PART 5: The County has a List of Non-Designated Heritage properties. But Did Anyone Check Who Owned Slaves?

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PEC Heritage Register and Property Rights Series

Read the series

PART 1 – WHO IS WATCHING THE WATCHERS? PEC’S HERITAGE DESIGNATION PROJECT RAISES PRIVACY AND ACCOUNTABILITY QUESTIONS
PART 2 – IS YOUR PROPERTY A NON-DESIGNATED PROPERTY ON PEC’S HERITAGE REGISTER? KNOW YOUR RIGHTS BEFORE THE DEADLINE
PART 3 – WHEN DOES A HERITAGE COMMITTEE CROSS THE LINE?
PART 4 – YOUR HOME, YOUR INFORMATION: HERITAGE, PRIVACY AND PROPERTY VALUE
PART 5 – THE COUNTY HAS A LIST OF NON-DESIGNATED HERITAGE PROPERTIES. DID ANYONE CHECK WHO OWNED SLAVES?

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Prince Edward County is deciding which non-designated heritage properties deserve permanent protection. Some are valued partly because of the people and families associated with them. But the County sits in the heart of a Loyalist settlement region where slavery was a documented reality. One prominent Loyalist who operated the ferry to Prince Edward County was reportedly the owner of as many as 20 enslaved people. That raises an uncomfortable but necessary question: before we decide which history deserves protection, have we researched the whole history?

Prince Edward County is undertaking an extraordinary exercise in historical judgment. Faced with changes to the Ontario Heritage Act, the municipality established a Heritage Designation Working Group to research its non-designated listed properties and determine which should potentially receive formal heritage designation. The County says designation protects important buildings and landscapes for future generations and preserves the community’s character and uniqueness.[1]

Look through the County’s inventory and many properties are identified not simply by architectural style or construction date, but by the names of people and families associated with them: the Joseph Clapp House, Moses Hudgins Log House, Thomas Welbanks House, Hart Hobson Hicks House and many others.[2] That matters because Ontario’s heritage rules specifically recognize a property’s association with a significant person, event, belief, activity or institution as a possible source of heritage value.[3]

But once the lives of historical people become part of the case for protecting private property in the present, another question follows.

How much of those people’s history are we examining?

And in a community deeply connected with Loyalist settlement, there is one question that deserves particular attention:

Were any of the people whose properties the County is considering protecting slave owners?

Slavery was not somebody else’s history

Slavery is often treated in Canada as an American story. It was not.

Enslaved Black and Indigenous people lived in what became Canada, including Upper Canada. Loyalists arriving following the American Revolution brought enslaved people north with them, and slavery remained legal during the early settlement period.

Upper Canada’s 1793 legislation restricting slavery was historically significant, but it did not immediately free everyone already enslaved. The institution disappeared gradually before slavery was abolished throughout most of the British Empire in 1834.[4]

That history is particularly relevant around the Bay of Quinte because this was an important Loyalist settlement region.

And there is a striking example almost directly across the water from Prince Edward County.

Thomas Dorland arrived at Adolphustown with Peter Van Alstine’s Loyalist company in 1784. He became a justice of the peace, militia officer and member of Upper Canada’s House of Assembly. From 1802 until 1824, Dorland operated the ferry between Adolphustown and Prince Edward County.[5]

The Dictionary of Canadian Biography records something else about him.

Dorland was reportedly the owner of as many as 20 enslaved people.[5]

The same biography recounts a tradition that when Dorland was hiding from American rebels during the Revolution, enslaved people belonging to him refused to reveal his hiding place despite being threatened.[5]

Here, then, is slavery not in Virginia or South Carolina but within the social and economic world from which early Prince Edward County emerged—and attached to a man who operated one of the transportation links into the County for more than two decades.

This does not establish that any particular person represented on Prince Edward County’s current non-designated list enslaved people. County First has not yet established that connection, and it would be irresponsible to imply otherwise.

It establishes something different and important: the question is historically legitimate and worth investigating.

The County is already researching the people behind these properties

This matters because Prince Edward County isn’t merely cataloguing attractive old buildings.

The County says its Heritage Designation Working Group, working with municipal staff, is researching and evaluating listed properties for possible designation under the Ontario Heritage Act. Recommendations move through the Built & Cultural Heritage Advisory Committee and ultimately to Council, which decides whether designation should proceed.[1]

Ontario’s own guidance says research and evaluation should take place before a property is recommended for designation and that a designation report should support Council’s eventual decision.[6]

One of the provincial criteria is particularly relevant. A property can possess historical or associative value because it has a direct association with a person, event, belief, organization, activity or institution significant to a community.[3]

If a person’s prominence helps establish the heritage significance of a house, then the history of that person cannot logically stop at the flattering parts.

If the research tells Council that someone was a prosperous merchant, influential settler, political figure, farmer, military officer or community leader, it should also tell Council if credible historical evidence establishes that the same individual enslaved people.

That does not automatically make the building less historically significant.

It may make its history more significant.

Prince Edward County has confronted this question before

There is an especially important reason for Council to consider the issue carefully.

