Preston Township Homecoming focuses on family ties, history, unity

Allister Johnson cannot contain his excitement.

Johnson will be giving tours of North Preston, his home community, during the first-ever Preston Township Homecoming beginning Friday.

The week-long reunion will celebrate the culture, history and achievements that have influenced the development of North Preston, East Preston, Cherry Brook and Lake Loon.

"As we go through the tour, I'll be giving people some history and then some of what I call social history, which would be some characteristics of the people, some family names," Johnson said in an interview in North Preston, Canada's largest black community.

"And we'll drive past some of the significant sites, for example, the baptism rock that's in Long Lake, the specific hills that we'll drive past, various areas where families … settled back in the 1800s and [are] still living in the same areas."

People from Saint Thomas Baptist Church were baptized outside from 1856 until about 1973.

"And this specific rock is like a marker where the pastors over the years [knew] how far [to] walk out and so that's … why we call it the baptism rock," Johnson said.

Many people in the Prestons can trace their roots back more than 200 years with the arrivals of the Jamaican Maroons (1796); the Black Loyalists (1782-1785) and the Black Refugees who arrived from the Chesapeake Bay area of the United States after the War of 1812.

For generations, people in North Preston, who lived on barren rocky land, survived by growing crops, picking berries, cutting down Christmas trees, making wreaths and selling their goods at the Halifax market.

Many of the women from the Preston communities, some of whom were not able to pursue higher education because of finances or racial discrimination in the school system, worked as maids and housekeepers for white families in Halifax and Dartmouth.

"And so they would clean house all week and then come home on the weekends … where they had to do their own work," Johnson said.

"Men would work on large farms in Cole Harbour, Westphal (and) Lake Major where they would work these farms all week while at the same time coming home and working their own farms and raising their own livestock."

Outside of his tour guide duties during the reunion, Johnson will be playing the role of Rev. Richard Preston, a former slave from Virginia who founded the African United Baptist Association of Nova Scotia in 1854.

Johnson will perform in a play called The Power of Preston, which was written by his sister, Anne Johnson-McDonald. He will also be part of the band playing music for the combined reunion choir.

Just over in the next community, Alma Johnston-Tynes, a retired teacher and guidance counsellor, will be giving a guided tour in Cherry Brook, the smallest of the Preston communities.

One of the stories Johnston-Tynes will be sharing is about Rev. Arthur Wyse, a minister in the Preston area for more than 40 years.  She will also speak about the first landowners, John Wisdom and Edward King, who received a 730-acre grant of land on Jan. 20, 1786.

"And then it wasn't until over 100 years later that land was granted to black people in the community," Johnston-Tynes said.

In 1904, Charles Jackson was granted 105 acres of land in Cherry Brook with a schoolhouse standing nearly in the centre of the lot, two years after Cherry Brook United Baptist Church was built with just 14 founding members.

The community was given the name Cherry Brook "because of the wild cherries that grew on everybody's property and there's a brook on everybody's property," said Johnston-Tynes, who compiled a book on the history on the church for its 90th anniversary.

Isaac Saney,  the director and teaching fellow in Dalhousie University's transition year program, developed the first African Nova Scotian history course at the university three years ago.

The course often discusses the Preston communities, especially when it comes to the issues of land titles and settlement.

"But I often use the Prestons as an example of how despite being settled on the margins of society, deliberately, … and on the land that was considered to be the least valuable, the least arable, African Nova Scotians have been able to create thriving communities despite the conditions they found themselves in," Saney said. 

Saney said it must be remembered that people of African descent that migrated here were often were deemed as a source of "cheap labour."

"They weren't welcomed here because of their humanity, they weren't welcome here because people wanted them to be citizens," he said.

Slavery was common in Nova Scotia in the 18th century. For example, 400 of the 3,000 people living in Halifax in 1750 were slaves.

Planters from New England who arrived in Nova Scotia between 1759-65 also brought with them hundreds of slaves. Other black slaves came from the southern United States.

An event like the homecoming is important, he said, "because it keeps alive the fact that African Nova Scotians are long-standing and very important parts of Nova Scotia history."

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