Canada's Uncle Tom

A poignant reminder of Canada's links with the abolitionist movement in the United States and with its most powerful propaganda tract, Uncle Tom's Cabin, stands today in south-western Ontario. The site, near the town of Dresden, includes the home of the Reverend Josiah Henson, a slave for forty-one years, who found freedom in Canada, with his wife and four children who were rowed across the Niagara river from Buffalo in 1830. The 200th anniversary of his birth last year gave Ontario a chance to increase awareness of Henson, his role in black history, and his efforts to establish a school and refuge for runaway slaves, as part of the province's multicultural policy.

Josiah Henson, the model for the hero of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, established his slave refuge colony, The British American Institute, in 1841 on 200 acres of heavily wooded land in south- western Ontario, south of the Sydenham River.

Born into slavery on a farm in Charles County, Maryland in 1789, Josiah Henson, his wife and four children, fled by means of the Underground Railroad (a network of sympathisers) to Upper Canada as it was then known in 1830.