to keep up the business. In other instances, free Black women were hired as servants to work in bars. In some cases Blacks were denied service or were subject to restricted seating, and so at times the tavern also became as site of resistance when individuals of African descent challenged these unjust practices. Another intriguing aspect is that some well-known taverns in places such as Toronto, St. Catharines, and Chatham were owned by Black men.29
Earlier communal Emancipation Day celebrations in Sandwich took place at Park Farm between 1838 and 1856, located on what is now the city-owned Prince Road Park. This property was the estate of Colonel John Prince who had received support from the local Black inhabitants in his successful bid for a seat in the Legislative Council. Apparently they believed he ordered the execution of four American rebel supporters of William Lyon Mackenzie because they killed a man of African descent during the course of an attack in the Rebellion of 1837. Annual festivities ceased being held on his estate after Prince voiced racist beliefs over the steady stream of escapees from American slavery, which estranged his Black voters and contributed to his political defeat.30
By this time Sandwich had become a centre of fugitive-led abolition activity. Henry Bibb founded the Voice of the Fugitive, Canada’s first antislavery newspaper, in Sandwich in 1851. Bibb, like hundreds of other self-emancipated slaves, relocated to this area because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act. Along with several community-building initiatives, he and his wife Mary were instrumental in organizing Emancipation Day observances in Sandwich. The celebration in 1851, held at the Stone Barracks, was attended by hundreds “parading up” from Amherstburg, “many of whom were dressed in the red jacket uniform, who marched into Sandwich after a band of military music looking as bold and courageous as John Bull himself.”31 Visitors from Detroit sailed across the Detroit River in the steamboat Alliance. Participants in the long parade included the Fugitives Union Society, whose anniversary and annual meeting was held that afternoon. The county’s high sheriff opened the assembly, followed by regional speakers including J.J. Fisher of Toronto, George Cary of Dawn, Samuel Ringgold Ward,32 and other American lecturers. The committee passed two motions, the first being to publish the days’ proceedings in the Voice of the Fugitive and the second to hold the next year’s event in Malden, but it was held in Windsor instead.33
Proceeds of the sales of admission tickets as well as the purchases of lunch, dinner, and refreshments went towards the construction of a brick building for the Baptist church on Crown-designated land located on West Peter Street. The building project for the Sandwich First Baptist Church, initially organized in 1840, was completed in 1851. Mary Bibb was one of the fundraising managers: “Dinner will be furnished by the Ladies for twenty-five cents per ticket. — Refreshments may be had during the day and supper in the evening. The proceeds will be appropriated towards erecting a Baptist church.”34
Sandwich Baptist Church was one of the community institutions that were created by fugitives. The church not only provided spiritual assurance, but physical security as well. Sandwich Baptist was a terminal on the Underground Railroad. There was a secret room beneath the church where escapees were hidden whenever the arrival of bounty hunters was announced by the ringing of a bell. Church parishioners kept lookout during services, as that was when bounty hunters liked to make surprise invasions. If alerted, fugitives escaped through a trap door in the floor of the church. Additionally, a tunnel running from the end of an underground passage connected the secret room to the nearby banks of the Detroit River.35
The August First commemorations also exposed the vast network of anti-slavery activists located across the continent. On his 1854 visit to Canada West, Levi Coffin, “president” of the Underground Railroad, attended Emancipation Day celebrations in the Maidstone area, which he described as, “a dense settlement of fugitives about eight miles south of Windsor.”36 He was part of a large group from Windsor, who, along with other guests, gathered at the schoolhouse run by Laura Haviland, a White Canadian-born Quaker, at the request of Henry Bibb and his Refugee Home Society in Sandwich. Invited speakers from Detroit delivered public addresses on a stage set up in a grove near the school. Coffin met and received many thanks from several freedom seekers he had assisted in their flight to Canada.37 In 1855, an estimated seven thousand people turned out at Prince’s Grove, the majority of them fugitives from American slavery, including thirteen who had been assisted to freedom by John Brown, a White revolutionary abolitionist from Kansas, and his son. Colonel Prince delivered remarks along with Eli Ford from Chicago. The evening galas were held in Windsor.38
However, by the 1890s, the direction and nature of Emancipation Day observances in Sandwich changed from a celebration of freedom, the maintenance of historic memories, and support of education to merriment and frivolity, so much so that leaders in the Black community, primarily church ministers, were calling for the event to be cancelled. What resulted were two different kinds of celebrations in the Windsor area, as described by the Windsor Evening Record in 1895. When celebrants from near and far arrived in Windsor, they split into two distinct groups: the first went to Walker’s Grove in Windsor and the second headed for Mineral Springs39 in Sandwich. The commemoration in Windsor was more serious in tone, focusing on spiritual and community prosperity through a steady schedule of lectures by notable local leaders such as Mayor Clarence Mason and Black alderman Robert Dunn. In contrast, the company in Sandwich did away with some of the traditional aspects of Emancipation Day in favour of having a good time by replacing them with lots of music, sporting activities, and barbecues.40
Colin McFarquhar, an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Waterloo, suggests that the separation occurred because slavery was in the remote past for too many of the attendees and few survivors were alive to tell the stories. Another reason he identifies is the decrease in speeches that recognized late freedom fighters and staunch abolitionists, resulting in the weakening of the collective memory that had been important in passing on shared historical experiences and cultural values.41
In the years immediately following, celebrations in Sandwich saw the introduction and growth of gambling, drinking, rowdy behaviour, and dance halls at Lagoon Park and surrounding venues. All of which became major problems, drawing complaints from both Black and White community leaders. In 1905, the mayor officially banned gambling and extra officers were hired to patrol the park grounds, instructing the police to arrest anyone who attempted to set up a game.42
Seven years later an association of Black church ministers appealed to the Sandwich town council to cancel the festivities, but they refused, perhaps because the stream of ten thousand people every summer brought an economic boom to the town. It is also interesting to note the change in tone of the media coverage of events. Previously, sermons and speeches were highlighted first at great length and the conduct of the crowd was always described as orderly. At the turn of the twentieth century the crap games, the arrests, and food were the main topics, with public addresses receiving little if any press, and the decorum that was highlighted favourably for the first sixty years of the celebration diminished greatly. Newspaper editors of the Windsor Evening Record joined in the chorus of unhappy Black voices calling for an end to the current trend of observances.
In 1913, the mayor of Sandwich, Edward Donnelly, announced that he would do his best to see that years’ celebration be the last because the event organizers refused to pay for the extra police officers that secured the event. His decision seems also to have been influenced by the pressure from the African-Canadian church ministers, coupled with the deterioration of the event.43
Interestingly, Mitchell Kachun, author of Festivals of Freedom, describes similar protests by African-American leaders about the change in objectives of the August First celebrations in the United States during the early 1900s. These leaders across North America wanted a separation of popular entertainment and commemorative events as the former threatened the spirit of Emancipation Day, and, by extension, the political movements in their respective communities. He argues that the shift was illustrative of a continental trend of increasing “commercialization
