the influx of greater numbers of African-descent people, prejudicial and discriminatory practices entered the picture.

Her research revealed that Pennsylvania abolitionists William Whipple and Stephen Smith – the two richest Black men in America – came to Dawn and purchased dozens of properties. Carter also discovered that Dresden’s first doctor and real estate agent were both Black.

Traditional narratives about the Dawn Settlement assume that the settlement failed, a misconception that was due to its close association with the troubled British American Institute (BAI). Co-founded by Henson with other abolitionists, 300 acres were purchased by the BAI in 1841 with the goal of creating farming and manual education opportunities for Black refugees.

However, the BAI development was hindered by conflict in its management through the 1850s and ’60s leading to the perception it had failed. Carter concluded that resulting court challenges led to restructuring and the land was sold off mainly to white settlers and industrialists. By 1872, under what was called the Wilberforce Institute, these lands were absorbed into the newly incorporated town of Dresden and today they encompass much of the southwest corner of the town.

Things changed for the Dawn Settlement when the American Civil War ended in 1865. According to Carter,  many Black settlers decided to return to the U.S. to assist with efforts to promote Black rights in the Southern U.S. during the American Reconstruction.

Some stayed in the former Dawn Settlement, Carter said, and continued to play a role in the development of the community and the ongoing struggle for civil rights. Their legacy continues, she stressed, and is felt to this present day.

Carter’s experience as a writer began when she worked at the North Kent Leader newspaper in Dresden.

She continued in the job until she married and became a mother, and her writing took a different path.

Encouraged by her husband Jeff, who is also a writer, Carter started freelancing, eventually specializing in social justice reporting.

During that time, she also served on the board of Uncle Tom’s Cabin when it was purchased by the St. Clair Parkway Commission. Today it’s part of the Ontario Heritage Trust network.

Marie, along with her husband, took on the Trillium Trail Historical Walk project in Dresden. This led to Carter’s invitation to be part of the Promised Land project, probing the freedom and experience of Blacks in the Dawn Settlement and Chatham. Through the Promised Land initiative, Carter met Cooper, who later edited some of Carter’s submissions to an anthology of Promised Land Papers.

Carter continued to research, write and present her findings and hoped to bring it all together in a single volume. She finally set out to write a book draft during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“I became very aware of my own mortality and decided that I better get started if I was going to do it,” she said.

After presenting a draft to Cooper and asking for her opinion on its merits, she was surprised at an invitation to submit the manuscript to the University of Regina Press, which was launching a new Black studies series conceived by Cooper.

Five years later, “In the Light of Dawn” was published, and the book has been chosen as the first in The Henry and Mary Bibb Series in Black Canadian Studies which Cooper founded.

According to Carter the story is an inspirational one, of a 200-year continuum of contribution and resistance by people of African descent. That significance is evident in the later appearance of important civil rights activists such as Rosa Parks, who visited Dresden twice.

“You can see the foundational work of 19th-Century abolitionists in terms of community building and resistance to injustice running like a golden thread from generation to generation,” Carter explained. “It’s a story that should interest a broad audience, because of the intertwining of Black history with the broader history of white and Indigenous peoples in Canadian history.”

Carter hopes everyone will read the book.

“The richness of the story is mind boggling,” Carter stressed. ” There are so many stories with so many layers…it’s impossible to get it all in.”

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