It has been called “one of the most important blocks of black history in Toronto,” a place where African Americans, fleeing slavery, found refuge to live, work and worship.

On this tract of land, just north of Osgoode Hall, a handful of African Methodists built a small wood frame church in 1845. It served as the spiritual and political centre of the city’s growing black community, which was asserting its voice in the abolitionist movement and welcoming an influx of families seeking freedom via the Underground Railroad.

Eventually, the congregation outgrew the tiny church and replaced it with a handsome brick temple. But after more than a century, membership dwindled, the congregation moved and the temple was sold off. In the late 1980s, the building was demolished to make way for a parking lot and, until last fall, the church was largely forgotten.

Now, with that same lot being prepared for the development of a new state-of-the-art provincial courthouse, the rich history of Chestnut St.’s British Methodist Episcopal Church has resurfaced, along with that of the 19th-century neighbourhood surrounding it.

Hundreds of thousands of artifacts have been discovered at the 0.65-hectare site — larger than a football field — near University Ave. and Dundas St. Infrastructure Ontario, the government agency overseeing construction, provided the Toronto Star with unique access to the five-month dig, considered one of the most extensive urban archeological projects in North America.

Unearthed ceramics, tools, toys and remnants of clothing are helping to compose a fascinating and largely untold story of the distant origins of Toronto’s diversity.

“Archeology often becomes the voice for the people without history,” says Holly Martelle, the consulting archeologist for the dig.

Rosemary Sadlier, past president of the Ontario Black History Society, visited the site before the excavation wrapped up in December. “It was an incredibly powerful experience,” recalls Sadlier, whose late relative, Rev. Thomas Jackson, served as a preacher at the church in the 1950s. “I was literally walking on ground that had been walked on by my ancestors.”

Karolyn Smardz Frost, a historian who has written extensively about black settlement in Toronto, describes the location as “one of the most important blocks of black history in Toronto.”

Infrastructure Ontario officials say they fully recognize the importance of the church site and its surroundings. Given the uniqueness of the archeological discoveries, the question now facing the provincial government is how will this history be commemorated, and what sort of stewardship will the artifacts require?

During the early stages of the new Toronto courthouse project, archaeologists discovered thousands of artifacts dating back to when the site was part of St. John?s Ward, Toronto?s first immigrant settlement during the 19th and early 20th centuries. To ensure that the historical value of the site was documented and preserved, IO completed a comprehensive archaeological excavation, while an analysis of the site and findings continues. This video highlights the archaeological work and some of its findings. For more information, please visit: http://www.infrastructureontario.ca/Templates/Projects.aspx?id=2147493094&langtype=10À

A sanctuary with humble beginnings

The spiritual foundation of Toronto’s black community began with a £40 tract of land.

In 1845, several families pooled their funds to buy property — on what is now Chestnut St., between Armoury St. and Dundas St. W. — from John Beverley Robinson, Upper Canada’s attorney general. A staunch Tory, he was responsible for a legal ruling that protected black people in Canada from extradition orders that would see them sent back to slave-owners in the U.S.

A tiny wood-frame church was built on the site. Initially, the Chestnut St. church was affiliated with the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) church, a U.S. denomination. In 1856, however, the AME’s Canadian ministers voted to split from the mother church, re-establishing themselves as the British Methodist Episcopal (BME). With a growing number of abductions by American bounty hunters looking for fugitive slaves, the church leaders wanted to provide protection for the ministers who travelled to the U.S. for conferences, and also align their church with Britain, which had abolished slavery in 1833.

“We have to remember that many of us came (to Canada) because of the problems we had down south,” says William Osborne, a retired BME minister who now heads the church archives committee. “I don’t think we have a proper record of our standing in the city.”

BME members, many of whom lived in modest cottages on nearby streets such as Elizabeth and Centre, helped provide settlement services for African-American refugees, arranging housing and jobs.

“This was an organization that was founded not just to meet people’s spiritual needs, but to pull them together around issues of injustice,” says Rosemary Sadlier.

The BME congregation grew rapidly. The church was expanded twice, in 1871 and again in the early 1890s, adding pew space as well as an elegant red brick facade framed by two steeples.

In a Victorian city famous for its places of worship — there were 75 churches by the early 1880s — the stately BME garnered media attention, including coverage of its renovations, ministers, elegant weddings and an accident in the furnace room that killed two employees in 1946.

However, by the 1950s, the church’s congregation was shrinking as Toronto’s black community became more dispersed. The worshippers relocated to a church on Shaw St., where they merged with another congregation, and sold the Chestnut St. landmark to Toronto’s first Chinese United Church. That congregation called the building home until 1988, when it was levelled.

