Guelph’s British Methodist Episcopal (BME) church at 83 Essex St. is among the city’s most significant historic buildings. The stone structure dates back to 1880, when it was built to replace an earlier wooden church.
Many of the church’s original congregation were people who had fled slavery in the American South via the Underground Railroad in the years before the Civil War. The first minister and one of the founders of the new church was the Rev. Junius B. Roberts, a man whose life’s journey before he arrived in Guelph had been well-rooted in the struggle against slavery.
Roberts was born in Rush County, Indiana, in 1840, to a free Black family, possibly of mixed-race ancestry. The Roberts family were abolitionists, meaning they were opposed to the institution of slavery.
With the passing of the Fugitive Slave Act by the American federal government in 1850, no “coloured” person in the United States, free or not, was really safe from men known as slave-catchers.
They pursued people fleeing bondage in the Southern slave states, and would follow them into the supposed “free states” of the North. Captured fugitives from the South were sent back to the slave owners from whom they’d fled. The slave catchers would also seize African Americans who were legally free, and take them South. All they needed was one unscrupulous white person to swear before a magistrate the person they’d apprehended was a runaway slave.
Therefore, Canada became the ultimate destination for many freedom-seekers travelling the Underground Railroad.
Roberts grew up in an area that had been settled by Quakers. They were well-known for their abolitionist sentiments. Quakers often volunteered their homes for use as way-stations on the Underground Railroad, and served as “conductors” guiding escapees along the route to Canada.
Small wonder, then, that Roberts served in the Union Army during the Civil War.
Roberts enlisted in the 28th Colored Regiment on Dec. 31, 1863. In March of 1864, his company was sent to Washington DC to help defend the capital. He was assigned as an orderly in the L’Ouverture African American Hospital located just south of Washington in Alexandria, Virginia.
That hospital not only cared for sick and wounded Black soldiers, but was central to an area that quartered “contraband,” refugees who had escaped slavery in the Confederacy.
Roberts never actually fought in battles, but suffered during his orderly duties from rheumatism and fevers. Given the primitive sanitary conditions of the time, illness among hospital staff was common. Roberts would also have endured the stress and grief of working with the torn and shattered victims of the battlefields.
The hospital filled up with wounded from his own regiment after the 28th lost half of its men in a disaster called the Battle of the Crater in July of 1864. Roberts’ wartime experiences would haunt him for the rest of his life, but also solidify his convictions on matters of race and freedom.
After the surrender of Confederate General Robert E. Lee in April of 1865, the 28th was sent to Texas to patrol the border with Mexico. Roberts mustered out the following November.
He had saved up about $400 ($7,500 in today’s funds) of his army pay. He used his money to study to become a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Sometime in the 1870s Rev. Roberts went to Kent County, Ontario, and made a home for himself and his family in Chatham. It is quite likely that he was familiar with the area because of his activities with the Underground Railroad before the Civil War. Many of the people who had fled slavery settled in that area.
Roberts became associated with Chatham’s Wilberforce Educational Institute, a school for secondary and post-secondary education named after William Wilberforce (1759 – 1833), the British champion for the abolition of the slave trade. The school was open to students of every race, colour and creed, but most of the young people who studied there were Black.
As a minister and an educator, Roberts would have been well-known to the Black homesteaders in the Guelph area. He eventually moved to Guelph and in 1880 became pastor of the BME church. He was a community leader who spoke, in the church and other venues, on issues of importance to the
parishioners.
For example, there was a difference of opinion among influential members of the congregation on whether they should fully integrate into Canadian society or live segregated from their white neighbours. Roberts favoured integration.
Roberts was also very much aware that even though Canadians in general opposed slavery and Canada had been a safe refuge from Southern slave-catchers, it did not necessarily mean all white Canadians welcomed Black refugees or wanted them living in their midst.
Under British law, on which the Canadian legal system was based, all citizens were equal, regardless of colour or ethnic background. But that was not true for many people in their everyday lives.
Racism was very much alive in Canada and would not be an easy demon to slay. Years later, in 1930, Junius Roberts’ Canadian-born grandson Ira Roberts, of Oakville, Ontario, would be threatened by Ku Klux Klan thugs who burned a cross in front of his home. There could also be disputes between Black settlers who had been in Canada for a generation or two, and those who were newly arrived.
As a lifelong abolitionist, a war veteran who had seen a lot of things most people would never want to see, and a dedicated minister, Roberts was a man to whom his Guelph congregation could look for guidance.
However, by 1885 he was back in Chatham, where he was likely involved in the construction of a new school. He returned to Indiana in 1893, and died there in 1894.
Roberts’ time in Guelph was relatively short, but he nonetheless connected the city to monumental events beyond its limits and those of Wellington County.
The larger story can be found in three volumes by local author Jerry Prager: Laying the Bed, Exodus & Arrival, and Blood in the Mortar: Freedom in Stone.
