BARRHEAD – It might not be a well-known part of Alberta history, but at the beginning of the 20th century the Barrhead area was home to Campsie, a thriving Black community.

From about 1908 to 1928 an estimated 1,500 Black settlers from Oklahoma, Kansas, Mississippi, Texas, and Alabama fled segregation, violence, and persecution for better opportunities for themselves and their descendants.

Although most of the settlers who came to Alberta migrated to the larger urban centres of Calgary and Edmonton, several hundred moved to four communities: Amber Valley (now Pine Creek), Junkins (now Wildwood), Keystone (now Brenton), and the previously mentioned Campsie. There was also a fifth settlement at Maidstone, Sask., near Lloydminster.

This is what Christine Beaver told a packed house at the Women’s Conference at the Babilitz Exhibition Hall on Saturday, March 21.

The theme of the 40th anniversary conference was Memories that Made Us. In addition to Beaver, other signature speakers included Bram and Kiran Sutherland, former Barrhead District home economist Elaine Breadon-Peiche, and Triple Lyonesse Farms. Entertainment was provided by the Dallas Stevens, Margaret Peterson and Loretta Borle Trio, as well as finalists from the 4-H speaking competition.

Beaver, a retired Edmonton Police Service detective, grew up with her siblings, Don, Paul, Deborah, Kenneth, and Mark on a farm near Tiger Lily, among the last descendants of Campsie.

Paul was the last descendant of the Black settlement in Campsie to live in the Barrhead area, leaving about five years ago following his retirement.

Beaver and her siblings’ history in Alberta also traces back to Amber Valley. One of Beaver’s grandmothers, Ivy Bowen, was from Amber Valley, the largest of the Prairie Black settlements.

“When the Canadian government wanted to settle Western Canada, they were attracting American settlers from the Dakotas, Montana, and then they were looking at people from England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland,” she said. “Of course, they all had one thing in common: they looked like you, not me. They wanted to keep the west white.”

Beaver said the Canadian government advertised in the southern states, such as Oklahoma, where her family is from, that it was offering 160-acre farms for $10; they did not know it would attract Black families.

“Before 1907 (and statehood), Oklahoma was largely Indigenous territory, so when the (U.S. government) moved a lot of tribes, a lot of Black people moved to the state as free people, creating their own towns, schools, churches, and councils,” she said.

However, Beaver said, when the state started to pass legislation enabling segregation, taking away Black citizens’ right to vote and restricting where they could live, many were persuaded by the potential for a new life in Canada offered when they read the advertisements by the Canadian government.

Beaver said she began researching the history of Black families in Alberta while in university, saying that when she was growing up, besides her own family, she knew of only one other Black family in the area.

“I knew about some of the names and the family people that my parents and my grandparents had talked about, my aunts and uncles, but until we started delving into our family background, I had no idea there had been this entire community at Campsie that had existed long before we came along.”

Beaver said that isn’t surprising, calling public information on the subject scant at best.

“Nowhere in the school curriculum, until recently, does it ever talk about the contributions that Black pioneers made to this country, to this province, to this community,” Beaver said. “It’s so important that we know history, not only our own history, but also the history of the other people who serve in your community, because we all have a story to tell as pioneers and now as neighbours.”

She said most of the Black settlers headed for the Prairies, crossing at Emerson, Man., or North Portal, Sask.

“That way, the government could keep track of who was coming, their health, and how much money they had,” Beaver said. “The requirements were really stringent for most pioneers, but for the Blacks that were coming, it was even more so. They were looking for anything they could find to justify not being allowed to come to the country.”

According to the records she could find, 36 homesteads were granted to Black settlers in Campsie, and there may have been fewer than a handful of other Black homesteaders outside the main community.

Beaver’s great-grandparents on her father’s side, James Moses and Hattie Beaver, arrived in Campsie in 1910, after first settling in Edmonton.

The community’s first school, Cavell School, opened in 1916 and was named after English nurse Edith Cavell, who was executed by Germany during the First World War.

“The school was integrated, but there were some parents who weren’t happy about that,” Beaver said.

As a result of the backlash, in a story told to Beaver by her oldest aunt, the then-Benton School District planned to build a new school specifically for Black students. Benton School opened in 1928, and according to her research, it was the only segregated school in western Canada, apart from the residential school system.

“I remember my granddaddy telling me this story about how a provincial official visited every Black home and tried to convince them that opening their own school would be a good thing,” she said. “One of the things he tried to sell my grandparents on was that all the farms were clustered together; it would be better if their children could attend the same school, closer to them. But they weren’t, they were amongst everyone else in the community. I can just imagine the choice words my grandmother had when she escorted him out of the house.”

The interesting thing, Beaver said, is that while the Benton School was intended to be segregated, in practice it wasn’t, as many white families chose to send their children there because it was closer than the Cavell School.

She also spoke about several incidents of racism that the Campsie settlers faced, including an incident where a child of a Campsie settler wasn’t allowed to enrol in school, and ended with the settler being arrested and sentenced to three months’ hard labour after he got into a physical altercation with the school’s headmaster.

“Not everybody was mean to them,” Beaver said. “There were many decent people. But there’s always that one, two, or three families that are full of bullies, kind of hillbillyish, and they have a bone to pick with you simply because of your skin colour.”

Unfortunately, there is very little left of the settlement, with the schools, the church, and most of the original structures long since destroyed. The only remnant is the now-decommissioned Bethel Baptist Cemetery about 19 kilometres west of Barrhead on Highway 18, which, thanks to the local Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, has been restored and maintained with fresh grave markers honouring the deceased members of the settlement. However, Beaver said her sister is working on a project to commemorate the Black settlers in Campsie, near the original settlement.

Barry Kerton, TownandCountryToday.com