When Hans Holt bought an acreage 12 years ago in the Amber Valley area east of Athabasca in northern Alberta, he knew he was buying the site of an old one-room school.
But he had no idea he was buying a piece of land that one day would cough up unique prairie history that is being recreated in one of Canada’s showcase national museums in Gatineau, Que.
The schoolhouse was Toles School, built to educate the children of a community of black families who moved to the valley early in the 20th century to escape the racism of Oklahoma.
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By late 2008, that school will be recreated as a permanent exhibit in Canada Hall at the Canadian Museum of Civilization, alongside other permanent exhibits such as a wooden elevator from Weyburn, Sask., circa 1939 and an oil rig from the early Alberta oil boom.
Rhonda Hinther, a 32-year-old Manitoban with a doctorate in Canadian history and a job as curator of western Canadian history at the museum, said the Toles School was a natural when she was looking for a one-room school to illustrate a slice of the West’s history.
It had artifacts, people with tales to tell and local support for the project.
“And it had a great story line,” Hinther said in an interview.
It was a story line that included more than 1,000 blacks moving north out of Oklahoma in answer to Canadian government advertisements of free land in the new province of Alberta.
It was a story line that included an unfriendly Canadian welcome once locals discovered the advertisements were attracting blacks rather than American white farmers.
And it was a story line that included a community that persevered, survived and sometimes thrived.
“It is a great story and a unique slice of Canadian history,” Hinther said.
Although the schoolhouse was bulldozed for a highway expansion some years ago, the original house for teachers still stands and Holt has converted it into a workshop.
The schoolhouse that will be built in the museum will be a replica of the 1932 school. Photographs of the time, including a class photo, plus a photo and report card of white student Bill Silkie who rode a horse to school and still lives in the area, are part of a temporary exhibit already on display.
It includes a 1939 graduation certificate for teacher Margaret Dobson signed by then-Alberta premier and education minister William Aberhart.
All of this attention to the historical gravity of the site would have been a surprise to Holt when he bought it 12 years ago. He has been supportive and generous in providing help and access to Hinther and other visitors interested in the history of Toles School.
“I don’t mind helping out,” he said. “Lots of people who have heard the story come around looking for Amber Valley, figuring it was a village. I tell them they’re standing in it. There never was a village, just a school, church and general store.”
They served a community of black family farms in the surrounding district.
Holt moved to the area in 1976 and had direct contact with a player in the original story.
Many black families moved to the valley in the 1908-11 period after Oklahoma became a state in November 1907 and enacted what were called Jim Crow laws discriminating against blacks, many of whom were former slaves and their families who had moved west.
One of those immigrants, Jeff Edwards, was still in the area when Holt moved in.
“He said the first few years were tough,” said Holt. “The family walked from Edmonton (160 kilometres) and no one told them about wool, so they dressed in layers of cotton that first winter and found it pretty cold.”
Hinther said the black immigrants at the time faced more than tough weather. They also faced local resistance and prejudice.
“The reception they received when they got to Alberta was not very warm,” she said.
It was a time when the government of Wilfrid Laurier was trying to populate Western Canada by attracting farmer immigrants from Europe and the United States.
But when it became evident that some of those attracted by the promise of free land and a better life were American blacks, groups as diverse as the northern Alberta business and labour lobbies and the Imperial Order Daughters of the Empire pressured Ottawa to close the border to blacks.
Ottawa refused but government agents did go to Oklahoma to discourage blacks from moving north, highlighting harsh weather and poor soil as deterrents.
Yet Hinther said when the community was established with a few white families in the area, it became a bit of an isolated oasis from the prejudices of the day.
“Amber Valley is interesting because it sheltered its children from the racism,” she said. “Many didn’t experience it until they moved to Edmonton to work. They found it quite bewildering.”
Holt said he had his own brush with racial attitudes when he bought a farm in the area in 1976. There were still as many as 25 black families farming in the area.
“One fellow told me they were not very happy to see a new white coming into the valley to buy land,” he said in an interview. “But I got along with them fine.”
Now, he said there are just three black families left. Most of the kids headed off to the city lights when they grew up.
For her part, Hinther still is looking for stories and artifacts about the school. She plans more trips to the area this year. She can be reached at Rhonda.hinther@civilization.ca.
