What the Land Would Give
The Black Loyalist Settlements of Nova Scotia
The Story of the Black Loyalists (Conclusion, Pt. 2 of 2)
Image: Descendants of Black loyalists from Documentary, Seven Shades of Pale. Source: https://www.nfb.ca/film/seven-shades-of-pale/Documentary Seven Shades of Pale
The Clearing at Birchtown
They had risked everything, and now they had arrived. In the late spring and summer of 1783, the Black Loyalists stepped off the decks of British ships and onto the rocky, pine-dark shores of Nova Scotia—not as captives, not as fugitives, but as free people. That is what they had been promised. That is what they believed. They had come with their families, with their discharge papers, with their names newly entered in the Book of Negroes, with backs worn by war labor and hands calloused from Loyalist service, but they had come with hope. And that hope, fragile as it was, would have to compete with the reality of the ground beneath their feet.
Port Roseway—renamed Shelburne—was not a city. It was scarcely a town. It was an idea, laid out on paper in London offices by men who would never set foot in its woods. It was a venture for speculators, and for the white Loyalists who saw in the unclaimed land of Nova Scotia not a new community but a new monopoly. It was also, however, a terminus. For those who had escaped bondage by serving the British Crown, it was the only destination that had ever been offered. And so they came. First by the dozens, then by the hundreds. Some still wore the uniforms of the Black Pioneers; others wore what remained of civilian clothes, the seams rubbed thin from the march to freedom. Nearly all arrived with nothing.
They were not given the center. The Port Roseway Associates had plans for the center—for wharves and taverns and shops, for mercantile concerns and fisheries, for land to be parceled among themselves and to be withheld from others. And so the Black Loyalists were sent inland, to the northeast arm of the harbor. There, a clearing was made, and it was called Birchtown, after General Birch—the British officer in New York who had once stood between them and a return to slavery. What General Birch had promised, however, could not be enforced by a name. The land was rocky, the brooks too shallow for even a canoe, the soil acid and stubborn. And behind the tree line: swamp.
Image: Minutes of the Port Roseway Associates, 1782-1783. Source: Living Memory.
There were no foundations. No lumber. No boards or bricks or iron nails. What there was, instead, was labor. The same men who had built British forts and cut military roads in the Carolinas now cleared trees and hollowed trenches. Huts went up—wicker-framed, birch-covered, dug-in. The shelters were cold in the fall, colder in the winter, and deadly by spring. By 1784, Birchtown was, in the words of one visitor, a “town of huts.” That was not metaphor. It was fact. In Shelburne, new frame houses rose; in Birchtown, roofs still sagged with wet bark. What lumber came into the port was carted to white settlements. What rations were shipped from Halifax were distributed last to the Black camps. Even the work itself was divided unequally. White settlers were required to labor on public projects six days per year. For free blacks, it was twenty-four. For the poor among them, it was thirty-six.
Even this labor was sometimes paid—in theory. In practice, men who worked on the Shelburne-to-Annapolis road, the great military artery that would later disappear into underbrush, were paid only in the form of rations—rations that, according to surviving records and local rumor alike, were routinely pocketed or sold off by the officials charged with distributing them.
Still, they stayed. And they built. By 1784, small plots were parceled out—often no more than two acres, often on land too swampy to plant. But even that small foothold soon came under threat. White Loyalists, impatient for their own promised land, hired a rogue surveyor to lay claim to the western shore—cutting into a third of Birchtown. A town that had barely risen from forest floor was already being carved up, fenced in, and encircled. What was not claimed for commerce was seized for the Church. Anglican glebe land took the east. Settler farms took the north. The Crown took what remained.
This was not only the case in Shelburne. In Guysborough, Black Loyalists built a town, lost it to fire, built another, and then waited three years for land grants that came in the form of 3,000 acres of forest in remote Tracadie—land so poor and so isolated that most families would abandon it within a decade. In Digby, black settlers were made to pay for their own surveys, even as white lands were measured and recorded at government expense. In Preston, where the land was thin and the winters long, they farmed what they could and sharecropped the rest. And across the province, in road crews and drainage projects and fishery work, black labor was always required and rarely rewarded.