Prince Edward County has already had an intense public debate about whether the complete historical record of a person should change the way the municipality commemorates that person.

His name was Sir John A. Macdonald.

The Holding Court sculpture commemorating Macdonald’s early legal career in Picton was installed on Main Street in 2015. Its presence later became the focus of a broader debate about Macdonald’s legacy and Canada’s colonial history. Following the discovery of unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Indian Residential School in 2021, Council held a special meeting, heard from the community and voted to remove the sculpture from Picton Main Street while considering its future public location.[7]

It is important to be precise about the comparison.

Macdonald’s statue was not removed because he was a slave owner. The debate centred particularly on his role in colonial policies and the residential-school system.

But the principle established by that debate reaches much further.

Prince Edward County decided that understanding a historical figure requires more than celebrating the accomplishments for which that person was once commemorated.

The broader historical record mattered.

So why wouldn’t the same principle apply when the County researches the people associated with properties it is considering permanently designating?

A statue and a house are not the same thing

There is also a crucial distinction.

Removing a commemorative statue and preserving a historic building are fundamentally different acts.

A statue is generally erected specifically to commemorate someone. A house can possess heritage significance for dozens of reasons unrelated to celebrating its former owner: architecture, construction methods, craftsmanship, landscape, association with an important event or its contribution to the character of a neighbourhood.

Discovering that an early owner enslaved people should therefore not automatically disqualify a property from heritage designation.

Indeed, doing that could create a strange outcome: demolishing or refusing to preserve physical evidence of an uncomfortable history precisely because that history makes us uncomfortable.

A former slave owner’s house could be historically important because of its connection to slavery.

A building in which enslaved people lived or worked could be enormously important.

A farm might tell us something about the economic relationship between slavery, land ownership and early settlement.

The proper response to difficult history is not necessarily to erase the building.

It is to tell the complete story.

And that changes the question facing Prince Edward County from:

Should a slave owner’s house be designated?

to something far more interesting:

If a property is designated partly because of the historical importance of its former owner, should the designation explain the complete historical importance of that person?

The answer should be difficult to argue with.

The names missing from the houses may matter even more

There is another reason this research could fundamentally change the way Prince Edward County understands its heritage.

Historic properties are commonly named for the people who owned them.

The County’s inventory follows that familiar convention. Houses carry family surnames through generations, turning former owners into permanent landmarks.

But consider what happens if archival research eventually establishes that an owner of one of these properties enslaved people.

We would know the owner’s name.

Would we know the names of the people he or she enslaved?

Would we know where they lived?

Would we know what work they performed?

Would we know whether they helped clear the land, construct buildings, operate farms or businesses, raise children or create the wealth that allowed the property owner to become prominent?

Would we know what happened to them after Upper Canada’s gradual abolition legislation?

Would their descendants still live somewhere in Ontario?

Suddenly the heritage investigation becomes much more than an argument over what someone can do with an old house.

It becomes an opportunity to recover people who may have been almost entirely written out of the County’s physical history.

Imagine what a complete heritage plaque could say

Consider two ways of describing the same hypothetical property.

The first version might read:

Built circa 1800 by a prominent Loyalist settler who became a successful farmer, magistrate and community leader.

That could be entirely accurate.

Now imagine historical research established that the same person also enslaved three people who lived and worked on the property.

The original description would still be accurate.

But it would no longer be complete.

A second interpretation could identify the settler’s accomplishments while also identifying the enslaved residents, explaining their lives where the evidence permits and placing the property within the broader history of slavery and gradual emancipation in Upper Canada.

Which tells future generations more about Prince Edward County?

Surely the second.

Heritage should not exist to make the past comfortable. Its value comes partly from allowing us to understand how people actually lived.

The investigation should extend beyond slavery

Once that principle is accepted, however, County First believes the question cannot stop with slave ownership.

If the County is researching historical associations as a basis for designation, the same research should consider significant relationships with Indigenous peoples and land, colonial settlement, Black history, women’s history, labour history, migration, religious communities, agriculture, poverty and the lives of servants and workers, where those connections are historically relevant and supported by evidence.

That doesn’t mean putting every moral controversy of the last 250 years into every designation report.

It means avoiding a selective form of heritage in which architecture is meticulously researched, the achievements of prominent property owners are carefully documented and difficult aspects of the same history quietly disappear.

There is an important difference between preserving history and venerating it.

A mature heritage policy should be capable of doing the former without automatically doing the latter.

So how many people on the list enslaved others?

At this point, County First does not know.

And neither should anyone pretend to know without doing the archival work.

A surname match proves almost nothing. Families were large, names repeated across generations and properties changed hands. Internet genealogy alone would be a dangerously weak basis for identifying someone as a slave owner.

The appropriate investigation requires something much more rigorous: establishing the historically significant people connected with each property and then checking land petitions, Loyalist claims, wills, probate inventories, deeds, census and assessment material, church records, family papers, contemporary correspondence and specialist scholarship on slavery in Upper Canada and the Bay of Quinte.

