The Dawn Settlement
In 1842, the community of Dawn Settlement was founded by Josiah Henson, a Freedom Seeker, and Hiram Wilson, a white abolitionist minister. The community was developed around a vocational school, the British American Institute for Science and Technology. The mandate of this school was to “cultivate the entire being, and elicit the fairest and fullest possible development of the physical, intellectual and moral powers.” More importantly though, the school would equip Freedom Seekers in Canada with an education and undermine racist assumptions that Blacks could not be educated or were incapable of independence.
The members of the community cleared and farmed the land. The Dawn Settlement grew to include mills and a brickyard. Black walnut lumber from the settlement’s sawmill was exported internationally.
Josiah Henson
Josiah Henson was born enslaved in Maryland in 1789. Henson, along with his wife and four children, fled slavery and settled in Upper Canada in 1830. Henson was inspired by independence and driven by a dream of owning his own property.
In 1841, Henson purchased 200 acres in Dawn Township to build a self-sufficient community for Freedom Seekers with Hiram Wilson. Around this same time, Henson and Wilson, along with James C. Fuller, began to develop the idea of establishing a vocational school for the community. The three men started the British American Institute for Science and Technology in 1842. With enrollment of students increasing, a settlement of Freedom Seekers developed in the surrounding area. The settlement became known as the Dawn Settlement.
Henson remained a leader in Canada’s Black community as an ordained pastor in the Methodist Church, a conductor on the Underground Railroad, and a captain of a Black militia group in the Rebellion of 1837. He lived in the Dawn Settlement until his death in 1883.
