Deborah Brown: Freedom Seeker
On December 8, 1908, the Evening Telegram published the story of an elderly woman named Deborah Brown who lived in a part of Toronto known as Seaton Village. Mrs. Brown had died in 1898 and is reported to have been 111 years old at the time of her death. She was considered to be the oldest resident in Seaton Village, and her house was said to be the oldest building in the village. Deborah Brown had once been enslaved in Maryland, on the east coast of the United States. She had escaped to Canada in the mid-1800s with her husband, Perry, when they learned he was about to be sold. The couple moved to the Township of York, the part of Toronto north of Bloor Street, which was the northern edge of the City of Toronto at the time. She lived in the same one-storey wooden cottage on Markham Street, near the corner of Bathurst and Bloor Streets, for over fifty years.
Nowadays it is hard for us to imagine that when Deborah and Perry Brown first moved to the area, it was rural farmland. By the 1870s their neighbourhood, by then known as “Seaton Village,” was bounded by Bedford Road on the east, Christie Street on the west, and Davenport Road to the north, with Bloor Street as its southern perimeter. In 1888, Seaton Village and the Town of Yorkville, which had developed just to the east around Yonge and Bloor Streets, were annexed to the growing city of Toronto. In a span of fifty years, the region where the Browns lived had gone from being on the rural fringes to being in the centre of the city.
Deborah Brown worked as a washerwoman, and her husband was a labourer. The Browns were a working-class family, judging from their occupations and their standard of living. Deborah could not read or write, and her husband, Perry, was also probably illiterate. In most U.S. states it was illegal to teach an enslaved person to read and write, so they had likely been prevented from gaining an education before coming to Canada. They purchased the house and the quarter-acre lot on which they lived for $50 in 1870. Their house was a modest wooden cottage with a garden, and they owned two pigs. Deborah and Perry were part of a larger Black community that was comprised of a working class, a middle class of skilled craftsmen and shop owners, and a tiny upper class of wealthy families whose businesses had been very successful. These wealthier Black Torontonians often owned a great deal of property, including houses that they rented out.
Deborah’s work as a washerwoman was one of the jobs that women did to earn money, but it was hard, backbreaking work. Prior to the invention of electric washers and dryers, washing clothes involved hauling and heating a large bucket of water and mixing in a lye-based soap. Clothes had to be washed by hand, then rinsed, dried, and ironed. Many women were able to earn a living by taking in other people’s laundry. However, Mrs. Brown lived during the Victorian era of the 1800s. At that time a woman’s primary responsibility was her own household, and it was frowned upon if a woman engaged in waged work. Nevertheless, most Black women had always worked. Their income was needed to help support the family.
In the late 1870s, Mrs. Brown was listed in the city directory as a nurse. This “directory” was a book published each year that recorded the name, address, and occupation of the head of each Toronto household. It is not likely that she studied nursing formally, as formal training in nursing did not begin in Toronto until the 1880s. Deborah may have gained a great deal of knowledge over the years in curing various sicknesses through the use of herbs, roots, and the like, and used her knowledge to nurse friends and acquaintances back to health. However, many women who reported their occupations as nurses in the nineteenth century were untrained. They worked in what today is known as personal support work, looking after the sick and elderly, cooking, and keeping the house tidy. This occupation was pursued especially by women who were widowed after the death of their husbands. It was another way to survive, and Deborah, too, found this avenue for earning a living.
Deborah and Perry were of the Wesleyan Methodist faith. They probably attended the Black churches in downtown Toronto from time to time — certainly on special occasions like Christmas, Easter, and Emancipation Day, the day set aside in early August to celebrate the British act of parliament of 1833 that freed enslaved people in most of the British Empire. However, Deborah also attended the Methodist church in Seaton Village. The 1908 Evening Telegram article notes that even in extreme old age Mrs. Brown continued to be a member of the Sunday School. She delighted in getting up on the platform with the children at Sunday School anniversary celebrations. Most Black people at that time belonged to either the Methodist or the Baptist faith, although there were Anglicans, Catholics, Presbyterians, and Congregationalists in the community, too.
Deborah Brown had at least one child that we know of. Her name was Sarah Brooks, but she does not seem to have come with her parents when they escaped to Canada. Sadly, her parents may have been forced by circumstances to leave her behind in slavery. There was, however, an eight-year-old child named William H. Brown, born in the United States, who lived with Deborah and Perry in 1861. Because of Deborah’s age then, fifty-six, it is not certain whether William was her child or a grandchild. He may even have been a nephew or great-nephew. When the census was taken in 1861 listing nearly all the people in every household in Canada, William H. was reported to be absent from the Brown home and living in “Toronto City” attending school. Unfortunately, after 1861, William was not listed in the same household as Deborah Brown again, and we are not sure what happened to him.
More is known about daughter Sarah Brooks. She had been born in the United States and she in turn had a daughter named Cornelia, who was also American-born. After the American Civil War was over and once-enslaved African Americans were free, these two women were living on Centre Street in St. John’s Ward, just west of today’s City Hall. According to the 1881 census, Sarah was fifty-six and Cornelia (her name was mistakenly recorded by the census-taker as “Amelia”) was twenty-three years of age. Both were widows. Like Deborah, her daughter and granddaughter also worked as laundresses.
On January 1, 1863, Abraham Lincoln, president of the United States, issued the Emancipation Proclamation that freed all enslaved African Americans in the states that had rebelled against the Union. After the Civil War, with the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment to the American Constitution, all the enslaved people of the American South gained their freedom. Some people who had found refuge in what is now Ontario went back to the United States in search of the families and homes they had left behind.
However, the story of Deborah and Perry Brown and of their daughter Sarah Brooks shows that, rather than making a “return trip” south after the Civil War, some African Canadians brought their family members north to live with them in Canada.