Today, some 200 BME congregants meet for services at a former Anglican church at Eglinton Ave. W. and Dufferin St.

Current minister Rev. Chester Searles, who was invited to tour the archeological dig last fall, was moved by seeing the church’s original stone foundation, including a basement room that may have served as a baptismal pool.

“There was that presence, that spiritual feeling,” he says.

Preserving a legacy

When the HK Hotel opens this spring on the Canadian National Exhibition grounds, visitors will enter over the glassed-in limestone foundations of an early-19th-century barracks that served Fort York.

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The BME Chestnut St. church deserves that same kind of “in situ preservation” says Ron Williamson, founder of ASI, Ontario’s largest archeological consulting firm. He believes the project is a perfect opportunity to incorporate the past and the future in the design of the new provincial courthouse being built near city hall.

The significance of the whole site is “unquestionable,” says Williamson, who co-authored Toronto’s archeological master plan. “Its history is incredibly important for our city.”

Nothing on the block presently acknowledges the area’s rich social history.

Jean Augustine, a former federal cabinet minister, highlights the symbolic connection between a new courthouse “where justice will be meted out” and a historical site linked to North America’s epic 19th-century struggle to end slavery.

“There’s a great opportunity when you talk about justice, and the fact that those individuals who lived and worshipped there were seeking justice and the ability to live freely,” says Augustine, who toured the excavation site. “I would like to see the courthouse have a design that will show what’s under there.”

In the past, foundations and artifacts discovered on Toronto construction sites were either bulldozed or placed in warehouse storage. But in the past 15 years, the city has not only strengthened its archeological preservation policies, but also begun to encourage developers to find ways to showcase or preserve these finds. In 2007, for example, remnants of Toronto’s first general hospital were unearthed on the future site of TIFF Bell Lightbox at King and John Sts. Some artifacts are now on display inside the TIFF building.

The foundations uncovered during the recent Chestnut St. dig have since been reburied, and artifacts have been removed to a storage facility in London, Ont., pending further planning for the site. Construction is not expected to begin until next year.

Provincial officials say they recognize the importance of the BME church. “There will have to be consideration and protection of that heritage site,” says Michael Coteau, minister of tourism, culture and sport, whose department oversees archeology. “These stories have to be told. My job will be to advocate for that protection.”

Infrastructure Ontario’s heritage adviser, Abbey Flower, promises that “finding an appropriate way to make the story of the site available to the public is going to be an important part of the longer-term project (to develop the courthouse).”

The province may have the will, but the question remains whether it is prepared to invest the resources necessary to commemorate the site’s history.

“What will happen,” wonders Sadlier, “to make that story live on?”

BME timeline: A church with deep roots

1794: Bethel African Methodist Episcopal church formally established by members of the Free African Society in Philadelphia.

1833: Slavery abolished across the British Empire. That together with a violent backlash against blacks in Virginia following the 1831 Nat Turner rebellion triggers an exodus of blacks to Canada via the Underground Railroad. In Toronto many settle in Macaulaytown, an area later known as St. John’s Ward, bordered by what are now Queen St., College St., Yonge St. and University Ave.

1845: African Methodist Episcopal church is built on what would become 94 Chestnut St.

1851: U.S. abolitionist Frederick Douglass speaks in Toronto, by then a hotbed of anti-slavery activism. He likely visits Toronto’s three African churches, including the Chestnut St. chapel.

1856: Several AME congregations in Upper Canada, including Chestnut St., split and form the British Methodist Episcopal church.

1864: Following Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863, a member of the American Freedmen’s Inquiry Commission — established to investigate free black society —travels to Upper Canada to conduct interviews, probably visiting the Chestnut St. church.

1871: The wood-frame BME church on Chestnut St. is torn down and rebuilt.The larger brick building can accommodate 200 worshippers and doubles as a community hub.

1952: The BME Chestnut St. congregation relocates to Christ Church on Shaw St. The Chestnut St. building is acquired in 1955 by a Chinese United Church congregation.

1988: Chestnut St. church demolished.

1998: Shaw St. BME church destroyed by fire. Three years later, the congregation relocates to its current home at Eglinton Ave. W. and Dufferin St.

Fragments of the past

The densely populated area around the BME church, which later became known as “The Ward,” was home to many black families and also to immigrants from Ireland, Russia, Italy and China. The recent dig revealed the foundations of factories, row houses, synagogues andstores, and yielded artifacts that attest to the site’s rich social history.