Josiah Henson

Josiah Henson was born on 15 June 1789 in Charles County, Maryland, into slavery. He became a labourer and a preacher, and in 1830 he escaped with his family across Lake Erie into Upper Canada. He worked at first on farms near Fort Erie and Waterloo to support them.

Henson soon became a leader among the growing number of fugitives from slavery in Canada. In 1834 he and friends set up a Black settlement on rented land at Colchester, and he was involved in the Underground Railroad, helping others to reach freedom. During the Rebellion of 1837 he led a Black militia unit that supported the colonial government.

With the help of the anti-slavery missionary Hiram Wilson and a silent partner, Henson and his partners bought 200 acres in Dawn Township, near present-day Dresden, in 1841, and in 1842 established the British-American Institute, a vocational school meant to educate and employ former slaves. Around it grew the Dawn Settlement, which at its height reached a population of 500 and prospered on exports of black walnut lumber to the United States and Britain.

In 1849 Henson published his autobiography, The Life of Josiah Henson, Formerly a Slave, Now an Inhabitant of Canada, as Narrated by Himself. Harriet Beecher Stowe cited his memoirs among her sources for Uncle Tom's Cabin, and he is widely regarded as the model for its title character, although some have expressed concern about that comparison. In 1851 he was granted an audience with Queen Victoria.

The institute closed in 1868 and the settlement declined as its residents moved elsewhere in Ontario. Henson died on 5 May 1883, aged 93. In 1983 he became the first Black person featured on a Canadian postage stamp, and his home and the Dawn Settlement area are now preserved as the Josiah Henson Museum of African-Canadian History, which was renamed from Uncle Tom's Cabin Historic Site.