DRAYTON – Diana Braithwaite’s smile said it all as she stood beside the stage listening to the music and looking out at the hundreds of people taking in Saturday’s Underground Railroad Music Festival at Centennial Park in Drayton.
“We have more people than we had last year,” she said as the music played under sunny skies.
Now in its third year, the festival is a celebration of black history, from the early 1880s when slaves and free blacks in the United States escaped captivity and persecution to carve out a life in what is now known as Mapleton Township.
It was a dangerous trip to an unfamiliar area known as the Queen’s Bush settlement where, as free people, they built roads, farms and communities.
At its peak in 1840, the Queen’s Bush settlement was home to some 2,000 black settlers. But the settlement died out almost as quickly as it began, when the government ordered the area surveyed and black settlers could not afford to buy the land they had settled.
When slavery was abolished south of the border in 1865, most black settlers returned home to their native land. Yet some black settlers remained in former Peel Township and continued farming well into the 20th century.
A few descendants of those settlers still call Waterloo and Wellington County home, but most are widely dispersed across Ontario and beyond.
Braithwaite’s mother Rella, a descendant of the original settlers, attended the festival to enjoy the music and message.
Together with musician Chris Whiteley, Braithwaite organizes the festival, which annually attracts musicians from across Canada and the U.S., bringing a message of freedom and dedication through gospel, folk, jazz and blues music and prayer.
“We started the festival to educate and acknowledge the other [black] history and its rich history,” Braithwaite said of the festival.
This year’s event featured Braithwaite, Whiteley, Douglas Watson, Donovan Locke and gospel group the Mississippi Singers.
Pastor Tim Bailey, who made the 18-hour trek along with the Mississippi Singers from Columbus, Mississippi, summed up the feeling of the festival in words of inspiration based on the theme The Long Road to Freedom.
“You’ve gathered together to commemorate the struggles of people who came all the way from Mississippi to find freedom,” Bailey said of the original settlers.
“In their travels they had one common thing in mind; they wanted to be free.”
The pastor said American blacks were willing to overcome any obstacle in their pursuit of freedom. He urged those attending the festival to continue the fight for freedom.
“Freedom has many enemies,” Bailey added. “Sometimes we are the biggest enemy because we don’t want other people to get ahead.”
A belief in God helped settlers overcome struggles, he added.
“Anyone who denies another human being to be free … in the end there is the judgement,” he told those at the festival. “Whenever you deprive anyone of the freedom they deserve, that makes the road longer.”
Bailey thanked local residents who welcomed the refugees at the time.
“Thank you Canada for assisting us,” he said.
The message and music was appreciated by Kathleen Scott and her sister, Carol Jackson, who attended the festival for the first time.
“I just love it,” Scott said.
An avid Braithwaite fan, Scott enjoyed a front row seat to see the artist perform live.
The audience seemed to appreciate the music and gave a standing ovation to Pastor Bailey’s sermon and its meaning.
“Freedom is a word worth living for and dying for,” the pastor said. “Freedom causes an individual to experience life at its apex.”
Both Braithwaite and Whiteley are headed off for a six-week tour of Britain and Ireland, where they will be performing at festivals and concerts.
Braithwaite thanked the small army of volunteers for helping to make this year’s festival a success, including the local Rotary Club, Mapleton Township and the Wellington County Historical Society.
In the meantime, plans for next year’s festival are already in full swing.