Image: Eliza Brody in her home at Sunnyville, Guysborough County around 1905. Brody's ancestors likely came to Nova Scotia after the American War of Independence and settled in Guysborough in 1784. Photographer: William H. Buckley Reference: Buckley family Nova Scotia Archives accession number 1985-386/26, negative number: N-5253
Yet the names survive. Tracadie. Birchtown. Brindley Town. Preston. Loch Lomond. The names survive not because the promises were fulfilled, but because the people stayed. Not because they were given a future, but because they built one anyway. In huts, in hollowed ground, with bark and boughs, in the harshest winters most of them had ever known—they stayed. That is the fact that cannot be erased by the denial of tools or land or rations or law: they stayed.
The Petition of Thomas Brownspriggs
By 1786, the winter had come again. And with it, the waiting. In Guysborough, on Chedabucto Bay, the Black Loyalists waited—for land that had been promised, for homes that had not been built, for the word that justice would finally keep its appointment. They had come there not by choice but by fire. The first settlement, at Port Mouton, had burned to the ground. What was lost was not just timber and thatch but the effort of a year—what little they had managed to build in the time between their arrival and the blaze. They had rebuilt, moved northward, founded Guysborough again, and waited. They waited through two summers and two winters. And then, in the third year, they wrote.
The man who led them was named Thomas Brownspriggs. He had once served with the Black Pioneers. He had earned a certificate of freedom and a promise of land. And now, in 1786, he did what men do when freedom and promises prove insufficient—he petitioned. The names on the petition numbered seventy-four. They were names marked by war and the sea, names recorded in British ledgers, names of men who had risked their lives on Loyalist ships and now found themselves penniless on a frozen frontier. Brownspriggs carried that petition to the colonial government. It was not a demand. It was not a threat. It was a plea for land that had already been promised.
Image: Joe Izzard playing the fiddle (copy for J. Bowden), Nova Scotia Archives, circa 1990
Source: https://novascotia.ca/archives/virtual/africanns/archives.asp?ID=161
And the government, perhaps shamed, perhaps merely impatient, granted it. Three thousand acres. But not there. Not in Guysborough, not on the bay. The grant came in Tracadie—forty miles inland, deep in the forest, over rock and frozen soil and too far from the market roads to matter. It was a gesture, not a solution. Each family was granted forty acres. But the land was poor, the location remote, and the promise, once again, provisional.
What happened next is what happens when a people is given land that cannot be used and liberty that cannot be lived: they left. Not all at once. Not in defiance. But by attrition, one family at a time. By 1799, just thirteen years after the petition, just a generation after the war that had brought them north, nearly all of the land had been abandoned—2,720 of the 3,000 acres reallocated, absorbed, erased. What had once been a grant of recognition became, with the passage of time, a legal footnote. A formality. A reversion.
And yet, Tracadie endured. It endured in name. It endured in the lives of those who stayed. And it endures still. That is the paradox of the Black Loyalist experience in Nova Scotia: that what was given was often unworkable, and what endured, endured not because of the government, but in spite of it.
The Lines That Were Never Drawn
In Brindley Town, near Digby, the story followed a familiar arc. First came the arrival. Then the silence. Then the wait. The Black Loyalists who had been directed there in 1783 did not ask for privilege, only land—land they had been promised, land they were told would be theirs by right of service. But in Brindley Town, the right to land depended on lines. Surveyor’s lines. And those lines never came.
Image: Joseph Leonard, one of the Black leaders at Brindley Town, who served as the Anglican lay preacher and school teacher. Leonard's name is listed in the muster list of Black Loyalists who landed at Digby, and he was noted as a leader among them. He spearheaded land petitions and served as the spokesman to the white community.
At first, the problem was money. The government had stopped paying its surveyors. No salaries, no surveys. The Black settlers, already forced to build shelters without tools and work roads for rations, were told that if they wanted the land measured, they would have to pay for it themselves. And so they scraped together what they could. A few coins, a promise of labor, anything to convince the man with the chain and compass to walk their fields. But the funds were never enough. And time passed.
