Birchtown
It’s a rainy Monday in Birchtown and the village seems abandoned. It’s so small these days – just a strip of road, really – that maybe you wouldn’t notice if everyone wandered off.
It was once the biggest free black community North America. Its neighbour, Shelburne, was once the fourth-biggest city in North America. Where did everyone go?
The Black Loyalist Heritage Museum, housed in an old schoolhouse, is closed. I walk around the building, cupping my hands to the glass and peer inside. The museum tells the story of slavery, how when American slaves got their freedom back in the 1780s, they came to Birchtown. The land was so inhospitable that a few years later, 600 of them sailed for Freetown, Sierra Leone. Their names were recorded in the Book of Negroes and, more recently, Birchtown’s name was recorded in Lawrence Hill’s novel, The Book of Negroes.
I follow the heritage trail. In the mosquito-filled woods, a humble hut imitates the pit houses the early black loyalists built for themselves to stave off Nova Scotian winters. It’s just logs fixed together over a hole in the ground. No wonder everyone left.
The path makes its way to the Black Burial Grounds, a bleak field by the water, populated by a few trees. A sign informs me that oral history remembers it’s sacred ground, but none of its inhabitants have tombstones. Almost all of the names are lost.
Further on is a plain white church, locked up tighter than a, well, tighter than a church, I suppose. I peer in the rain-streaked window. No signs of life. The streets reflected in the windows are deserted. A sign tells me Enoch Scott sold the land to the rectors so they could build a church. His great-grand daughter, Anna Scott, makes quilts in Shelburne. Maybe she can tell me where everyone went.
In Shelburne, I ask the plugged-in proprietors of the Whirligig Book Shop if Anna’s still making quilts. They have her on the phone in minutes and I’m packed off to her cozy home up the hill.
Anna greets me like we’ve been neighbours for a hundred years. With a flurry of welcome, she blasts off the rain clouds and makes her own sunshine. Her retired husband Peter nods, like we’re resuming a briefly interrupted conversation. Rachel Ray interviews Jennifer Lopez on the television.
Anna’s family on both sides goes back to the birth of Birchtown. Both her grandfathers were fishermen and both moved to Shelburne to be nearer the boats. Moving toward work has been a common theme in the depopulation of Birchtown.
“Everyone’s gone,” she says. “There’s a couple families out there, but they just moved out there recently.”
Anna is the family historian and we’re soon pouring over old records: marriages, births and deaths, and the odd newspaper clipping. She’s got old photos of her ancestors walking in Birchtown. The handsome man in a dashing suit and hat, posing outside a building, is her father, she says.
Another shows Enoch, the land-giving grandfather. The archive goes right back to William Scott, who left Virginia and turned up on Nova Scotia’s shores around 1783.
When she was little, Anna would go to Birchtown to visit her relatives. She keeps the memories of Birchtown alive for the Scotts, who descend on her house from all over North America.
When tourists come following threads of family history from the slave fields of Virginia to the barren lands of Nova Scotia, they come to Anna. She tells them how it was and how it is.
One day she was working at a garden party for the Lieutenant-governor, Mayann Francis. They got to talking and Francis invited herself up to Anna’s
house for a tour of her gardens.
“Can’t you see this car coming up the road with flags and everything! Oh my heavens,” Anna exclaims. “She was a very nice lady, very down to earth.”
The L-G stopped in and the two ladies headed out back.
“We were walking up in the fields – she had these little high heels on! But she walked way up to the end,” Anna marvels.
It’s a nice gift Anna has, making powerful people feel just normal and ordinary strangers feel like royalty.
First published in the Chronicle-Herald Aug 23 2009