[WITHROW] THE UNDERGROUND RAILWAY 71 
son, there were between three and four thousand refugees and the pupils 
reached the number of one hundred and sixteen. Thus was anticipated 
by nearly half a century the industrial training which Booker T. Wash- 
ington has so successfully organized at Tuskegee, Alabama. 
At Buxton, in Kent County, a settlement named after Thomas 
Fowell Buxton, the famous philanthropist, was organized, and in 1848 
the Elgin Association was incorporated. Ten years later Dr. Howe 
reports 2,000 acres deeded to negro owners, and two hundred neat cot- 
tages erected, with a population of about 1,000. “There is no tavern, 
and no groggery,” he writes, “ but there is a chapel and a schoolhouse. 
Most interesting of all are the inhabitants. ‘Twenty years ago 
most of them were slaves, who owned nothing, not even their children. 
Now they own themselves; they own their houses and farms; and they 
have their wives and children about them. They are enfranchised citi- 
zens of a government which protects their rights.” A saloon was opened 
in the Buxton settlement, but could not find customers enough to support 
it, and so was closed within a year. 
Other similar but less noted colonies, one bearing the honoured 
name of the philanthropist Wilberforce, were established. Some of the 
negroes’ best friends, however, considered that they would succeed better 
if thrown upon their own resources and encouraged to cultivate self- 
reliance. Their gregarious instinct, however, tended to keep them 
together. The refugees for the most part gravitated towards the towns 
and cities—Amherstburgh, Windsor, Chatham, St. Catharines, Hamil- 
ton and Toronto—where they cultivated small gardens and performed 
such lowly labours as wood sawing, whitewashing, hotel service, laundry 
work and the like. A less number found homes and occupations at 
Kingston and Montreal, and a few at St. John and Halifax. 
The negroes at Dawn were reported to be “ generally very pros- 
perous farmers — of good morals, and mostly Methodists and Bap- 
tists.” Out of three or four thousand coloured people not one, says 
Josiah Henson, was sent to gaol for any infraction of the law during 
the seven years from 1845 to 1852. 
In 1852 the Anti-Slavery Society of Canada reported that there 
were about 30,000 coloured residents in Upper Canada, nearly all 
being refugees. About ten years later Principal Willis, of Knox 
College, who took deep interest in their condition, estimated the 
number at 60,000. This was doubtless an over-estimate. After the 
War the number very greatly decreased, many returning to the north- 
ern tier of states and some further south. 
The Canadian census of 1901 reports in the whole Dominion 
17,437 negroes, more than half of whom, namely, 8,935, dwell in 