Then came the relocation. The settlers were told they had built their homes on land already designated as church property. The mistake was not theirs—they had settled where they were sent—but the burden of correction was. So they moved again. And when they resettled, and began the process once more—clearing trees, cutting sod, marking out imagined boundaries—they were told again that the land must be resurveyed. Again they were told they must pay. Again, they waited.
Brindley Town never received its full allotment of surveyed land. Some families simply stayed where they had built, on land they did not legally own. Others drifted toward Halifax, where work—if not land—could be found. And yet Brindley Town, like Tracadie, remained. It existed not on paper but in memory, in oral history, in the records of complaints and the absences in the ledgers—absences where the lines should have been.
What the settlers of Brindley Town faced was not simply poverty. It was disqualification by delay. To settle land in Nova Scotia, you had to prove that you had cleared it. And to prove you had cleared it, you had to have it measured. And to have it measured, you had to pay. This was the circle in which Black Loyalists found themselves. And it was not a circle that surrounded white settlers.
There were, in those years, hundreds of white grants issued. Dozens of them came with government-sponsored surveys. But the Black Loyalists were treated not as recipients of compensation, but as dependents to be managed. Their land was granted on terms, then revoked. Their surveys were delayed, then charged. Their homes were relocated, then ignored. And yet they remained. They remained on land that would not welcome them, in towns that were never drawn to scale.
The Edges of Halifax
Halifax was not built for them. But it was where they went. For Black Loyalists who could not wait any longer for the land, or for those whose land turned to swamp and stone, Halifax offered something else: wages. Not freedom, not equality, but wages. It was a port city, the seat of the colony, and more importantly, a market. There was work on the docks. Work in the shipyards. Work as day laborers and domestic servants. It was irregular and poorly paid, but it was work. And it was something else too—it was near.
Image: In June 1967, Globe photographer Erik Christensen travelled coast to coast for a special centennial year examination of Canada’s capitals. In Halifax, the children of Africville pose for a picture.
From the Black settlement of Preston, northeast of Dartmouth, a man could walk to the Halifax markets in half a day. That made it different. Preston’s land was poor—rocky, forested, often unfarmable—but its location meant that even a failed farmer could sell firewood or haul fish or load grain for a shilling. That alone made it more viable than Tracadie or Brindley Town. But Preston was also something else: a stopgap.
Fifty families were settled there in 1785. Each was promised forty acres. But the farms were too small to support livestock. The tools were few. And the best land was already spoken for. So what happened in Preston was not agriculture, but sharecropping. Not as law, but as practice. Wealthy white landowners had received grants too large for a single family to work. Clearing the land was a requirement—if they failed to do so, the land could be repossessed by the Crown. But they had neither the labor nor the inclination to clear it themselves. The solution was as simple as it was cynical: they hired the Black Loyalists to do it for them. Sometimes for wages. More often for a share. And then, once the land was cleared and the title secure, they no longer needed the sharecropper.
It was a familiar pattern. And it was not limited to Preston. Across the Annapolis Valley, in Windsor, and even in Shelburne, white landowners made use of Black labor to secure white wealth. And always the Black settler remained precarious—legally present, materially expendable.
Image: Halifax children. Date: [ca. 1898], Photographer: J.A. Irvine Source: J.A. Irvine Nova Scotia Archives Photo album 37/122 negative number: N-1007.
Colonel Blucke
But there was another pattern—quieter, more complex. In Birchtown, it had a name. His name was Colonel Stephen Blucke.
He had worn the uniform. He had commanded men. In New York, he had been an officer in the Black Pioneers, a man trusted by the British command, a symbol of Black loyalty and order. In Nova Scotia, he was something else. He was a liaison. A mediator. A figure who stood between the Black community and the colonial government. He had the ear of the surveyor, the attention of the magistrates. He was, in theory, their advocate.
But to be a Black man trusted by white power in 1783 required more than competence. It required complicity. And that was the burden Blucke carried. When the site of Birchtown was chosen—wet, rocky, unfarmable—it was Blucke who signed off. Marston, the chief surveyor, wrote in his journal that Blucke “seemed pleased” with the site. What choice did he have? His presence conferred legitimacy on a settlement that no white officer would have accepted for himself.
