Thornton and Lucie Blackburn

Thornton Blackburn was born around 1812 and Lucie, called Ruthie, around 1803, both into slavery in the United States. They met in Louisville, Kentucky. On the Independence Day weekend of 1831, using forged papers after learning that Lucie was about to be sold, they escaped on a steamboat up the Ohio River to Cincinnati and then by stagecoach to Michigan, where they settled in Detroit.

In June 1833 slave hunters from Kentucky discovered them and they were arrested in Detroit. Lucie was smuggled out of the jail and across the Detroit River into Upper Canada, and Thornton was rescued by a crowd of about 400 members of Detroit's Black community in what became known as the Blackburn Riots, the city's first race riot. The governor of Michigan demanded that they be returned.

The case went to the lieutenant governor of Upper Canada, Sir John Colborne, who refused extradition. He reasoned that a person could not steal himself, and that lifetime slavery was too severe a punishment for any crime less than murder. His refusal established the principle that Canada would not extradite freedom seekers to places where they might be re-enslaved, a principle that underlies Canadian extradition law to this day.

The Blackburns settled in Toronto in 1834. In 1837 Thornton launched Upper Canada's first cab company, a red and yellow one-horse cab called The City, which carried four passengers with Thornton himself at the reins. The business was a success that lasted into the 1860s, and others followed his example. The couple bought property, rented homes to other fugitives and helped found Toronto's Trinity Church, becoming prominent members of the Black community.

Thornton died in 1890 and Lucie in 1895. In the 1980s the archaeologist Karolyn Smardz Frost led a dig on their home site with nearly 3,000 high school students, the first Underground Railroad site excavated in Canada. Her book on the couple, I've Got a Home in Glory Land, won the 2007 Governor General's Literary Award for non-fiction, and in 1999 Canada designated them Persons of National Historic Significance.