North Buxton

rdf:langString North Buxton

rdf:langString North Buxton

rdf:langString North Buxton

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rdf:langString Buxton National Historic Site and Museum, South Buxton, Ontario .jpg

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rdf:langString CAN ON Chatham-Kent#Canada Southern Ontario

rdf:langString Map of Southern Ontario with a dot at the location of North Buxton

rdf:langString dispersed rural community

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rdf:langString North Buxton is a dispersed rural community located in Southwestern Ontario, Canada. It was established in 1849 as a community for and by former African-American slaves who escaped to Canada to gain freedom. Rev. William King, a Scots-Irish/American Presbyterian minister and abolitionist, had organized the Elgin Association to buy 9,000 acres of land for resettlement of the refugees, to give them a start in Canada. Within a few years, numerous families were living here, having cleared land, built houses, and developed crops. They established schools and churches, and were thriving before the American Civil War. There was great interest in the settlement among Americans. Buxton was visited by a reporter from the New York Herald Tribune in 1857, and by the head of the American Freedmen's Inquiry Commission in the summer of 1863, established after President Abraham Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation had freed many slaves in the American South during the Civil War. The resultant reports praised the achievements of the people of Buxton and other African Americans in Canada. The community is within the Chatham-Kent municipality, at the junction of Chatham-Kent Roads 6 and 14. Its population in the early 21st century is approximately 250, over half of whom are Black Canadians. North Buxton's historic population peaked at more than 2000, almost exclusively descendants of free blacks and fugitive slaves who had escaped the United States via the Underground Railroad. Upper Canada (now known as the province of Ontario, after the Dominion of Canada was confederated in 1867) was the first British colony to abolish slavery, in 1793. Though slavery had never been widespread in Canada, Great Britain abolished slavery in its colonies in 1838. The related community is South Buxton.