Blucke supervised the road crews. He helped distribute the rations. His Pioneer Corps was the only reliable source of employment for Black men in Birchtown—and even that employment paid in food, not coin. When the work was done, and the rations exhausted, it was Blucke who determined who received aid. And when aid was denied, it was Blucke who carried the refusal.
Image: Pen portrait of Stephen Blucke, in William Booth, "Rough memorandums from 20th January to 24th March 1789."
To some, he was a leader. To others, a tool. And perhaps he was both. What is certain is that his authority was made possible only by the power that excluded others. In Birchtown, he lived in a two-storey house while most lived in bark-covered huts. He was respected. He was also resented. But he was necessary—because power in Nova Scotia, even for a Black man, even in a Black town, flowed from its proximity to whiteness. And no one was closer to that line than Blucke.
He outlasted most. When others left—when families drifted north to Halifax or west to New Brunswick, or crossed the sea again to Sierra Leone—Blucke remained. He died in obscurity. Not honored. Not reviled. Forgotten.
Image: Black Loyalists in Nova Scotia, Courtesy National Archives of Canada (C-115424).
But what he represented—the burden of standing between a promise and its betrayal—was never forgotten. Because every Black Loyalist settlement, from Birchtown to Preston to Tracadie, had a man like Blucke. A man asked to broker a deal that could not be kept. A man entrusted with hope and constrained by power.
Primary Sources
British Government. Book of Negroes. 1783. Nova Scotia Archives. Accessed May 28, 2025.
https://archives.novascotia.ca/africanns/book-of-negroes/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C3070438?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Clarkson, John. The Clarkson Papers. Edited by Kenneth C. Barnes. London: Hakluyt Society, 1998.
https://blackloyalist.com/cdc/documents/diaries/mission/153-155.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com
https://equianosworld.org/associates-abolition.php?id=9&utm_source=chatgpt.com
Colonial Office Records. Nova Scotia Correspondence and Land Grants. CO 217. The National Archives (UK).
https://discovery.nationalarchives.gov.uk/details/r/C4408
Shelburne Muster Rolls and Blucke Papers. 1783–1791. Nova Scotia Archives and Shelburne County Museum Collections.
https://loyalist.lib.unb.ca/record/local-records-1782-1860
Fergusson, Charles Bruce, ed. Clarkson's Mission to America, 1791-1792. Publication No. 11. Halifax: Public Archives of Nova Scotia, 1971.
https://archives.novascotia.ca/african-heritage/archives/?ID=686
Hodges, Graham Russell, ed. The Black Loyalist Directory: African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution. New York: Garland for the New England Historical Genealogy Society, 1995.
https://searchworks.stanford.edu/view/6919744
MacNutt, W. S. Select Loyalist Memorials: The Appeals for Compensation for Losses and Sacrifices to the British Parliamentary Commission of 1783 to 1789 from Loyalist of the American Revolution who came to Canada. Typescript. University of New Brunswick Archives and Special Collections. See
https://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/archivalcollections/pdf/americanloyalists.pdf
Stephen Blucke’s Leadership in Birchtown.
https://blackloyalist.com/cdc/people/secular/blucke.htm?utm_source=chatgpt.com
Secondary Sources
Barry Cahill, “The Black Loyalist Myth in Atlantic Canada”, Acadiensis, XXIX, 1, (Autumn 1999),pp.76-87.
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/Acadiensis/article/download/10801/11588/14683
Schama, Simon. Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution. New York: HarperCollins, 2006.
Walker, James W. St. G. The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783–1870. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1993.
Whitfield, Harvey Amani. “Black Loyalists and Black Slaves in Maritime Canada.” Acadiensis (2012).
https://journals.lib.unb.ca/index.php/acadiensis/article/view/20066/23079
Whitfield, Harvey Amani. North to Bondage: Loyalist Slavery in the Maritimes. Vancouver: UBC Press, 2016.
Winks, Robin W. The Blacks in Canada: A History. 2nd ed. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2000. See
https://www.nypl.org/sites/default/files/archivalcollections/pdf/SCMicroR5858.pdf
Further Reading