In the damp basement of a home in Fort Erie, a tour guide drew my attention to what at first appeared to be a pretty ordinary bookshelf. But with the flick of a hidden latch, the entire bookshelf swung out on hinges to reveal a hidden room.
“Right here is where slaves seeking freedom would have stopped to rest before continuing on,” the guide told me as we continued to tour Bertie Hall, a famed stop along the Underground Railway.
What an incredible story. Or so I thought. Not long after I published that story back in 2011, I was contacted by someone who said the whole thing was fake. So I did some poking around, talked to some local folks and, sure enough, I couldn’t find anything reliably linking Bertie Hall to the Underground Railway.
Rumours of the veracity of the Underground Railway story continued to swirl around town for a few years until eventually Niagara Parks (which owns the building) did a proper investigation.
Turns out the whole thing was hogwash. The entire story about Bertie Hall being a safe haven for Black Americans fleeing slavery was total fiction, cooked up by someone at Town Hall back in the 70s as part of some ill-advised tourism scheme.
Ultimately, the plaques affixed to the building which touted it as an Underground Railway station were quietly torn down and discarded. It was the right thing to do, obviously.
However, I do think it’s weird that the new plaque installed there simply talks about the architecture and the history of the building, but there’s no mention of the 50 years in which a fake story about the Underground Railway was being peddled.
Yes, the fake story needed to be corrected, but it seemed to me that by erasing that story entirely, we’re letting the town off the hook for their disastrous decision to concoct a false story which paints them as heroes.
Which brings me to the new plaques unveiled in Niagara-on-the-Lake a few weeks ago. A pair of heritage plaques were replaced because they contained what was described as “outdated” phrasing. And when it comes to the one plaque that read, “Negro Burial Ground,” that makes sense. Definitely time to change that one.
As for the other plaque that was replaced, it seems less a case of updating the phrasing, and more an attempt to bleach clean the stains of our historical mistakes.
The entire story about Bertie Hall being a safe haven for Black Americans fleeing slavery was total fiction, cooked up by someone at Town Hall
One of the plaques contained the word “slaves” which, apparently, for reasons that don’t make sense to me, needed to be changed to “freedom seeker.”
The phrase “freedom seeker” is an awfully upbeat way to describe someone who has had the worst possible thing done to them. That’s what slavery is; it’s the worst thing we can do, it’s the deepest, darkest stain on our history.
To try and put a sunny spin on that just seems wrong. Someone is only a “freedom seeker” because we did the worst possible thing you can do to them, we enslaved them.
Look, history is ugly. We’re all learning that lesson on the world’s stage right now as Canada faces the fallout from inviting a literal Nazi into our House of Commons and giving him a standing ovation.
Perhaps if we all paid a little more attention to history, rather than trying to smooth over the rough edges, our politicians would have known better than to applaud someone who was described as “fighting against the Soviets” in World War 2, which should have probably been a red flag for them.
Perhaps surprisingly, one of the few people to really understand this is Disney. While book publishers and movie studios are scrambling around and editing old works to erase “outdated phrasing” the people at Disney have decided to just present their stuff as it was, warts and all, and explain with a disclaimer that this work contains some bad stuff.
“These stereotypes were wrong then and are wrong now. Rather than remove this content, we want to acknowledge its harmful impact, learn from it and spark conversation to create a more inclusive future together,” reads the disclaimer which pops up before certain movies on Disney Plus.
That’s the proper way to handle these things. Don’t look away from the grimier parts of history. Learn from them. I certainly learned from my experience with Bertie Hall. I learned that attempts to whitewash history have a way of backfiring eventually. I learned that the real version of history has a way of seeping out, even when we try to paint over it.
So then, what the heck was the deal with the secret room in the basement of Bertie Hall behind the swinging bookshelf, anyway? Well, from what I was able to gather, the secret room wasn’t being used to smuggle slaves from America to freedom in Canada; the smuggling was going the other way. Turns out it was being used to run whisky from Canada to America during prohibition.
Now that’s a story that deserves a plaque.
Find out how to yell at James Culic at the bottom of the page.
