Paying tribute to Middleton Black Loyalists

McConnell doing research in Old Holy Trinity cemetery, church records

A man writing a book about Middleton’s Old Holy Trinity Church is hoping sales from the new volume will help fund a monument to Black Loyalists, possibly in the church’s cemetery.

“This book that is due for release early in June, I call it First Church, because it’s the first of three churches the Anglicans have here,” said Brian McConnell.

“It’s also going to have one or more chapters dealing with the Black Loyalists here.”

McConnell has already written two books on Loyalists in Nova Scotia, concentrating on Annapolis and Digby counties, and First Church delves deeper into a congregation that built its original place of worship after clearing land in 1789, with the first church service held in August 1791.

The success of the new church can be attributed largely to Rev. John Wiswall, who was appointed rector in 1789.

OLD RECORDS

McConnell, who is head of the Old Holy Trinity Charitable Trust, has been looking into old records and is discovering a rich culture of determined people who were unwanted in the 13 colonies and who had struck out on their own.

McConnell said the Loyalists who came to this area were poor and basically lived in shacks.

“They didn’t have much. So, they were hoping that the government, either in

England or through the church, would donate money to complete the construction of the church, but that didn’t happen,” McConnell said.

“They had to try to raise the money on their own, and the way they did that was to try to sell the pews. It didn’t go as well as they hoped.”

Wiswall had a pension from his service in the navy as a chaplain on a ship, McConnell explained.

“So, he ended up buying about half of the church pews.”

WELCOMED

With the Loyalists came

Black Loyalists who were attached in one way or another to the white settler families and from McConnell’s research, they appear to have been welcomed into the community and into the church.

McConnell said there are records that show there were Black Loyalists buried in the cemetery, including Jeffery Jenkins, a freed slave who lived to be 100 years of age and died in 1857. He came to Nova Scotia in 1783.

McConnell has documented his research in a recently published paper.

“The surname Hill is the most common one that appears in the Anglican Parish records of Wilmot with the notation ‘Coloured’,” he wrote. “For several years Charles Hill served as Sexton, or the person responsible for maintenance of the church property.”

An entry in the church records notes his burial: “1883 Jan. 26 - In the Pine Grove Cemetery Charles Hill aged 80 years. Many years Sexton of the Church (Coloured man).”

OTHER NAMES

McConnell said the 1871 census shows the Jenkins (also spelled Jinkins) and Hill names in the Wilmot area as well as the nearby communities of Nictaux, Clarence and Broad Cove. “Other African (Black) surnames that appeared were: Brown, Middleton, Clement, Jackson, and Neil,” he wrote.

The census describes occupations as “servant” or “farm labourer” and some lived with white families, such as Margaret Jenkins of Broad Cove, who is listed as “residing in the household of Andreas Bohaker”; or John Pomp, who lived with the John H. Croscup family.

At Old Holy Trinity, records show that 14 people of

African descent were buried in the cemetery, but only three headstones are known to exist and those three are relatively recent additions.

McConnell said many Loyalists, including Black Loyalists, arrived and then left. In this part of the province, most of the Loyalists remained.

“That’s why the greatest number of headstones and Loyalist cemeteries, are in Annapolis and Digby counties,” he said. “Probably because of different factors — the geography and the climate here appealed to the Loyalists, I think.”

CHARITABLE TRUST

“The charitable trust is made up of volunteers interested in preserving and caring for this church, which is the oldest, unaltered church in Nova Scotia,” McConnell said. “It was established in 2002 by members of the congregation here and community members who were interested in that project after it had received heritage status.”

He said the trust came about because the congregation could no longer cover the cost of the building.

“So, the building was headed for demolition if something

wasn’t done,” he said. “A few members of the congregation came forward with this idea of establishing a charitable trust, which would take over exclusive responsibility for doing so.”

Now McConnell is writing a book about the church.

“Any sales from the book, the funds from that, are going to be donated back to the charitable trust,” he said. “Hopefully to be used towards some type of a memorial or monument which we could put up either inside or outside — we haven’t really confirmed this yet — to indicate the presence and contribution of these people because that hasn’t been done.”