The results should then be separated into at least three categories:

Documented evidence of involvement in slavery.

Research completed with no evidence presently identified.

Insufficient evidence to determine.

That distinction is essential. Failing to find evidence is not proof that someone did not enslave people.

Equally, no living property owner should be associated with slave ownership simply because someone who lived on the property two centuries ago may have been involved in slavery. The history belongs to the historical record, not to the present owner.

The County should answer a simple question

Prince Edward County’s Heritage Designation Working Group has been charged with researching properties before decisions are made about designation.[1]

County First believes Council should therefore ask the Working Group and staff:

As part of the historical and associative research conducted on the County’s non-designated listed properties, has the County investigated whether historically significant people associated with those properties participated in slavery or enslaved people?

If the answer is yes, the next question is straightforward:

What did the research find?

If the answer is no:

Why not?

That is not an argument against heritage designation.

It is an argument for better heritage research.

Don’t erase the houses. Recover the people.

There would be a certain irony in discovering that a historic house was connected to slavery and concluding that the answer was simply to remove it from the heritage system.

The better response may be exactly the opposite.

Preserve the evidence.

Research it properly.

Tell people what happened there.

And, wherever the historical record allows, put back into the story the names of people who had no property to leave behind and therefore rarely had houses named after them.

Prince Edward County has already confronted the difficult question of how a community should remember John A. Macdonald. Whatever one’s view of Council’s decision on the Holding Court statue, the debate established an important principle: history does not stop with the accomplishments we choose to celebrate.[7]

Now the County is making another series of decisions about its past.

It is deciding which buildings matter, which associations are significant and which pieces of history should receive permanent protection.

Before those decisions are complete, there is one question worth answering:

How many of the people whose properties we are protecting enslaved other human beings?

We may discover the answer is none.

We may discover several.

But until somebody actually looks, we don’t know.

And perhaps the most important question isn’t whether discovering that history should prevent a house from being designated.

Perhaps it is this:

If Prince Edward County is going to decide which history deserves protection, shouldn’t it first know the whole history it is protecting?

Footnotes and Sources

[1] Prince Edward County — Heritage Designation Project. The County states that its Heritage Designation Working Group and municipal staff research and evaluate listed properties for possible designation, with recommendations proceeding through the Built & Cultural Heritage Advisory Committee and Council.
Prince Edward County Heritage Designation Project

[2] Prince Edward County — Non-Designated Listed Properties, updated April 29, 2025. The municipal inventory identifies properties by address, property name and, in numerous cases, historic individuals or families associated with them.
View the County’s Non-Designated Listed Properties inventory

[3] Ontario Regulation 9/06 under the Ontario Heritage Act. Ontario’s criteria include historical or associative value arising from a property’s direct association with a significant theme, event, belief, person, activity, organization or institution.
Ontario Regulation 9/06 — Heritage Criteria

[4] Archives of Ontario — Black Histories in Ontario. Provincial archival material documents slavery in what became Ontario and the arrival of enslaved people with Loyalist settlers.
Archives of Ontario — From Slavery to Settlement

[5] Dictionary of Canadian Biography — Thomas Dorland. The biography records Dorland’s Loyalist settlement at Adolphustown, his operation of the ferry to Prince Edward County from 1802 to 1824, and reports that he was said to own as many as 20 enslaved people.
Dictionary of Canadian Biography — Thomas Dorland

[6] Government of Ontario — Designating Heritage Properties. Provincial guidance says candidate properties should be researched and evaluated before recommendation for designation and describes preparation of supporting designation reports for Council.
Ontario’s Heritage Designation Process

[7] Prince Edward County — A Path Forward / Holding Court. The County’s account explains the history of the John A. Macdonald sculpture, the public debate surrounding Macdonald’s colonial legacy and Council’s June 2021 decision to remove the sculpture from Picton Main Street following the discovery of unmarked graves at the former Kamloops Residential School.
Prince Edward County — A Path Forward and Holding Court history

Disclaimer

County First has not determined that any particular historic person associated with a property on Prince Edward County’s current non-designated heritage inventory enslaved people. The Thomas Dorland example is provided as documented evidence of slavery within the Loyalist-era Bay of Quinte society closely connected with Prince Edward County; County First has not established that a Dorland-associated property is among the properties currently under consideration.

Historical allegations of slave ownership should be based on credible documentary or scholarly evidence and should not be inferred from surnames, family relationships or property locations alone. References to historic people do not imply anything about current property owners, who bear no responsibility for the conduct of previous owners centuries ago.

The comparison with Sir John A. Macdonald concerns the broader principle of considering a historical figure’s complete legacy when making present-day decisions about commemoration and heritage. County First does not suggest that Macdonald’s Picton statue was removed because of slave ownership. The County’s documented 2021 debate centred on colonialism, Indigenous peoples and the residential-school legacy.

Nor does County First suggest that a documented association with slavery should automatically prevent heritage designation. Such an association could itself constitute important historical evidence and may strengthen the case for preservation, research and fuller public interpretation.