Black Life in a Nineteenth-Century New Brunswick Town

Drawing on a variety of unstudied and understudied materials, this essay seeks to contextualize the lives of nineteenth-century Black residents of Sackville, Westmorland County, New Brunswick, as a means of considering their lives and what factors may have motivated their choice to leave in the late 1860s. As the history of Black settlement in Westmorland varies from that of other areas in the province, this essay attempts to address the specificity and consequences of that different experience, and draws attention to the ways in which the lives of Black residents in smaller Canadian communities might be profitably recuperated.